Matt Springer of Ultimate Classic Rock site called the A-side “lazy, passionless and trite” and suggested it would be playing on a loop in hell . This was not an implication that the Devil has all the best tunes. As recently as 2014, USA Today wrote that McCartney’s efforts on this song were akin to “the writer of an Adam Sandler movie”. As if this could be confused with praise, the writer added its creation was “like if Irving Berlin wrote the Thong Song.”

Defending Sisqo’s breakthrough hit is for another article, and another time of year.

Google “Worst Christmas songs” and Esquire, The Independent and the seers at 96.3 JACK FM all have it listed.

Wonderful Christmastime was recorded two months after Wings’ final album, Back to the Egg, emerged in June 1979 and preceded McCartney II, out the following summer. Of that album, Danny Baker wrote in the NME: “McCartney II isn’t worth the plastic it’s printed on. Neither is Paul, but he’ll go on doodling and fooling his public because they’re too frightened to ditch him and his past and he’s too rich to be stopped.”

They are all wrong with a capital “R”.

Wonderful Christmastime belongs in the pantheon of truly great Christmas pop songs, along with Chris Rea (both songs celebrate festive get togethers), Wizzard (each uses a children’s choir) and Slade (recorded in the height of summer, Slade’s was laid down in July).

What makes it live up to its name?

McCartney understood that cheese is a perfectly acceptable part of any pop songwriter’s palate. No other Beatle would have the smarts to sail so close to naff to write such an effective ear-worm. While Lennon was making grand statements about war and peace in his Christmas song with Yoko – Macca’s is very much a solo effort – John starts with a sneering “So this is Christmas? And what have you done?”

By contrast, his old mucker Paul is wearing a party hat and handing out the Selection Box.

The message of his song couldn’t be more simple: “We’re here tonight/And that’s enough.”

That should be enough. It is after all Christmas.

Four decades after its release, Harry Styles, MF Doom, The Monkees and Kylie Minogue featuring Mika have all covered it. Jimmy Fallon and The Roots did a passable version in 2016. Of the McCartney hits that don’t involve Lennon, his festive hit is top of the tree in terms of PRS earnings, surpassing all others by coining more than £300,000 annually.

If you thought Stevie Wonder playing the Clavinet, Moog synthesiser bass and drums on Superstition, or Prince taking on 27 instruments on his debut album was impressive, check out the credits on this song. “Paul McCartney: vocals, keyboards, synthesizers, guitars, bass, drums, percussion, production.” They forgot engineer. He also, according to Beatlesologist Keith Badman in his Beatles: After the Break Up tome, balanced a drum on top of his farm toilet to get the sound just right.

In many respects, the Fabs were having a dog of a year. Wings were about to tour but had released their last album, John, Paul, George and Ringo had to sue organisers of the Beatlemania stage show, in an interview John called Paul “a company man”, the house in the Hollywood Hills Ringo rented from Harry Nilsson burnt down and the band were still trying to extricate themselves from any association with Robert Stigwood and the Bee Gees’ 1978 Sergeant Pepper film.

No wonder Paul retreated to his farm in Sussex to take a break from the Hofner bass and muck about on synthesisers. Coming Up from the same session as Wonderful Christmastime was believed to be the song which motivated John Lennon to return to the recording studio after hearing it on holiday in Bermuda.

In a 2011 interview with music site The Quietus, McCartney was asked about that period. “I really just was fascinated with these things called synthesizers which had appeared on the scene” and cited [Radiophonic Workshop’s] Delia Derbyshire, John Cage and “certainly Talking Heads. I love David Byrne’s eccentricity” as influences.

There is even debate among the synth geek community over which instrument Paul uses on the record. As SCI-Prophet 5 appears on the video but most believe it was made on a Yamaha CS-80, the same bit of kit Vangelis would use for the Blade Runner soundtrack and now beloved by bands including Phoenix and Empire of the Sun.

Mull of Kintyre may have been Christmas No 1, and this wasn’t, but it’s a Macca song of staying power, charm and even innovation. Only one section of society is reasonably entitled to despise this record. Those who work in retail.

So what are we to make of that very modern writing dilemma? To end something slowly and well, ah that’s the thing. Not via a playwright (although plays can often be long enough) but for the show-runner of the multi-series drama.

These episodic dramas which, often through the demands of US television, go on for five or six series very often have one thing in common – they start with rapturously received reviews and end in reviled finales. Worse, if you’re House of Cards, and the star and executive producer is Kevin Spacey. Sometimes the ending is inevitable. When Bartlet’s Presidency was over, so was The West Wing.

The one-off six-part dramas like State of Play or Edge of Darkness are less popular in America than the more lucrative multi-series option. Homeland is a good example of a series which, with Damian Lewis as a supposed war hero-turned-terrorist, could well have benefitted from one series which ended with a bang. Big Little Lies, based on Lianne Moriarty’s book, was another. Big Little Lies, season 2, was not based on a book. It showed.

The howls of anguish around could be heard over Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ on Tony Soprano’s diner jukebox when his family took their last bow on HBO. Many seemed convinced that Game Over on Game of Thrones left what they saw as the wrong person nearest the Throne. Don Draper may have found his Californian place of Zen in the last embers of the slow-burning Mad Men. Critics and those happy-go-lucky types on Social Media didn’t. Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire and Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom both seemed rushed to a conclusion when HBO decided to make their final series much shorter.

This also happened to the initially well-received psychiatric drama, In Treatment, which saw Gabriel Byrne take home a Golden Globe. The Irish actor Byrne played a shrink, which is what HBO did to season three (28 half-hour episodes shown over four days) after seasons one (43 episodes) and two (35). It ended, with Byrne’s character in inner turmoil, with something of a whimper.

What’s relevant to In Treatment was that it was an adaptation of Hagai Levi’s Israeli drama, BeTipul, where playwright Sarah Treem cut her teeth writing for television. Treem seems to have learnt from this on The Affair, which she and Levi co-created. The Affair won Golden Globes for Best Drama and its female stars Maura Tierney and Ruth Wilson.

After five series, Treem was left with the task of wrapping things up and it is not a spoiler alert to say she utterly nailed it. The show’s title reflects its narrative and, after Wilson asked to leave after Series 4, and another star Joshua Jackson also left, the final episode – which aired a couple of weeks ago on Showtime in the US and Sky Atlantic – was a triumph.

Treem knitted together closure for the principal characters, where the viewer demanded it, the appropriate levels of messiness for the whodunnit which was never solved and a moving arc around The Waterboys’ anthem Whole of the Moon. The song began and ended the final episode itself.

It is a hard trick to pull off, to guide a much-loved show to its final stop after many series. If the aphorism “Dying is easy, comedy is hard” is overused, it doesn’t apply to drama. Ricky Gervais and John Cleese had the sense to say goodbye after two series each of The Office and Fawlty Towers.

The best series finale of all time was probably Six Feet Under, Alan Ball’s drama about a family of funeral years. The final minutes unfolded over many years, as it killed off its characters one by one in the future, to the soundtrack of Sia’s Breathe Me.

In its own way, quite Shakespearean. Everyone dies.

What’s remarkable about the comment is not whether it’s true or not (your opinion is as valid as mine) but that when Zappa spoke to the Toronto Star reporter in 1977, he had no idea how much worse things were going to get.

This was ten years after the establishment of Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone, nine ahead of the founding of David Hepworth and Mark Ellen’s Q magazine and it was around thirty years before record companies started offering media training for fledgling pop stars. Now we have Rolling Stone’s 2017 cover story on Kendrick Lamar where the rapper mentions a videographer present, putting paid to any pretence of intimacy. The September 2018 edition of Vogue was graced by Beyoncé on the cover (good) but the feature inside was a first-person piece, clearly dictated and edited to within an inch of its life by Team Beyoncé (less good).

Where once the minibar and life secrets were shared, when a journalist now braves some alone time with a living legend, the results can be glacial. See Van Morrison’s 18 minute encounter with The Guardian’s Laura Barton as the latest example.

You could conclude that music journalism is in the same shape as Elvis’s television set after it became acquainted with Elvis’s .357 magnum, or even Elvis himself. But what’s actually happened is that music journalism didn’t die, it just changed channel.

The interesting books of recent years, from Hepworth’s riffs on the limited shelf-life of the Rock Star (Uncommon People) and the year 1971 (Never A Dull Moment), Brooklyn writer Rob Sheffield’s idiosyncratic takes On Bowie and Dreaming The Beatles, Sylvia Patterson’s on-off relationship with the celebrity interview, 2016’s I’m Not With The Band, or Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley’s sprawling tome on British pop music Yeah Yeah Yeah are all wildly different. What each has in common is the author’s strong personality writ large over every page.

One of my favourite music books of this decade was Alan Light’s 2012 The Holy or the Broken. Light took more than 250 pages on one album track from a 1984 Leonard Cohen record which his US record company wouldn’t even release. This sounds unpromising, but the song Hallelujah would become a staple of reality shows and glossy dramas, beloved by everyone from Simon Cowell to Bob Dylan.

We can end up learning more about current and past artists not by the confessional interview, shunned by almost all the big stars but longer form music books.

Two examples from 2019 would grace the stocking of anyone still brave enough to profess an interest in rock journalism.

In Why Karen Carpenter Matters, cultural critic Karen Tongson references the band’s huge popularity in the place of her birth, the Philippines. Tongson was named after Karen by her mother, a singer who was said to sound like her. A return to Manila provides a revelation into just how omnipresent the Carpenters’ music remains in her mother country. Throughout, Tongson sketches out her personal perspective on why the Southern Californian siblings’ music retains its universal appeal, as well as its influence on her own life.

British writer Ian Penman’s It Gets Me Home This Curving Track is, at first glance, less personal – a collection of book reviews about artists including Charlie Parker, James Brown, John Fahey, Frank Sinatra, Prince and Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen. On closer inspection, the conceit is an excuse for the writer to dig into the id of various icons. Penman offers his theory that Prince’s Lovesexy was “a gospel album” as well as his last great one, he breaks down the concept of “straight hip” in Steely Dan records, why Lalo Schifrin worked with Clint Eastwood more than any other actor and pays tribute to the “subtly evolutionary” recording techniques employed by Bing Crosby.

In short, by getting inside Penman’s and Tongson’s heads, you are forced to think anew about great artist. This is rock journalism for people who can read – even if the artists are often decidedly unavailable for interview.

Fast forward to 2019. Who does that anymore? Only one person immediately springs to mind, and he happens to be a pop star. On the Pet Shop Boys’ thirteen studio albums, Neil Tennant’s lyrics reference Pinter (Bilingual), Stravinsky (Very), Richter (Yes), Shostakovitch and the Bolshevik uprising (Behaviour) as well as contemporary issues like the Special Relationship (Fundamental) and Peter Mandelson’s multiple sackings (Release). He also writes love songs. Probably their greatest 21st century song, Love Is A Bourgeois Construct, was inspired by David Lodge’s 1988 Booker-nominated novel, Nice Work. Their breakthrough hit, West End Girls, is so far the only global number one single to namecheck critic and historian Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station.

The Pet Shop Boys closed this year’s Radio 2’s all-day festival at Hyde Park after Simply Red, country singer Kelsea Ballerini, Bananarama, Clean Bandit, Status Quo and Westlife (none of whom has written a song about the Bolshevik uprising, unless there’s a Quo B-side I didn’t hear). The light show, choreography and (small detail) songs utterly justified their headlining slot.

With a catalogue of hits including It’s A Sin, Left To My Own Devices, Domino Dancing, Always On My Mind, What Have I Done To Deserve This and Suburbia all performed, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe showed that they belong with other great British song writing duos, such as Jagger & Richards, Difford & Tilbrook, John & Taupin et al. That’s no idle comparison – on the 2006 documentary, A Life In Pop, their EMI record company head Tony Wadsworth likened them to Gilbert and George meets Lennon and McCartney. Having written the musical Closer to Heaven, a ballet (The Most Incredible Thing), and sound tracked a screening of Battleship Potemkin in Trafalgar Square, as well as holding a residency at the Savoy Theatre, Gilbert and George meets Gilbert and Sullivan might be a better comparison. (The fact they covered a Gilbert O’ Sullivan song with Elton John is a side detail.)

Art and theatre are writ large over much of their work and not since Andy Warhol has anyone entwined the words “pop” and “art” so persuasively. Wolfgang Tilmans, Derek Jarman, Sam Taylor Wood, Dame Zaha Hadid and Martin Parr have all worked with the band. The Mark Farrow design on their record sleeves, particularly the orange Lego of the Very album, is a cut above the “five blokes leaning against a wall” visual presentation of many bands, with only Peter Saville & New Order serious competitors in this area.

Chris Lowe’s signature look, sunglasses and oversized headgear, is a work of performance art on its own. It also ensures he is rarely stopped in the street for photographs. Tennant even helped judge the Turner Prize, won by Chris Ofili, in 1998. He is from the North East rather than the North West, but to this writer at least, many of his recurring fascinations in song, such as the capital (London, West End Girls), royalty (Dreaming of the Queen, the King of Rome),  spying and surveillance (Nothing Has Been Proved, Integral) and homelessness (Theatre) express an understated sense of camp and thwarted love reminiscent of Yorkshire’s Alan Bennett, who often explores these themes.

His other touchstone can be found in another comment Tennant made of the group: “I see us in the tradition of Joe Orton and Noël Coward in that we are serious, comic, light-hearted, sentimental and brittle, all at the same time.” Tennant once compiled an album of Coward’s songs recorded by modern stars including Paul McCartney, Robbie Williams, Sting and Damon Albarn.

While it may be tempting to wheel out Coward’s maxim, “strange how potent cheap music is”, that’s a little unfair on Tennant and Lowe. Besides, the playwright once famously mixed up Sibelius and Delius. Tennant, a classical musical nut, has not.

A better Coward comment might be this: “Thousands of people have talent. I might as well congratulate you for having eyes in your head. The one and only thing that counts is: Do you have staying power?” In the words of two of their album titles – Yes, Actually.

You may have reached the third Saturday of our final month blissfully unaware of this latest mangled assault on the English language. This is the latest Social Media trend of 2018. If you’re still interested, the rules are as follows:

Try to avoid hearing Wham!’s Last Christmas.

That’s essentially it. No covers, or remixes, or someone sticking the track on near you out of pure malice (if they were truly malicious, they’d play Justin Bieber’s Mistletoe). If you can experience festive radio, television, city centre shopping and hold out on hearing George Michael saving his beloved from tears, you’ve done well. Once you’re out the game, you post #whamageddon on your Social Media as the song has tracked you down in the manner of Tommy Lee Jones setting his sights on Harrison Ford.

Or you could log off, and save yourself from tears, and give your attention to something special.

Last Christmas could be the most powerful festive hit for capturing the melancholy nature of the month. Or certainly the saddest since Bing Crosby sang I’ll Be Home for Christmas for overseas soldiers in 1943. Like George Michael, David Essex and Elvis have been dumped. Jona Lewie is in the snow while his girlfriend is in a nuclear fall-out zone. (Could happen) East 17 have lost a loved one. Bing Crosby is wistful about a lack of snow, or David Bowie’s just turned up at his house and, unlike you, forgotten his lambswool golf attire. Chris Rea is stuck in a traffic jam. Shane McGowan is in the drunk tank. (Uncharitable types might wonder what made December stand out from all Shane’s other months). Chris De Burgh sings his song from out in space but, most heartbreaking of all, remains resolutely Chris de Burgh.

The second season without George Michael around adds to the poignancy of the Wham! hit.

It’s a tribute to the work of George Michael (as it does for Noddy Holder and Roy Wood) that their music now nestles alongside Charles Wesley, Isaac Watts and Felix Mendelssohn in the repertoire of charity carol singers.

It puts one in mind of other cultural phenomena in this particular month against which anyone would do well to fight.

Backstopageddon, JohnLewisageddon (avoiding drippy cover versions of ‘80s hits on adverts and trails for TV dramas) and Problematicageddon (endless debates about the lyrics of Baby It’s Cold Outside and The Fairytale of New York being declared culturally verboten by people who perhaps misunderstand the idea that because something is ‘problematic’ for them, it doesn’t necessitate a ‘problematic’ status for everyone who isn’t them).

My own personal experience saw a 90 minute drive accompanied by Magic Christmas (Magic FM playing non-stop Christmas hits), December shopping on the seventh level triangle  of Hades also known as Oxford Street, Regent Street  and Tottenham Court Road and buying a tree at Homebase. It was two hours and ten minutes into an office Christmas lunch on the 12th when the faint sound of a glockenspiel heralding the start of the “once bitten, twice shy” finally broke me.

Negotiating December without Last Christmas is trickier than the Mistral Straight chicane on Paul Ricard. You’re more likely to survive the month as the leader of a European superpower.

If you’ve reached this stage without encountering Last Christmas, congratulations. You’ve probably been online shopping and listening to Radio 3 in the mornings. Or your breakfast soundtrack has been Radio 4, in which case, commiserations.

Few other Academy Awards hosts could have greeted their peers at the Kodak Theatre with the line: “Writers. Directors. Actors. If we’re stuck here tonight and run out of food, that’s the order in which we eat them.”

Martin emerged in the first big stand-up boom in the US when others coming to prominence included Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, following in the footsteps of the likes of Don Rickles and Joan Rivers.
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In 1985, Williams demonstrated his unpredictability by taking a theatrical detour playing Estragon to Martin’s Vladimir in a Broadway production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Your view of Williams’ work probably depends on which of his films you saw, just as your opinion of David Bowie could initially be guided on whether you discovered his music in the 1970s or 1980s.

If you watched Patch Adams and Toys alone, you’d never watch anything with his credits again. If you saw him eat up the screen in his movie breakthrough Good Morning Vietnam or his more measured performances in Dead Poets’ Society or Good Will Hunting, you’d be more generous.

This year there have been two in-depth evaluations of Williams’ work – the publication of Dave Itzkoff’s thorough biography Robin as well as Marina Zenovich’s HBO/Sky Atlantic documentary on Williams, Come Inside My Mind, two years after his suicide.

Neither spares detail in uncovering a complex individual who often chose the wrong tipple, the wrong relationship and, more often than not, the wrong film. Neither the book nor the film shirks from the controversy that surrounded Williams, from accusations of plagiarism around his stand-up material to substance abuse on the set of Mork and Mindy, and serial infidelities, or how much Williams felt threatened by up and coming film comedians like Jim Carrey.

It is also a story of wasted potential. Williams died after a struggle with Lewy body dementia. His comeback to TV sitcoms had not been a success and his last substantial film hit had been in 2002 (the darker suspense of One Hour Photo). Towards the end of his life, his wife would recall him telling her: “I just want to reboot my brain.”

Seeing the footage and the Williams mind in action ticking over made Brits of a certain age think of his peer, Billy Connolly.

As well as the Parkinson’s diagnoses (Connolly is happily alive but no longer touring), there was a similarity to their stand-up routines which almost inevitably led to the two becoming friends. Williams would accompany Connolly to Highland games near The Big Yin’s estate in Aberdeenshire.

Both men’s routines showed quicksilver minds at work which characterised an apparent lack of structure to their routines, but their grasp of technique ensured there would never be too many awkward pauses. Both overshared on personal problems and strongly held political opinions. Connolly has had more misses than hits on screen too.

Nonetheless, both Williams and Connolly on stage were unpredictable. That added to their appeal. Even the animators behind Disney’s Aladdin created a Genie around which Williams could ad-lib, knowing that this would elevate his performance and the subsequent film.

Now, our comedians in Britain from Jack Whitehall to Russell Howard, Josh Bishop to Michael McIntyre, routinely sell out the O2 so they’re hardly on their uppers.

On every reality show, talent show and the endless parade of panel shows, you can’t miss British stand-ups.

But the kind of freewheeling or unfashionable opinion which Williams or Connolly used to deliver on stage is sadly absent. Williams and Connolly stand out as being nothing like anything produced in comedy since perhaps Eddie Izzard.

Most of the panel show comedians in the UK seem concerned with being “on the right side of history” but are they on the right side of comedy? Applause is a frequent audience feature on Have I Got News and The Mash Report. Laughter less so. Most current comedians’ Twitter feeds, Bob Mortimer aside, do not feed their audience with jokes but synthetic outrage. The late Joan Rivers was concerned with getting a laugh even if “saying the unsayable” was involved. Stewart Lee plays with form in an interesting way but his routine on “political correctness gone mad” sets out a clear subtext to his own audience – people who complain about political correctness should look elsewhere.

How much would contemporary comedy benefit from an injection of the unpredictability delivered by Robin Williams?

Steve Martin once said: “What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke.”

As this year’s documentary and biography on Williams illustrate, Williams’ made some poor film choices. But unlike so many modern comics he put the search for ideological purity above belly laughs.

Hamlet could be viewed as a revenge thriller, a family potboiler, a ghost story, a twisted rom-com gone wrong, a meditation on procrastination or on mental health or the weirdness of the Danish royal family, an action flick ahead of its time with added iambic pentameter, the ultimate actor’s workout, all of the above or none of the above. That’s up to you, really.

The Cherry Orchard, Miss Julie, Waiting for Godot are open to the same kind of interpretations, discussions and theatrical remixes.

Few would sit through Vladimir and Estrogon’s babblings and then ask for their money back because (spoiler alert) Godot never showed up.

So, Stefano Massini’s 2013 play The Lehman Trilogy, which this week announced its transfer to Broadway, after three months at the National Theatre, is about Lehman Brothers. And it isn’t.

It’s also about the three Bavarian Jews and their successors who came to found what would be the USA’s fourth biggest investment bank. It’s about the promise of America. It’s about geography too, as the brothers leave Bavaria one-by-one, settle in Alabama before the lure of New York beckons. It’s about New York, New York (so big they built it twice and then built some more).

What else does it cover in its three hours and 20 minutes? Global expansion. Family dynamics, both the brothers and then Philip Lehman (Emmanuel’s son and the first chairman of the bank). The method of trade which went from hardware to cotton, to coffee, to trains, to transportation, to money, to trading itself leading to the inevitable conclusion.

It’s about identity (Chaim Lehman renames himself Henry on arrival in the US in 1844, brother Mendel becomes Emmanuel) and status (Philip, Emmanuel’s son and the bank’s first chairman, chooses a bride from eight based on social suitability he’s selected in his written journal). It’s about the thin distinction between grafters and grifters when it comes to making a deal, and the kinds of personality required to pass as both.

It is also a right old yarn.

As well as that, like the aforementioned Hamlet, The Lehman Trilogy provides a pretty extensive workout for the three leads. Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley are all exceptional, each playing every part on stage including the three brothers, their wives and children and a few more characters besides.

What the play isn’t about is what made Lehman Brothers global headline news in 2008. The 1929 crash is covered in much greater depth than the bank’s later collapse into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Perhaps that’s fair enough. The Lehman dynasty had been usurped by other traders and investors within the bank by then. The recent history of Wall Street and City of London has been well-covered in documentaries (The Smartest Men In The Room), drama (HBO/Sky Atlantic’s Too Big To Fail), films (Margin Call, The Big Short), plays (Lucy Prebble’s Enron) and umpteen books (including those by Michael Lewis, and this site’s editor, about RBS’s Sir Fred Goodwin, Making It Happen).

Again it is open to interpretation. Most opera buffs will not hear a word said against Wagner’s Ring Cycle while others think, that at 15 hours, it could do with a bit of trimming. In fairness to Wagner (if you’ll forgive this decidedly non-woke sentiment), that did take 26 years to write.

Therefore, if you’re deterred by 200 minutes in your seat watching a banking saga, based on a translation by the National’s deputy Artistic Director Ben Power and directed by Sam Mendes, bear in mind the 150 years of American history it covers.

It is a measure of how good the Lehman Trilogy is that it didn’t feel long enough.

A constant source of comfort for the past 35 years has been the Now That’s What I Call Music! set of albums.

It is a sound concept, made all the sounder for being first dreamt up on Richard Branson’s boat (and not his trains, balloons or spacecraft.)  The greatest hits of the past few weeks served up on double vinyl, cassette or CD.  Now 1 started as it meant to go on with Phil Collins and Genesis, Men Without Hats and Men at Work, Limahl and Kajagoogoo. Quality and diversity.

By Now 99, the R’nB collaboration was in full flow. As well as mainstays like U2 and Kylie Minogue, the most recent Now! Album featured 13 tracks “featuring” in its credits, the most collaborative being Let Me Go by Hailee Steinfeld (an actress) & Alesso (a DJ) featuring Florida Georgia Line (a country and western act) and watt (no idea).

This in some respects is as it should be. The Now That’s What I Call Music!  (long since shortened to “Now!”) albums reflected the charts of the day no matter how ludicrous so if they were dominated by sullen indie bands, anonymous Mediterranean DJs or Bob The Builder in the day, that was reflected in its tracklisting. No matter. The albums were always an option for the aunts and uncles loitering in record shops or supermarkets bereft of gift inspiration or musical nous.

It is my sad duty to report that for their centenary, the Now! Operation have laid waste to their own brand. Now! 100 does not deserve its own card from Her Majesty.

The first disc is so far, so Now!, kicking off with Calvin Harris featuring Dua Lipa and George Ezra and featuring the inevitable “featurings” – you can relax if you’re a ‘Tiësto & Dzeko featuring Preme & Post Malone’ completist.

It is the second disc where the wheels really come off the jalopy. Compilers of Now! 100 have dropped a huge ricket. (Not Adam Rickitt, whose “I Breathe Again” surfaced on Now 43.)

In its infinite wisdom, Sony and Universal Music, who now have their hand on the Now! tiller have packed Disc 2 with a greatest hits of Now!’s era with Angels, Love Is All Around and James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful. Tracks we’ve spent the best part of the past 35 years avoiding. To add insult to injury, the last track on Disc 1 before the golden oldies on Disc 2 is by “Good Morning Britain Competition Winners.” (No, not  the co-presenters on Piers Morgan’s lieu days). A cover of a Phil Collins’ cover version. Who could ask for anything less?

This stretches beyond continents, where the Now! Albums have been successful from New Zealand to North and South America. This is an inter-continental scandal way beyond any current trifling issues we might have around any customs union.

Ever since Live Aid, the music industry has got hooked on heritage – the reissued classic deluxe edition, reunion tour, old-album-in-full tour, repackaged Greatest Hits, documentaries, tenuous anniversaries and umpteen ways to reinvigorate the hoary. Old has been gold.

At the big events, like the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies, the Glastonbury Saturday headlining slot and the huge charity gatherings, it has been a real faux pas for the big acts not to roll out the hits. The most awkward part of any Carpool Karaoke is when James Corden pretends to know the words to the newie, contractually obliged before his passenger will put on his or her seatbelt.

The singer of any band drawling “we’re going to do a new one” is a breach of an article of accepted faith. It’s the equivalent of using the wrong cutlery at one of Peter Yorke’s dinner parties, while wearing a shellsuit.

Now That’s What I Call Music! operated above all that. The albums were a beacon of welcome sanity (or if you prefer, welcome insanity) throughout this period. While Woolworths closed, downloads and streaming came in, the charts baffled for Britain. Now! Albums were the best reflection of what was, if you’ll forgive the adjective, Now.

If you wanted to know who was currently doing well in the charts, pick up a recent Now! album.

Their 100th birthday was the wrong time for Now! to focus so much on Then.

It must be a gas, or something in the water, which means that four men with the collective age of 294 can be responsible for the most anticipated  tour of of the summer.

Bearing in mind the size of the grounds where West Ham and Manchester United play their football, and three of the four home nations play their rugby, some will be seeing The Rolling Stones for the first time.

If you are numbered among them, in the interest of preparation rather than spoiler alerts, here are ten things to expect:-

1 Mick Jagger may well wear an eye-watering shade of canary yellow or fuchsia pink because, once you’ve appeared in Freejack with Emilio Estevez and Dave Stewart’s reggae project Superheavy, you’re pretty much unembarrassable.

2 While trading guitar licks, Ronnie Wood will rub bottoms with Keith Richards. It will look like two dogs mating which is sort of is.

3 Mick will make a droll quip about the band’s multi-faceted history. (Sample from a gig this writer witnessed in Los Angeles. “Nice to see all the wives and ex-wives here….and that’s just Charlie.”) Mick will then chuckle away at said droll quip as if he’s been summoned by the spirits of Mark Twain or Groucho Marx.

4 That lips logo will seem like it’s everywhere because it is. On stage, on flags, on every conceivable piece of merchandise. It is beyond any the powers of Western political party, any other rock band or global corporation save perhaps the McDonald’s golden arches. Jeep® have paid to be the official sponsors of the 2018 No Filter Tour but they could plaster their insignia from Stratford to Richmond and back and it won’t compete with a pair of giant red lips.

5 You will look at the skin and mainly bones of Keith Richards, still directing musical traffic ahead of an impending 75th birthday. You will consider the husk hauling the Fender Telecaster weaving his way in and out of a 40 year back catalogue, inspiring 60,000 souls to belt out every word. You will look at this anti-Jane Fonda, a personal trainer’s worst nightmare, this affront to the idea of healthy living who has ingested every substance known to a man, and you will ask yourself: “Why did I worry about that extra burger? Was it really worth denying myself the kingsize Mars Bar? Why did I risk the run? Or the weights at the gym? Or that salad? Because look at him. He clearly didn’t bother with any of that and seems to be all right…”

6 No one will miss Bill Wyman. This is not The Stones without Mani, Chic without Bernard Edwards, The Who without The Ox. The Stones were lucky that, unlike The Spice Girls, Genesis and Van Halen before them, their least charismatic member bailed early. Although it would be something of a collector’s item if the band performed Je Suis Un Rock Star. The Stones always come with a hefty Bill anyway….

7 One of your party will note that the ticket prices include £399.95 for one ticket for an area called the No Filter Pit. Another of your party will ask how many ex-wives and children this astronomical price the singer needs to justify charging this astronomical price. It is kinder not to ask.

8 Mick will drawl at one point “Keith’s going to sing one now” and there will be a mass exodus to the bar. Fight the temptation to join them. Keith’s rendition of Happy, even without the late, great Bobby Keys, is always one of the highlights.

9 You will glance at Charlie Watts and recognise, in the light caressing of the sticks, and care in his labour, the opposite of the tub-thumping, poodle-haired, television-hurling drummer in other stadia-dwelling bands. (The Foo Fighters alone number two of those) You will remember that Charlie is at heart a jazzer.

10 If they don’t perform Tumbling Dice, you are legally entitled to ask for your money back. Likewise, if they do perform Waiting On A Friend.

Although it is about AIDS, it contains many lacerating comic one-liners. One character, a black nurse, says towards the end, “The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what America sounds like. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it.”

The play is billed as a “gay fantastia on national themes” and it is set in New York (with short scenes in Salt Lake City and San Francisco). In reality, the influences stretch to Israel, Germany, the Soviet Union, and England. The black nurse is called Belize, and the same actor plays a travel agent.  Dialogue is in English, French, and German. There is also ome Hebrew and Aramaic.

The subject matter is grounded in one of the major current affairs stories and health crises of the late 20th century but the play delves into dream sequences and the supernatural.

The part of Joe Pitt, the closeted Mormon by-the-book lawyer, was played in the 1993 National Theatre production by Daniel Craig, currently better known for playing Britain’s most celebrated lady killing assassin.

At the end of the first play, Part 1, Millennium Approaches, the lead character Prior Walter faces a dramatic moment referenced by the title with the words “Very Steven Spielberg.” Tony Kushner would go on to write two screenplays for the director, Munich and Lincoln.

The subject matter is the stuff of nightmares but dreams loom large throughout. At least one of the scenes was written directly inspired by one of Kushner’s own dreams. Part II, Perestroika, is dedicated to Kathryn Flynn, Kushner’s intellectual mentor, whom he helped nurse through a long illness. Even though one man’s name is on the title, and the production features a Hollywood leading man in Andrew Garfield, it is a very collaborative venture.

The plays run for seven and a half hours (really) but few if any scenes (there are 67) outstay their welcome. The sprawling madness also has method as the characters interconnect, with all the cast playing at least two parts.

This helps explain what has made it such a magnet to actors. ‎The latest production is Andrew Garfield’s first job since being nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for Hacksaw Ridge, and it is his first stage role since Death of A Salesman on Broadway for Mike Nichols. Garfield is excellent in this production, as is James McArdle (fresh from David Hare’s version of Platonov in Chichester), and Russell Tovey, and Nathan Lane, making his South Bank debut as Cohn. Mike Nichols’ TV adaptation attracted Jeffery Wright, Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. The original National production, as well as Craig, featured Jason Isaacs, Claire Holman and Henry Goodman.

You might call Angels in America Wagnerian, except Kushner’s interest in family fissures is closer to another Germanic influence. His hero is Bertolt Brecht. There are nods to Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare as well as Milton too.

The chief villain of the piece is an interpretation of Roy Cohn, a closeted lawyer who was fearless except when he told the world of his ”liver cancer”.

Kushner’s version of Cohn is a monster, a dealmaker, a bully. The playwright admits of his profile that “liberties have been taken.” The real Cohn, as most of the features around the 2017 revival have pointed out, was an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy and a mentor to the young Donald Trump. He is also responsible for arguably the sweetest line in the play: “What you love will take you to places you never dreamed you’d go.”

Unlike most contemporary plays and films, this production stays with you days after you’ve seen it. ‎

It is almost undeniably the theatrical event of the year, rivalled only by Jez Butterworths’s The Ferryman at the Gielgud Theatre directed by Sam Mendes and starring Paddy Considine.

Both plays deal with love, forgiveness, death, violence and the ties of family. Only Angels in America references Mormon underwear.

Angels in America is on at the National Theatre until Saturday 19th August and will also be broadcast to cinemas by NT Live from 20 July.

Those sieving through the tea-leaves of Britpop’s demise might be better directed to the release of the Help! Album in September 1995. where the great and the good of the genre had 24 hours to record something for the Warchild charity. Blur served up a slight piece of whimsical fluff, Eine Kleine Lift Musik. Oasis offered a forgettable song Fade Away with their new mate Johnny Depp on guitar and Kate Moss on vocals. The Manic Street Preachers and Suede delivered cover versions.

Radiohead contributed Lucky.

Whether the British music scene is a sprint or a marathon, this was when the Oxford band broke away from the pack. This searing 4:20 gut punch was a huge step forward from the promising indie guitar band who released The Bends. Their third album OK Computer, from which Lucky was an early calling card, shuffled on to release two years later in 1997.

At a time their musical peers were looking to lift from Revolver, or if they felt really artistically ambitious, Dark Side of the Moon, the template for OK Computer, their first collaboration with producer Nigel Goodrich, was Miles Davis’ improvisational, cussed trip down his own musical rabbit hole, double album Bitches Brew.

Since OK Computer, Radiohead have existed in their own lane. For them and their competition, Britpop very much took up the rear view mirror. By rights, an album like this should have sidelined them commercially into the bracket marked ‘critically acclaimed’. The singalong stadium anthems which went round and round and round were not to their tastes.

It was the start of two decades without compromises – the cover of Q magazine to promote Kid A (a seemingly self-taken photo of the side of singer Thom Yorke’s head) put the band straight in the awkward squad as far as the music press were concerned. Interviews were refused. Two decades of dizzying success followed, including 30 million album sales. These were albums with their own experimental texture, musical tautness and sense of play like Kid A (2000), Amnesiac (2001), Hail to the Thief (2003), In Rainbows (2007) and A Moon Shaped Pool (2016).

Friday night’s Pyramid stage appearance at the Glastonbury Festival was a return to where they appeared in rainier circumstances in 1997, the last year they might have been considered to have musical peers.

At a time other Grammy winners post their own lunch on Instagram, Yorke, Colin and Jonny Greenwoods, Phil Selway and Ed O’Brien are still hard to categorise, hard to read and hard to predict what they’ll produce next. No alarms and no surprises? Their career suggests the opposite.

A rare 2016 “in the studio” piece for the Times Literary supplement attempted to reveal more but writer Adam Thorpe was only given brief glimpses of the recorded process. He found yoghurt cartons (used as an instrument), a hand-built sound machine with added hammers and analogue speakers while outside the group’s resident artist Stanley Donwood tried to fashion what the record sounds like on acrylic canvas. When the Stones made records in the south of France, it was not like this.

Thanks to their mix of dissonant anthems, innovative percussion, Godrich’s distinctive production style (present since 1997) or Yorke’s delicate vocals, the band appeal to rock and classical fans alike. Indeed, guitarist Jonny Greenwood, an exceptional musician by most standards let alone rock star ones, scored two Paul Thomas Anderson films (including the Academy Award-winning There Will Be Blood) and has enjoyed residencies with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and London Contemporary Orchestra.

No other currently working band can boast the breadth of admiration. Fans include the last two James Bonds. Pierce Brosnan was at their O2 gig, Daniel Craig and Sam Mendes asked them to record a song called Spectre, before producers foolishly opted for Sam Smith’s theme. Justin Timberlake says 2000’s Kid A inspired him to embark on a solo career. Prince recorded a version of Creep, as did Tears for Fears and Damien Rice.

The musical theatre’s finest living practitioner, Stephen Sondheim expressed his admiration to Billboard in 2015. “Most pop music’s not about harmony, and for me all music is about harmony. Pop music is ­primarily about rhythm and sound, the combination. But if you ­listen to Jonny Greenwood, it’s about the music as a whole. It isn’t ‘Oh, what a great tune’ or ‘That’s a great rhythmic idea.’ ”

The classical music critic  of the New Yorker Alex Ross is as likely to write about them as the magazine’s pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones. On OK Computer, Ross, the author of The Rest Is Noise which covered the music of the last century, wrote: “Ideas unwind in every register. Paranoid Android is a symphony in six minutes…This band has pulled off one of the great art-pop balancing acts in the history of rock.”

Even more than acts like Sigur Ros, Joanne Newsom and Bjork, Radiohead are the accepted Rock Act It’s OK for Classical Musicians To Like. Ross calls them “the English composers.”

To that end, have a quick flip through the band’s entry on online film encyclopaedia IMDb. To add Radiohead to a soundtrack – even for laughs as the creators of Father Ted did in their last ever episode – is to suggest good taste on the part of the film-makers.

The same track used on Crilly Island, OK Computer’s Exit Music for a Film, was written for the closing credits of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet and has cropped up in various shows from Westworld to Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. This led US website The Grinder to call it “the new Hallelujah” in reference to the ubiquitous Leonard Cohen number.
Other Radiohead tracks have cropped up everywhere from Match of the Day, Dancing with the Stars and Twilight to CSI.

Their set on Friday at Worthy Farm – which divided music critics – could have been been either a collection of abstract deep cuts or reasonably big hit singles. The Radiohead faithful, a committed and knowledgeable set of fans, want both and as a result always end up happy – even if the music might not sound that way.

They know by now always to expect plenty of alarms and a few surprises.

1 Rallies masquerading as press conferences.
This creeping tendency among the main parties (the Conservatives, Labour and the Nats – if you watch Lib Dem press conferences, you are probably Mrs. Tim Farron or beyond help) to fill the front rows of what pass for press events with cheerleaders. This leads to political reporters being booed and party leaders receiving raucous laughs at non-jokes. The BBC’s Laura Kuennsburg is not King Rat in a marginal seat production of Dick Whittington because she asked Jeremy Corbyn about spending cuts. Neither does Newsnight’s Nick Watt deserved to be booed like Captain Hook because he asked the Prime Minister about May-ism. She told him “there is no May-ism”, something the rest of us found out in due course. Nicola Sturgeon, despite the adoring guffaws from the front rows of the SNP gatherings, is no Don Rickles.

The main parties used to have press conferences with journalists asking serious questions and no party goons braying at anyone impertinent to ask questions. Let’s go back to those.

2 “Strong and stable”.

3 “Preparedness and resilience.”

4 “Magic” and “money” and “trees”.

5 Leaflets based around a leader with the name of the party hidden (Messianic and unwise) or mentioning the party but avoiding all mention of who might lead it. (Sneaky and evasive)

6 #IndyRef2
The worst quick fire sequel idea since Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, one of which was actually greenlit.

7 “Fields of wheat”. Not only will this provoke cringeing from now until the end of time, it sounds like an out-take from Sting’s Ten Summoners Tales album.

8 Tweets from old people telling 18-24s insisting that they register to vote. Not at all patronising.

9 Tweets from old people congratulating 18-24s for voting as if it was climbing Kilimanjaro on stilts rather than performing the basic minimum function expected in a democratic society. See above.

10 Tweets from old people saying “I wouldn’t dream of telling you who to vote for but if you care about anyone under 70, you have to vote for…” There’s a theme emerging here.

11 Newsnight’s Evan Davis and Nick Watt in a deserted Walsall art gallery at 11:40pm.

12 Avoiding the Today programme where they might actually ask a relevant question but bringing either your husband or a pot of jam on to The One Show.

13 Enthusiasts of all political stripe pushing “my side’s better than yours” arguments within 12 hours of a terrorist attack on social media when the major politicians, to their credit, largely left things for a moment.

14 Visits to the Bath Cheese Festival on the same night as a leaders’ debate. Fair enough (I went to the theatre rather than watch it) but if you’re one of the leaders, not such a good move.

15 Paul Nuttall in a tweed suit.

16 Recommendations to the Electorate from celebrity residents of California and New York.

17 “Look”. A popular political trope when a politician pivots away from the question being asked to something else entirely. (Hello, Barry Gardiner MP). It is to 2017 what Ed Miliband favourite “I don’t accept that” (often used when presented with an incontrovertible fact “You knifed your brother and guaranteed Electoral oblivion”) was to 2015.

18 Editors of regional free sheets who used to be Chancellor of the Exchequer on warp-scale gloating mode. If the career trajectory was the other way, this might be more understandable.

19 The eerie omnipresence of Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. (This is admittedly unlikely at the next Election, whether it is in August 2017 or June 2022).

20 Sitting through three hours of Friday morning of rolling Election news TV where not one of the major party leaders held a press conference to resign. Paul Nuttall doesn’t count. What a rip-off.

The previous weekend, the same venue, London’s O2 offered a similar attritional bombardment of the eardrums in front a giant skeleton based on Mayan civilisation while the lead singer danced in a gimp mask, a monkey headdress and on occasion what looked like a general’s jacket from the American Civil War while he wielded an enormous Union Jack flag from a pole. You could say the lead singer Bruce Dickinson was old enough to know better but he is the only member of the band under 60. This was Iron Maiden. This is what they have been doing since 1975.
As an invitation from my beloved, who is more attuned to the merits of this music than I, it was educational seeing audiences totally tuned into the louder side of contemporary music. (She says it’s payback for a near-three hour set from Leonard Cohen at the same venue, something I insist was a kindness). Since marriage, I have frequented concerts by Def Leppard (twice), Whitesnake, AC/DC, Metallica and now this week Kiss and Iron Maiden. You mustn’t under any circumstances tell her, but I pretty much had a whale of a time at all of them.
For the widespread music press sneering at heavy metal, and its near-neighbours in the hard rock neighbourhood, the audiences are loyal and don’t adopt poses. Bands like Kiss and Maiden put on a show and continue to sell out stadia four decades after they began. Maiden are a great British success story, selling around 90million records and playing more than 2,000 shows (many arenas) without the usual music industry back-up of TV and radio.

Unlike many more fashionable groups, who are all about The Music, metalheads have a hinterland. Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson has been a qualified pilot for the past 15 years https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYn2TNGWET8 even flying the band on a world tour. Metalllica’s drummer Lars Ulrich buys and sells art – he flogged a Basquiat at Christie’s in New York for £9.1m – and his dad was a Davis Cup player for Denmark who played clarinet in a jazz band. The band’s singer James Hetfield is an enthusiastic beekeeper.

Metal has been prime real estate for satire since Spinal Tap exquisitely nailed the art of turning it up to eleven, but many of these gentlemen shrug their shoulders -they’re mainly in vests or leather waistcoats so that’s easily done – and get on with playing live and loud in surround sound Dobly. They are also, in terms of bass, drums and guitar interplay, terribly musically intricate and adept.

In the flip, cynical world of the music industry, metal bands deliver on theatrics. Their shows are likened to pantomime which isn’t a phenomenon in the States but a more apt comparison is turn of the last century vaudeville. Alice Cooper, who spent evenings round at Groucho Marx’s, whose brothers cut their teeth on vaudeville shows, understood this. He must have, or hanging a snake around his neck, dancing with skeletons in top hat and tails, and chopping a watermelon with an axe would have been all for nothing. Incidentally, Groucho Marx would go to Alice Cooper shows and was said to love them.

The cast and crew of the heavy rock family are full of surprises. AC/DC, whose Angus Young dresses as a schoolboy, even got replacement singer Axl Rose in line for a world tour. As Guns N’ Roses aficianados will know, this is something Slash and co couldn’t always manage.
David Coverdale of Whitesnake is plummier than even the 2015 Cabinet, and his preferred tipple is red wine.

The most softly spoken pop star I’ve met, and this includes people who have featured on pastel-hued Belle and Sebastian sleeves, was Chris Fehn, also known as #3, or “Dicknose”, from uncompromising boiler suit-clad metallists Slipknot.

There is also a bravery about some of the metal bands lacking in their so-called edgier counterparts. Maiden and their army of fans took on the secondary ticketing agencies with a degree of success (the only similar comparison is grunge band Pearl Jam attempting to face down the music industry closed shop of Ticketmaster), and Metallica went to war with downloading outlet Napster, which led Ulrich to widespread derision from more fashionable bands decades before they spat their own feathers about Spotify, Apple Music and iTunes.

The best thing about heavy metal bands is their sense of adventure. The smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd are guaranteed at their events, as are committed audiences, light shows, big tunes, a few guitar solos and a sense of the absurd. The lead frontman is likely to have 99% of the crowd in the palm of (more often than not) his hand. Paul Stanley and Bruce Dickinson certainly did this week. In comparison, many mumbling indie frontmen of more critically acclaimed bands are, to use a 2017 phrase, just about managing.

The bequiffed frontman proved he’d lost none of his capacity for tactfully skirting free from controversy with a toe-curling Facebook statement this week on Monday’s unspeakable events where he slated the Prime Minister, the Queen, the Mayor of London, the Mayor of Manchester and members of the press.

It is a small mercy that his sidekick Johnny Marr was on hand with a simpler, more sober tribute to the city on Twitter. “Manchester stands together.”

One of these men lives in the city, the other has spent the best part of the last 30 years living in London and then Los Angeles.

Morrissey’s bizarre outburst about a grisly event at a pop concert didn’t really matter because when it comes to Manchester music, it’s not short for spokespeople. They boast strength in depth. If you accept that Britain has historically done pop music better than anyone else in the world, and then look at our nation’s major cultural outposts, Manchester is arguably its musical capital.

The genius of the Fab Four was honed in Hamburg, and their greatest songs bloomed not on Merseyside but from John’s house in Weybridge and Paul’s further into town near Harley Street. Franz Ferdinand hail from the Glasgow Art School tradition but three of the classic quartet are English. Similarly Lloyd Cole and The Commotions’ Rattlesnakes may be evocative of the West End of Glasgow for graduates of a certain age but Cole’s creative wellspring originally flowed from where they produce the water, Buxton in Derbyshire.

Many chroniclers of London life are outsiders. The man who sang on London Calling was born in Turkey to an Indian father and mother from the Scottish Highlands. He settled in Somerset before his passing. Blur’s breakthrough album Parklife, with its launch party at Walthamstow dog track, tales of Tracy Jacks seeing a Harley Street doctor and London Loves’ playout of a cabbie’s talk radio, couldn’t have sounded more like the Big Smoke if the city’s future Mayor had guested on it (that came on the follow-up album). Parklife’s working title was London. The band are from Colchester, Essex.

Suede may have been renamed The London Suede for American audiences, but Brett Anderson’s spacey alienation came from another place entirely – two miles outside Haywards Heath, to be specific. Do The Strand (arguably about cigarettes or dancing anyway) was sung by a man from Country Durham, West End Girls by another North East native Neil Tennant (the other Pet Shop Boy is from Blackpool) and no wonder Ralph McTell struggled finding his way round the Streets of London – he’s from Farnborough, Kent.

So London’s rich music scene has been forged by the city dwellers and tourists alike. Even music legends like The Who, Stones, Bowie and Adele claimed by the city all spent many of their formative years on the outskirts. There’s a reason many critics call The Buddha of Suburbia one of the Dame’s most personal records.

Birmingham may boast Ozzy Osbourne but so does Beverley Hills, where he has lived for years and set all his reality TV shows.

Sheffield is probably Manchester’s rival in terms of a wide range of musical bands from the Human League and Def Leppard to Pulp, but for all Alex Turner’s Yorkshire lyrical wit and grit, Arctic Monkeys’ recent albums reflect the West Coast of America where they’ve worked with Californian Joshua Homme from Queens of the Stone Age.

But Manchester, to paraphrase the late, great Tony Wilson, they do things differently there.

One main point of distinction is that its musical titans tend to stay firmly entwined with the city.

When Joy Division became New Order, they stayed invested in the North West, often to their financial detriment, with Factory Records, the label’s Manc-born design guru Peter Saville and the Haçienda nighclub.

The Haçienda was such an influential moment in dance music that it places the city’s global status alongside Amsterdam, Detroit, Paris, Chicago and even Ibiza. The Chemical Brothers formed in the city, there’s A Guy Called Gerald, Sub Sub (who would become Doves), Mike Pickering (who would form M People) and Justin Robertson started his career from here. During the late eighties and early nineties, Manchester really was the 808 State.

They like to dance in this city. Bradfordian Tim Booth was chosen as James’ dancer (he would eventually be demoted to lead singer) because the Lancastrian bandmates liked his moves at a University of Manchester students’ union cellar bar.

The Happy Mondays had a dancer, Bez, as did The Stone Roses, Cressa.

There is a fuzzy through line from music to football to partying in this part of England which meant it didn’t seem contrived or forced for Manchester United players to link their Europa League triumph to the city’s horror 48 hours previously, or Eric Cantona and Pep Guardiola to pay tribute to the city this week.

United players still run out to The Stone Roses’ This Is The One and City frequently play the Inspiral Carpets’ Saturn 5 over the Etihad Stadium tannoy.

Although the Gibb brothers moved to Australia after their formative years in Chorley, and The Gallaghers decamped to London, other Mancunian musicians remain tightly woven into the city’s fabric. Mark E Smith, Shaun Ryder, Pete Shelley, the late Tony Wilson: they came (from the area), they saw, they conquered and then they came back.

Many of Elbow’s best songs, including Grounds for Divorce and My Sad Captains,  are about drinking in Manchester pubs. Many of the best watering holes have a jukebox, a pleasure denied to many London pubgoers. Singer Guy Garvey does his radio show from Salford, or Manchester Central Library and works with fellow Manc musicians I Am Kloot. He even appeared in the latest series of Peter Kay’s Car Share.

For all the Coronation Street cast on Smiths sleeves, songs like Rusholme Ruffians,  Roy’s Keen and Alma Matters, Morrissey left Manchester a long time ago even if the city didn’t leave him.

This is relatively rare.

Unlike other musicians in other cities (Bowie and Lennon both moved to New York, Rod Stewart and Jeff Lynne to LA, Bobby Gillespie, Annie Lennox and Sharleen Spiteri to London, most of the rest to country piles satirised by Blur), Manchester keeps a tight hold on its musical children. The rain may fall hard on this humdrum town, especially this week.

To counter Morrissey one last time, the city’s musical heroes show us how far from humdrum it really is.

Even though Iain and I were born in the same year, someone has to take issue with his assertion that the 1970s were nothing but the relentless gruel of flared trousers, prog (much of it quite good), heavy metal (again, we agree to disagree), disco (won’t hear a word against it) and cook-from-frozen burgers.

There are strong cases to suggest that the decade was in fact the period where popular culture was at its most productive. It was a time when the rock stars of ’60s took flight into their most prolific eras before the bloated padded shoulder excess of the following decade. Children’s television like The Clangers*, Mr. Benn and Chorlton and The Wheelies was as creative as it’s ever been. Tiswas proved that Anarchy In The UK extended beyond punk. Similarly, film directors such as Scorsese, Coppola, Cimino, De Palma, Spielberg and George Roy Hall (among others) were allowed to take risks with personal pictures before Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977 heralded the move into tentpole blockbusters of the ’80s. In Hollywood, this has led us to where we are today when the only men or women able to get films of scale made are Marvel cartoon characters.

The Seventies may have been a decade where the great office of the US President was called into disgrace and ignominy (and thank goodness we’ve moved past that), but they were often a time where artists delivered – even if some of those were working three-day weeks.

For example….

In the ’60s… David Bowie studied mime at Sadlers Wells and recorded The Laughing Gnome.

In the ’70s… a string of era-defining albums including both The Man Who Sold The World & Hunky Dory in the one year, and “Heroes” and Low in another 12-month period.

In the ’80s… he wore a pink wig in Labyrinth and a leopard print jumpsuit in the Dancing In The Street video.
In the ’60s… Woody Allen did stand-up comedy in dungy Greenwich Village nightclubs and pretended to be James Bond in Casino Royale, decades before Daniel Craig.

In the ’70s… Woody Allen wrote and directed some of the greatest comedies ever including Sleeper, Annie Hall, Love and Death and Manhattan.

In the 80s… Woody Allen thought we needed cheering up with gloomy Ingmar Bergman-esque (excuse the tautology) dramas.
In the ’60s… George Harrison was the third-best songwriter in his band.

In the ’70s… George Harrison released All Things Must Pass and organised the Concert for Bangladesh.

In the ’80s… George Harrison had a song on the Porky’s Revenge soundtrack.

In the ’60s… Ringo Starr was the second drummer, and apparently the second-best, in his second band.

In the ’70s… Ringo played on the Concert for Bangladesh, established himself as a solo artist, went partying with Keith Moon and worked with Quincy Jones, Maurice Gibb and Harry Nilsson.

In the ’80s… Thomas The Tank Engine.

In the ’60s… Joni Mitchell gave her best songs, like Chelsea Morning and Both Sides Now to other artists.

In the ’70s… Intimately personal and timeless classic albums like Blue, Court & Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns.

In the ’80s… It was the era of guests stars on records. Hers were adorned by, among others, Billy Idol, Lionel Richie and the actor who played “Crying Indian” in the “Keep America Beautiful” ads.

In the ’60s… Carole King gave her best songs like The Locomotion, Up On The Roof and I’m Into Something Good to other artists.

In the ’70s… In 1971, King wrote and released Tapestry, which redefined the singer-songwriter genre for solo artists, part of what made the decade great (see also Elton John, James Taylor, Rickie Lee Jones…)

In the ’80s… Carole King wrote and performed the theme to The Care Bears Movie.

In the ’60s… Marvin Gaye’s golden tonsils adorned Broadway standards at the beck and call of Motown’s head honcho Berry Gordy.

In the ’70s… Marvin cut loose from Gordy’s tutelage to release What’s Going On, Let’s Get It On, I Want You, Trouble Man  and sang Got To Give It Up on Soul Train.

In the ’80s… tax problems, sparring in a gym in Belgium, speaking French on the Midnight Love album and that little local difficulty with his father. (Sorry. Too soon?)

In the ’60s… Stevie Wonder had to be billed as ‘Little’ Stevie Wonder, released covers and an album of instrumentals under the rib tickling name Elvets Rednow.

In the ’70s… A hotter than July hot-streak of era-defining records like Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale and Songs In The Key of Life.

In the ’80s… I Just Called To Say I Love You and Ebony & Ivory.

In the ’60s…. Andy Warhol was shot and had to wear a corset.

In the ’70s… Andy Warhol hung out at Studio 54 and sold his work to John Lennon, Diana Ross and Brigitte Bardot.

In the ’80s… Andy Warhol worked with Curiosity Killed The Cat. And died. (The second unrelated to the first).

In the ’60s… The Rolling Stones were predominantly a singles act, albeit a very good one.*

In the ’70s… They released their masterpieces Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street.

In the ’80s… Mick and Keith fell out, and Mick danced in a video with a man in a leopard-print jump suit.

In the ’60s… pre-Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola was working with Petula Clark on Finian’s Rainbow. This was also the decade he met the most overrated rock star of this or any other decade, Jim Morrison.

In the ’70s… The Godfather, Parts I & II.

In the ’80s… no Godfather.

In the ’90s…. The Godfather, Part III.

So if the political leaders of our age are determined to bring us back to the 1970s, in terms of albums and movies (and probably chidren’s television too), bring it on.
*(Yes, yes, there were three 1969 episodes of The Clangers and The Stones released Let It Bleed and Beggars Banquet in the Sixties, but let’s not nitpick.)

So it is with the concept of a Supergroup, the name for any band consisting of members from other bands to form a new unit.

In broad terms, supergroups can be divided into the good, the bad and the Clapton.

Good supergroups are the rare ones which last, but even then, they (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young or Emerson, Lake and Palmer) have an unfortunate habit of sounding like chartered surveyor firms and an even more unfortunate habit of forcing fans back to the original source.

Most people would rather listen to an Arctic Monkeys record than The Last Shadow Puppets, or favour Duran Duran and Chic over the Power Station.

The bad are often assembled for one single for charity, often in response to famine, disaster or most unfortunate, a BBC2 documentary featuring choirmaster Gareth Malone. Unsuccessful supergroups tend not to hang around too long as they are filled with egos who will not commit to more than one album.

The worst supergroup of recent years proved that the Super-tag remains unreliable. SuperHeavy featured Mick Jagger, the Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart, Damian Marley, Joss Stone and legendary Indian musician A.R. Rahman and as such groups go, they were a great advertisement for a Keith Richards solo record.

Supergroups are not the preserve of Yes men – unless, of course, these men are members of the prog giants Yes, all of whom frequented supergroups the way Jeremy Corbyn frequented protest rallies. Members of Yes were in so many supergroups, they must have had a problem with No. There was a group called UK, another called Asia and an Explorers Club thrown in for good measure. Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe morphed later into Anderson, Rabin and Wakeman, there was GTR, XYZ, The Chris Squire Experiment as well as National Health, Badger and Refugee, the last three sounding like policy initiatives from the Countryside Alliance.

Eric Clapton was seen as the godfather of the supergroup, with Cream being seen as the first of its kind before Clapton formed other supergroups including Derek and the Dominoes. When the Pet Shop Boys joined forces with Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner of New Order to make a record with new supergroup Electronic, Neil Tennant quipped “we’re the Blind Faith of the ’90s.”

In recent years, apart from valiant efforts from Dave Grohl, Damon Albarn and Jack White, the supergroup label should by rights have been subjects to the occasional steward’s inquiry. One megastar plus some other blokes doth not a supergroup make (see Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band, Bowie’s Tin Machine and Slash’s Snakepit). Moreoever, a supergroup is not the same as a compound group – two bands welded together – with all respect to FFS (Franz Ferdinand & Sparks), or McBusted (McFly & Busted).

This month, a supergroup has emerged that has bucked the trend by being quite good. Members of Midlake took a chance and called up musicians from different spheres they admired, in a positively Wilburyan effort of ambition.

Midlake’s Eric Pulido, McKenzie Smith, Joey McClellan, and Jesse Chandler have lured what Pulido calls their own “poor man’s Travelling Wilburys” – Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell, Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle (who has endured a brutal week after the sudden midweek death of bandmate and bassist Kevin Garcia), and Travis’ Fran Healy. The new venture is called BNQT (intended as Banquet the same way MGMT is pronounced Management). Results, based on two years of work, phone calls, emails, and in Lytle and Healy’s cases, visits to Midlake HQ in Denton, Texas, are on the basis of lead-off track Restart and Kapranos-fronted Hey Banana encouraging. There wasn’t a market for a band which sounded a bit like Grandaddy, Franz Ferdinand, Travis and Band of Horses, but Pulido and co-created one just in case.

Songwriting and vocal duties are split and the musicians seem to be at the stage in their career when they have left their previous success outside the studio and embraced the collaborative nature of the enterprise. “There are frontmen who are driven by that need for attention, possibly because they didn’t get enough as children,” Healy told Paste magazine. “But I had plenty, and everybody else [in BNQT] has. All of these frontmen are quite good at that job, maybe because they’re not so desperate for the spotlight. Maybe for the next album, [Pulido] should get people who crave the spotlight and see how that changes the dynamics.”

It’s encouraging to hear there may be a second incarnation of BNQT. Pulido and other members of Midlake have already bizarrely done the opposite of supergroup building seven years ago. In 2008 and 2009, they let the frontman of the Czars John Grant use their home studio and played as backing band on his first solo album, Queen of Denmark, released in 2010. It is one of the most outstanding records of the past ten years, and every subsequent Grant project has marked him out as a unique and major talent leading to awards, recognition and gushing praise from Elton, Kylie, Tracey Thorn and many others.

As a rare example of a group establishing a separate Super- solo artist, it was definitely a job well done.

It’s a good question. What a blessing for us all that Heather Small asked it in the first place.

It’s such a good question Tony Blair used the song for a Labour Party conference in a period sandwiched between his work with Lord Levy and the President of Kazakhstan.

Music for party political campaigns remains a tricky business. John Major probably got it right when he used Purcell’s Rondo from his Abdelazer Suite, as the lyrics of an instrumental can’t be misinterpreted.

Even the use of Splodgenessabounds’ Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps Please will result in inconvenient grilling around duty on alcohol and snacks at the next Budget.

If you are going to use music from the last 50 years, Bill Clinton’s adoption of Fleetwood Mac’s Don’t Stop (expecting Peter Green-era Mac is asking a lot) seemed to work. After all, as scandal around Bill and Hillary circled in 1992, what says “Happy Marriage” better than a track from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.  The 2016 choice for his wife, Katy Perry’s Roar was not so successful.  Roar is widely thought to be a song about getting over Russell Brand. Even across the pond, Russell Brand associations are Electoral Kryptonite. Just ask Ed Miliband.

President Trump’s campaign was really when the campaign song felt like an unwanted stepchild.

He used anthems from Twisted Sister, R.E.M., Aerosmith, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and The Rolling Stones. All artists in various forms issued some sort of cease and desist. Sad!

Trump opted for these ahead of the more obvious options, Queen’s I’m Going Slightly Mad, Sting’s Russians or anything from “Weird” Al Yankovic’s ninth studio album, Bad Hair Day.

While the idea of some politicians using similar artists is best avoided (if Angela Eagle had used Twister Sister when running for Labour leader, she could have faced awkward questions at the next family gathering from Maria), the main parties only have seven weeks to soundtrack their own rallies.

In the spirit of helpfulness and in an effort to avoid The Lighthouse Family’s Lifted – another selection from Blair, the man who promised Things Could Only Get Better – here are some suggestions for the main parties:-

Conservative Party: Theresa May won’t do TV debates, press conferences, flesh out an in-depth manifesto or post-Election Brexit strategy beyond sound bites.  On the basis that anything by Disclosure can be ruled out, the Tories’ theme tune might have to be Can’t Explain by The Who.

Labour Party: One look at their leader might lead you to believe the Steptoe and Son theme tune is the go-to theme. One look at their poll ratings leads you to The Surfaris’ Wipeout. Other options include Martin Stephenson and the Daintees’ Boat to Bolivia, anything from the Sandinista album, Fleetwood Mac (them again) with Oh Diane, Paul McCartney’s Give Ireland Back to the Irish and in honour of Mr. Corbyn’s charming habit of taking lieu for weekend work and his enormous contribution to the EU debates of two whole speeches, Dolly Parton’s anthem, working 9 to 3 (with an hour for lunch). Failing that, there’s always UB40 – the half of the band who are supporting him.

Liberal Democratic Party: in honour of The Donald in politics they like,  an obvious choice would be yet another Fleetwood Mac track, Tusk

Scottish National Party: It would be cruel and petty to suggest Fandabidozee by The Krankies but perhaps more useful to suggest the interminable Loch Lomond by Runrig. The SNP MP and former Runrig keyboard player Pete Wishart likes to rail against everything that irritates him, particularly journalists. Once nine minutes of Runrig is piped through every public square and town hall of Scotland, and there’s an inevitable call to ban it, we can see how he likes them apples.

UKIP: It’s tempting to pay tribute to their previous leader Nigel Farage with Lionel Richie’s epic ballad, You’re Once, Twice, Seven Times A Loser. But we must move with the times (even if this party doesn’t) and find a theme for their imaginative new leader Paul Nuttall. Could be time for Kirsty MacColl’s classic There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis (And Lost Close Friends at Hillsborough).

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for.”
Robert Browning

Managing expectations is a peculiarly British trait.

So this week, when the BBC 6 Music Breakfast Show marked ten years on the air with Shaun Keaveny in the chair, producers were keen not to go the way of Browning.

The approved hashtag #TenLongYearsofKeaveny was met with such glowing tributes from listeners as “Ten years of adequate radio”, “feels like longer” and “Ten years. Ten. Congratulations. To you and us. Mostly us.”

They don’t mean it, really. Regular fans include Radiohead, Jude Law and Kate Moss who listens between nine and ten am, a slot since renamed The Kate Moss Hour. (She was its guest for the hour before Christmas).

They even threw a party this morning at BBC’s Maida Vale studio with guests including Maximo Park, Law, Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine and Brian Eno.

The 6Music Breakfast Show is a comfort blanket of expectations managed, under the stewardship of producers “Fire warden” Phil Smith and previous incumbent Claire “The Slev” Slevin, music news reporter Matt Everitt and presenter Shaun Keaveny.

Radio at that hour broadcasts to a harsh, unforgiving audience.

The Today programme on Radio 4 remains the preserve of mainly men shouting at each other for telling lies or avoiding the question. On Radio 2, another man may be shouting at the listeners, or colleagues if they have fallen out of favour. On Radio 1, the thought of Everything being Amazing before the day’s first gulp of coffee can be a bit much and the two hour interview they just broadcast with Harry Styles is not for most of us over 21.

The 6Music Breakfast Show is the sound of a man howling at the moon or, on a day he’s struggling, happy to let dead air speak for his pain. If Pedro Almodovar ever wants to switch the gender of his classic film Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and relocate it to the UK, he should contact Keaveny and Everitt.

Any awkward dead air – other breakfast shows are available but less willing to offer this – is interrupted by dad jokes, impersonations and random clips from Keaveny’s “cart wall” of sound effects. These include the Sid James guffaw (for innuendo), Happy Birthday on the tuba (for birthdays he insists he doesn’t celebrate), horse braying (a tribute to Everitt’s Easter Island-style fizzog) and inexplicable singalongs to Take That’s Greatest Day (a record 6Music listeners would not countenance all the way through).

Keaveny will also use the Music News as an excuse to unleash ropey impersonations of Keith Richards and Paul McCartney but the real things don’t seem to mind, having both guested on the show. Everitt secures plenty of big name interviews from AC/DC and Rod Stewart to Elton John and Kate Bush.

Listeners are invited to contribute in the shape of an ‘ear worm’ (recent samples – Andrew WK’s Party Hard, Nu Shooz’s I Can’t Wait and Abba’s Thank you for the Music) and Small Claims Court, where a caller might remember, say, the time he met Hi de Hi’s Simon Cadell at Baldock services.

The Thought for the Day on 6Music is more likely to be about the hummus in Shaun’s fridge going off than the irreversibility of climate change. Small talk doesn’t get much smaller.

People, between 959,000 and 1.04m of them on last counts, nevertheless start their day with this show.

It can’t just be the records, although the playlist which ranges from The Animals to Alt-J, Stevie Wonder to Sharon van Etten, Little Eva to Laura Marling is almost always excellent. (He doesn’t play enough Pet Shop Boys but this is a small gripe).

It’s reasonable to argue that Shaun Keaveny has one of the biggest challenges in radio-land.

People who are Serious About Music (mainly men, to be fair) are often a tough crowd. Woe betide the 6Music DJ who gets his Clash B-Sides mixed up.

Keaveny once suggested the song Living In A Box had been recorded by an act other than the band Living In A Box at five to eight and while the 8am news was fresh, was addressing a tidal wave of complaints.

And he can be as grumpy as his audience, infamous for his bin-kicking, bemoaning his TV career (don’t ask) and bellowing “not on my watch!” when a record request does not meet his approval. (This is personal. My wife’s favourite group is Def Leppard – again, don’t ask – and she requested a song on her birthday. I didn’t mind, but there’s a reason all the DAB radios in our house are now tuned to the Today programme).

His sense of humour is rooted in his upbringing in Pete Shelley and Georgie Fame’s hometown of Leigh. In an industry of self-puffery, his deprecating humour is reassuringly Northern and unlike the heyday of Radio 1 DJs, Keaveny is quick to make himself and his anti-celebrity the butt of any jokes.

For anyone with a half-sizeable record collection, or who remembers what a record collection meant, 6Music is one of the jewels in the BBC crown. Perilously close to the BBC axe in 2010, many of its roster of talent are rock stars (Elbow’s Guy Garvey, Jarvis Cocker, Iggy Pop) and retired rock stars turned TV presenters (Lauren Laverne, Huey Morgan, Cerys Matthews). If the station’s roster was a beauty pageant, Shaun Keaveny wouldn’t be up to the podium giving his thoughts on world peace.
It does not sound like the recipe for a Sony Radio award. And the Sony Awards committee seem to agree with this, except for an award for the station.

But somehow it works. In fact, its three hours of old and new records, music bulletins and shambling amateurism filling the rest of it make it arguably the most lovable show on the station. As these shows include Iggy Pop, that isn’t too shabby.

Long may Shaun Keaveny’s reach continue not to exceed his grasp.

In June, it will be 50 years ago today when The Beatles released what some (wrongly) deem their signature album. The same month, Jimi Hendrix played Monterey. The definitive divorce album, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, marked its 40th in February. It’s 20 years in May from Radiohead’s OK Computer, dubbed for a while the greatest rock album of all time. Elvis left the building for the final time in August 1977.

What is absent from the above list is an album which arguable dwarves the lot, even though its creator was 5’ 2”. It combines all the aspects of the previous work. A frontman who reinvented the live game, with as many comebacks as Elvis, who shredded and picked like Hendrix, wrote a barrowload of hits, recounted all his messy relationship details in song and performed a purple patch of music in four years to rival The Beatles’ imperial phase of Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and The White Album.

For those not following, the clue was in the word “purple”.

Prince’s masterpiece Sign O’ The Times was released 30 years ago today.

Some fans prefer the quirkier Parade, the mainstream audience cleaves Purple Rain closer to its heart, and Diamonds and Pearls sold three times more in the UK. If, however, you want a case study on occasions when the word genius is not always overused in music criticism, Sign O’ The Times is the occasion.

It’s special because classic albums are the result of a band or solo act relying on a producer in sync with their moods and talents.

Even a solo confessional like Carole King’s Tapestry benefitted from Lou Adler’s production.

So much of Sign… is his work alone. The daring of a man who should choose to file for divorce from most of his band after a flop movie and embark on making a triple album – Crystal Ball would become Sign O’ The Times – is breathtaking.

In some respects, Prince was fixated with concept albums through his imperial phase. Purple Rain in 1984 was the result of “60 or 70 songs written for the movie” his keyboard player Matt Fink told me for a BBC feature on the album. The intention on 1985’s Around the World In A Day was to create a psychedelic Beatles-esque landscape and in 1986 Under the Cherry Moon and its soundtrack Parade aimed for a South of France 1920s playboy feel. By 1987, Sign O’ The Times had its own concept. That concept was Prince.

On October 7th 1986, Prince broke up his band, The Revolution. On October 8th, the post-revolution era started with the home recording of Housequake. A voice sped up and slowed down, horns featuring Eric Leeds’ sax, who told me it was done “in an hour”, and a drum beat programmed himself to create a splash of pop-funk which doesn’t sound like that or any other era.

He even stuck on some applause at the end. It’s merited.

Sign O’ The Times criss-crosses the genres of soul, funk, rock, Top 10 pop, electronica, acoustic confessional and the plain weird.

The lyrics are by turns searing, sensual, spiritual, soulful, sweet and silly. (“Shut up, already…damn” will mean nothing to some music fans, and everything to others. See also “Ooh, doggies!” and “Here we are folks, the dream we all dream of, boy vs girl in the world series of love.”)

The record is the sound of an artist zeroing in on what he’s good at and having fun. Mainly, it’s a man playing not just his guitar (which he does exquisitely), but with songs’ tempo and rhythm, with his gender identity on If I Was Your Girlfriend, with the idea of nursery rhymes on Starfish and Coffee. It isn’t just anyone who can persuade a talent show singer from Bellshill, North Lanarkshire discovered by Esther Rantzen, to sing “Sho’ nuff do be cooking in my book” on U Got the Look. Sheena Easton does this for Prince.

The Ballad of Dorothy Parker’s dark tone was the result of a studio mistake from cables missing from equipment shipped to his home studio which turned into a happy accident. He was clever enough to keep it.

Like one of his heroes Miles Davis, Prince plays in the spaces and leaves gaps. Much fuss was made of When Doves Cry from Purple Rain having no bass but there are similar moments here.

He ran freely and no one – not in the charts, nor his band, nor anyone since – could keep up.

Usually the thought of a nine-minute song on a double album would alert the listener to impending self-importance or self-indulgence. It’s Gonna Be A Beautiful Night is a nine-minute joyride. Meticulously recorded live in Paris and then re-recorded in the studio where Eric Leeds and Atlanta Bliss sounds as drilled as the marine corps under the bandleader’s instruction. No other popular musician in history could legitimately be mentioned in the same bracket as Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and even Mozart. Prince routinely is.

1987 was the year Quincy Jones asked Prince to duet on Michael Jackson’s big comeback single (opening line “Your butt is mine”) after Thriller.

Prince passed.

He was instead programming the drums, playing the guitar, screwing around with his vovals in the writing and recording of Sign O’ The Times. Lyrics for the title track, which would be covered by Nina Simone, Chaka Khan and Simple Minds, took in AIDS, the space programme, drugs, guns with gangs and mothers unable to feed their children.

Who’s Bad?

Listen to Sign O’ The Times. Argument settled.

The point of this preamble: audiences want what they want and there is often no rhyme nor reason to it. This becomes more baffling, which is part of the ageing process.

All of which brings us to what is still quaintly known in some quarters as the Top 40. March 2017 saw fourteen of the top fifteen entries occupied by Ed Sheeran. This is not because he’s released singles, but because the Singles Chart is no longer the Singles Chart but a chart based on tracks bought and downloaded. Sheeran’s third album Divide, which James Masterson’s iTunes podcast on the charts tells me sold more than the next 500 albums combined, filled the Top 20 with streams and sales. Masterson also pointed out that the last artist to have four songs in the Top 10 was Frankie Laine in 1954.

As I write, this week’s Top 40 has twelve songs each from Canadian rapper Drake and Sheeran, the latter camped in the Top three. Two men take up more than half the charts with Drake, the nephew of Sly Stone and Prince bassist Larry Graham, having a further ten songs in the Top 75 and Sheeran another four.

In January, one US entertainment site feverishly shrieked the headline: “Ed Sheeran Has Single-Handedly Saved 2017, Twitter Says (& We Agree!)”

Not everyone agreed.

This takeover led for calls for the charts to be overhauled, and ideas for improvement from the BBC’s Mark Savage – a return to singles only (bad news for Led Zep if they ever reform), an end to streaming listens (good news for Taylor Swift who took her songs off Spotify and Apple Music), introducing airplay sales (bad news for anyone old enough to remember payola). It all appeals to a simpler age when the Top 40 “mattered”.

This age feels as current as the stone age, the iron age or Frankie Laine. In the US, the rot could have set in when TV binned Casey Kasem’s Top 10. Over here the BBC scheduling Top of the Pops against Coronation Street then exiling it to BBC2 didn’t help.

The introduction of streaming counting as part of the charts in 2014 led to some weird anomalies.

The Spotify Top 40 means that the top track on a streaming list stays the top track in their charts. Recent records from Take That and Justin Timberlake were top sellers, but missed the summit.

One Direction had four Number One singles to Westlife’s fourteen but were hardly less popular. This just suggests that Simon Cowell, who masterminded both bands, felt the Top 40 was more important at the turn of the century than it was by 2011. He’s not alone.

The concept of the paying customers is over when the customer doesn’t need to pay. That tide isn’t being turned back anytime soon.

Whatever the reason for the mess in the top 40, it’s not really fair to blame Sheeran.

He namechecks Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison, and his mentor Elton John in his work. For any music fan from ten to 110, those three artists’ greatest albums are all as readily available as Sheeran’s and his contemporaries’ for online listening or, in extremis, buying. So old acts are, to Sheeran’s audience, new acts. Paul McCartney has even said in interviews how students come up to him and gush about 1971’s Ram.

So maybe the charts could be about old acts competing with their newer incarnations – Stevie, Van, Elton, Macca seeing if their latest efforts take down what they did in their pomp.

Another solution to help break new acts could be one song per artist in the charts. If Sheeran or anyone else wanted to release a new record, the last one would automatically be disqualified from the charts. His album tracks would not enter the “singles” charts until he decided to release them as such.

The Top 40 could then provide a greater diversity of new acts, streamed tracks from artists who didn’t have big record company backing or songs which have popped up in a film or ad. This was how Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight re-entered the charts.

Or maybe in an age where people don’t buy physical singles or watch music on TV anymore, it’s too late.

Old Chinese Proverb: you know the debate around the charts is in trouble when the outcome is influenced by a drumming gorilla advertising Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.