A Bridge too far?

Ever since André Villas-Boas was, apparently, set the impossible task of transforming from within a Chelsea dominated by its then José Mourinho spine of Čech, Terry, Lampard and Drogba, there's been a never-ceasing murmur about who would blink first in the battle of wills between the club and, in particular, its "Captain, Leader, Legend".

The conventional wisdom has been that John Terry - while beloved unconditionally by Chelsea fans - has been on an exit path ever since he turned 30, six years ago. That he hasn't left - and even had a resurgence, some managers later, under Mourinho - has only served his status as 'Mr. Chelsea'. But the reality has been, despite the mutual Mourinho-Terry dependency, that the defender's effectiveness has started to show its age.

Tomorrow night Chelsea's record breaking, medal-hoovering skipper will no doubt start in the FA Cup quarter-final at home to Manchester United. It's a tie rooted in so many histories, the most prominent being Mourinho's as, now, the United manager, but also the long memories we Chelsea fans all have of the humiliation by United in the 1994 FA Cup Final (never mention David Elleray's name around these parts...) and that night in Moscow when a slippery sod rendered Terry in tears and United the European Champions.

The sad truth is that if Chelsea lose, it could be the last competitive game we see Terry play at Stamford Bridge. And even if Chelsea go through to the semi-final and beyond, Terry's place in any starting line-up will be in doubt. To his absolute credit, Terry has accepted that this season his club captaincy has been more a job of seniority and moral support, dressing room continuity for Antonio Conte. There haven't been any complaints in the press about playing time, while his posts on Instagram have been of a dutiful player training relentlessly. "In the nicest way I hope I don’t get back in because it means we are carrying on winning matches," Terry told the Evening Standard in November. Last week Conte declared that Terry was important to him this season "because he's the captain and he's working very well on the pitch and helping me a lot in the changing room, transferring the right message".

The Italian is well aware of Terry's Chelsea legacy, but most Chelsea fans will, equally, be aware that the old soldier can't go on forever - even if, much like Monty Python's Black Knight of Holy Grail fame, he believes he can. This season's Premier League form with a largely Terry-free line-up has provided Chelsea fans with a convenient reason to not miss Terry. We might love the old slugger, of course, but with David Luiz's growing maturity, Cesar Azpiliqueta's quiet confidence, Gary Cahill finally looking not totally lost without JT at his side, and Kurt Zouma slowly working his way back from injury, no one has felt that Terry could offer anything more than being a figurehead with a penchant for taking a boot to the face when it is needed.

Still, though, the 36-year-old Terry believes he has a couple more seasons in him in the top flight before he hangs up his boots, much like his close friend Frank Lampard who has only just retired at 38. West Bromwich Albion and Bournemouth are believed to be interested in taking him on, Stoke are also rumoured to be keen, and having previously said, out of loyalty, he wouldn't play for a rival Premier League club, these are likely to be his options, should he not accept a coaching or ambassadorial role at Chelsea.

It would be a tough acceptance for Chelsea fans, but no more than seeing any beloved player in another team's shirt. There maybe a few more blue rings on the Terry treestump than when Chelsea sold on the much loved Juan Mata to United, even Nigel Spackman to Liverpool, many years ago when money was tight, but Terry deserves what he can get, even if at a rival, as much as Chelsea clearly need to complete the process begun this season of weaning itself of a club player since he was 14. It can be done, it probably needs to be done if, for once, we allow head to overrule heart.

Always a woman - Laura Marling's Semper Femina

Sometimes it just works this way: Yesterday, I was celebrating the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree, today I'm listening to an album in part inspired by a trip into the same part of California's Mojave Desert; two days ago the world was celebrating International Women's Day. And now Laura Marling has released an album all about womanhood, Semper Femina. It's a title which, for those not schooled in Latin (such as myself, who clearly had to look it up), means "always a woman", and reflects an exploration of Marling's own femininity as well as those of women in general.

But, first, the music. I first came to Marling without knowing that she was regarded as part of the 'new posh folk' movement (Mumford & Sons and Noah & The Whale - of whom she dated the former's Marcus Mumford and the latter's Charlie Fink). My interest was piqued purely by comparisons with John Martyn - an unusual reference point for anyone in her then-early twenties - but as much for her acoustic guitar skills as any other more hackneyed aspect. It was a welcome and valid comparison all the same.

Inevitably, when you mention 'folk' and 'female' in the same sentence, the Joni Mitchell comparisons flood in, but I'd never really consider Marling in this context with her Mercury Prize-nominated debut Alas, I Cannot Swim, or much of its four successors. But on Semper Femina - perhaps due to her relocation to Los Angeles and absorption of the slightly way-out Californian way of life - there is a distinct note of Mitchell's stylistic breadth.

Working with Blake Mills - whose past production credits include Alabama Shakes along with guitar sessions for Paulo Nutini, Carlene Carter, Dixie Chicks and Lana Del Rey, amongst many others - Marling adds new textures to her brush strokes. While never straying far from a core of introspective singer-songwriting, there is a pleasing variety on this, her sixth album. From the opening track Soothing and its pulsing, trip-hop rimshot beat, to the more frenetic Next Time, which obliquely addresses the denouement of sexually ambiguous relationship trauma, ending with "I don’t want to be the kind, Struck by fear to run and hide." The Valley takes a similar turn, a very pretty song that again makes reference to an unspecified and unsuccessful friendship (I know she stayed in town last night, Didn’t get in touch. I know she has my number right, She can’t face seeing us".

But despite alluding throughout to romantic and interpersonal upheavals, this is not a melancholy trawl through the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. There is a pleasing serenity to tracks like Always This Way and Don't Pass Me By, and the album ends with Nothing, Not Nearly with the lines: "We've not got long, you know, To bask in the afterglow, Once it's gone it's gone, Love waits for no one" followed by the sound effects of a garden and birdsong.

The womanhood theme rides throughout, with Nouel containing the refrain "semper femina" - a Greek classical reference which Marling first entertained as a tattoo at the age of 21. Nouel is about an LA artist, and celebrates her being both "fickle" and "unchangeable". If anything, it's a celebration of womanhood, of free spirits. And coupled to the honey-coated warmth of Marling's vocal, it is a notable high point on a album of many other hight points, an album by turns accessible, deep, engrossing and soothing. And fabulous.

Desert songs - The Joshua Tree turns 30

30 years ago I'd not yet set foot in America, let alone visited California or the Mojave Desert where a certain type of tree grows in the apparently waterless terrain. But even though it would be another five years before I would feel Western sunshine on my face for the first time, one album had already put me there: U2's The Joshua Tree.

Released 30 years ago today it took the Dublin band over the threshold of superstardom. Hit singles like Pride (In The Name Of Love), Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Year's Day, plus the critically acclaimed albums Boy, October and War, had already established their credibility, placing them on the fringes of daytime mainstream without brushing them out of the evening radio shows where the not-yet-huge could consider themselves cool.

Two things happened before The Joshua Tree became U2's turning point: firstly it's predecessor, the Brian Eno/Daniel Lanois-produced Under A Blood Red Sky, had netted them hits in Pride and the melancholy The Unforgettable Fire. And then the following year, on 13 July, 1985, the-then still-young band became one of the standout turns at Live Aid. This was due in part to U2 challenging Queen for the liveliest set of all the acts at either Wembley or in Philadelphia. Having torn through Sunday Bloody Sunday and then an extended version of Bad, Bono hammed things up by beckoning British teenager Melanie Hills to join him on stage (a Springsteen-esque gag he'd pulled before), shortly followed by her sister Elaine. At the singer's behest, bouncers attempt to pluck the girls from the crowd, but with Harvey Goldsmith's strict 20-minute limit on each bands' sets ticking away, Bono himself dived into the crowd to assist. A third girl, the 15-year-old Kal Khalique - there principally to see Wham - was also pulled from the throng. She's the one Bono ended up slow-dancing with. It was all gloriously hammy, and not entirely spontaneous ("I don't like the distance between performer and audience. So I'm looking for a symbol of the day, something I can hold onto", Bono would later say) but it carved an eternal mark in the collective memory of Live Aid, not least of which, because it occurred during a set that U2 had scheduled (via clever negotiation) just as the vast US audience was joining Bob Geldof's "global jukebox". It was a masterstroke.

Fast forward, then, to 6 March, 1987. I was in the control room of Studio 5 at Tyne-Tees Television in Newcastle, invited there by the show's producers on the day Jools Holland returned from suspension for saying a naughty word during a live teatime promo. Paula Yates (I think it was) spoke to camera to introduce a world exclusive - the first ever playout of the first single from a new U2 album. The screen faded to black and a quiet but distinct Adam Clayton bassline started to pulse. From the darkened screens in an utterly hushed, pindrop-silent room, Bono emerged, his hair slicked back into a pony tail, wearing a leather waistcoat with a guitar strung across his back. "See the stone set in your eyes," he semi-breathed, "See the thorn twist in your side. I wait...for you.".

We were hearing With Or Without You for the first time. It's a moment I clearly won't ever forget. Like so many bands, I'd not disliked U2 previously but I'd never been all that fervent about them, either. Tonally, too, With Or Without You didn't sound all that different from The Unforgettable Fire, their last single, but there was a notable flavour of Americana (then not really a term) about it. The following Monday The Joshua Tree was released, and it all started to come together.

They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn's cover photography for U2's fifth studio album set the tone. There, in a black and white strip taking up a third of the cover space were Larry Mullen Jr, Clayton, The Edge and Bono, squeezed into the left-hand half of a frame, with grey desert occupying the other half. There was more of this sparse, monochrome photography on the inner sleeve and back cover, all shot in the vast Joshua Tree National Park near Palm Springs in California, and all with the band looking less like the punk-inspired New Wave rockers from Dublin that they once were, and more like members of a native American nation. "When I see the people we were back then," The Edge has written in a forthcoming personal photo diary of the Corbijn shoot, "I see a bunch of pilgrims on a journey towards some kind of creative home. I think that really does capture the spirit of the band at that time."

Corbijn's cover art was perfectly in keeping with the music within. Produced by Eno and Lanois (who'd most recently been responsible for Peter Gabriel's breakthrough So), it managed to encompass the signature U2 sound - Edge's instantly recognisable delayed guitar, Clayton's thudding bass, Mullen's crisp drums, and Bono's breathy vocal style - in a simpler, more stripped down sound, one which somehow evoked the desert landscape on the album sleeve. The desert theme became instantly obvious with the opening track, Where The Streets Have No Name, a compelling, scaling song that, according to Eno, had been tortuous to record ("...a ridiculous saga" he tells the latest edition of Mojo, "I estimate that 40 per cent of the time was spent on that one song. It became a kind of weird obsession."

As the album opened up further, it was clear that the Irish quartet were deliberately exploring the badlands of the Americas. Just as Bruce Springsteen had successfully evoked New Jersey and the industrial north-east, The Joshua Tree was doing the same for the barren south-west, with Red Hill Mining Town and even One Tree Hill (a tribute to a U2 roadie who'd died in a motorbike accident the previous year), drawing on the searing heat and dust of the West. Bullet The Blue Sky, while set in South America, sort of followed the album's unspoken theme of America's influence (it had been inspired during U2's involvement in the Amnesty International 'Conspiracy Of Hope' tour of Central and South America).

30 years on, The Joshua Tree is, perhaps, more legend than milestone. But for the 19-year-old me, it opened up a fascination with American music that I hadn't yet fully appreciated. I could recognise references to the blues (later to flourish on The Joshua Tree tour, with their BB King collaboration, When Love Comes To Town) and the various Lanois-influenced clips of Americana that dot the album. What is certain is that it launched U2 into the upper echelons of global achievement, with Time magazine featuring them on a cover with the splash "Rock's Hottest Ticket". Crucially, The Joshua Tree - with its American themes - established them in the country of its inspiration, becoming their first ever No.1 album in the US just three weeks after its release.

Some will argue that Achtung Baby, the Berlin-recorded studio follow-up, was a better album, written deliberately to confound the belief that U2 had, via The Joshua Tree and it's live release Rattle And Hum, become an Irish version of The Eagles. But, perhaps, with Americana as a genre taking more subtle strides to appropriate the American heartland, U2's first commercial colossus can be appraised afresh. A piece by Tim Sommer in The Observer last Sunday made a somewhat valid point that U2's unashamed appropriation of a blend of authentic genres was "the most basic thievery", but no more than a Led Zeppelin had done beforehand. However, Sommer wrote, "the sheer weight of U2’s personality and charismatic energy" allowed them to get away with it. "In their hands, it doesn’t feel like plagiarism, but like a redistribution of deserving and lesser-known art to the masses." Surely, though, isn't this what everyone has always done? From rock and roll to Chicago house music, someone's always taken from someone else and turned it into something different.

This spring and summer we'll get a chance to make our own minds up with U2 retreading The Joshua Tree in a 30th anniversary tour of, first, the US and then Europe, playing the album - as is the vogue - in its entirety. On 2 June the band will issue an anniversary edition of the record itself, including in the obligatory super deluxe package a live recording from the 1987 tour's Madison Square Gardens show, B-sides from the album's singles and new remixes from Daniel Lanois, Steve Lillywhite and others, along with an 84-page hardback book of unseen personal photography shot by The Edge during the Corbijn cover art photo sessions out in the desert.

Obviously it's a package aimed squarely at people like me and my vintage, but as someone who believes that U2 peaked in the contrasting period of The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, and began to lose their appeal with the bombast, gimmicks and pontification that followed (not to mention the violation of that free iTunes album...) I will happily take the journey back three decades, get some desert sand on my feet again, and remind myself of what it was like to dream about America long before I got the chance to experience it for real.

Decompression

© Simon Poulter 2017

What is it about being beside the Mediterranean in March, enjoying a shot of early spring sunshine while nibbling away at an agreeable glass of local vino tinto, that feels simultaneously decadent and undeniably relaxing? Whatever it is, it was a significant part of my Friday, and just what the doctor ordered. For the first time in what seemed weeks, there were no meetings or conference calls, no e-mails marked 'Important' with "URGENT" stamped in the subject line, just in case the red exclamation mark didn't work.

Like Punxsutawney Phil I emerged yesterday morning from my burrow, after weeks of preparing for and then attending Mobile World Congress, to suck in some sea air and soak up the Catalan vibe. It was a decompression day, one when I could sleep in and then, once self-levered out of my pit, saunter down to the hotel restaurant for a Barça breakfast of kings (noticeably comprised of sausages, some more sausages, several sausages and a Montserrat Caballe-sized hill of scrambled eggs. It is possible, however, that I subconsciously, but quite belligerently, missed the fresh fruit and yoghurt buffet...).

Either way, stuffed on a large quantity of artery clogging porcine goodness, and before I'd had the chance to ask what "cardiologist" was in Spanish (cardiólogo, Google later advises me), I set off to blow away cobwebs accrued over the last few weeks slaving over a steaming laptop and the last few days spent in a large metal shed with a corporate lanyard around my neck.

The not-so guilty pleasure of coming to Barcelona at the end of each February for a trade show is that, if you're lucky, you can catch your first reviving blast of Vitamin D. It's not always easy, as you find yourself sucked into a cycle of airport → taxi → hotel → taxi → event → taxi → hotel → taxi → event → taxi → airport, but if you're smart, and don't have anything or anyone to rush home to, you'll stay down here in this most engaging of Mediterranean cities for an extra couple of days to unwind.

© Simon Poulter 2017

And thus so yesterday proved: what started out as a gentle stroll from my hotel next to the vast Diagonal Mar shopping mall, became an engaging walk along the three-mile beachfront down to the preposterous sail-shaped W hotel with its pretentious staff and equally pretentious restaurants (so typical of the brand), before curling back into the Barceloneta district and the marina, with its vast - and I mean aircraft carrier-sized, Russian-owned (apparently) yachts.

This all might sound like a route march, but one of the eminent joys of Barcelona is going on foot and stopping as often as you want and not feeling under any pressure to be doing anything. At all. Somewhere in the midst of all this "vigorous" exercise I managed to squeeze in a latte, a sizeable vessel of Rioja and a light selection of tapas, not that this was any kind of novelty as I seemed to have existed almost exclusively on tapas as my evening meal over the last seven days.

The idea of tapas being a bar snack has almost been abandoned in Barcelona, as restaurants have based their entire menus around the cuisine. From shaved ham and croquettes, through to octopus and salted vegetables of every hue, no single eaterie seems to offer the same dishes, with the only common denominator being the red wines and cold cervezas that, even at the wet and blustery tail end of winter, trickle down a treat.

© Simon Poulter 2017

Until evening, this particular Friday was blessed with fine weather, which meant that there was no excuse to be indoors for anything. And so, after lunch (tapas) in the Barceloneta district - the marina on one side, the beach on the other, it was back walking again, moving up into the city centre where, by mid-afternoon, the British stag and hen weekends were already luridly spilling out all over La Rambla already, a calamity-in-waiting of ill-fitting T-shirts bearing legends like "Dave's Stag Do - Barcelona Or Bust" or "Susie's Final Weekend Of Freedom". There are times when you can really be embarrassed to be a Brit abroad.But who cares, each to their own.

My Friday had begun without agenda and so continued that way. By the time I'd reached the north end of La Rambla, and the sprawling Plaça de Catalunya - heavily armed police conspicuously standing guard, a sad fixture now in European tourist spots from Paris to Milan - it was time to stop and download a cold beer and take it all in. According to an app on my phone I'd walked just over six miles since leaving my hotel mid-morning. As evening bore down, it was time to refuel again. At the suggestion of my friend Mary, meat was the recommended option. Not a great surprise, I grant you, given the amount of vegetarian-unfriendly dishes I've consumed this last week, but it was, I was promised, going to be a meat feast untold.

And so we ended up in the somewhat unassuming La Vermuterie, appropriately just off Carrer de Londres, where we were offered an 800g pile of cooked cow, preceded - natch - by the prerequisite tapas selection. I'm not a huge meat eater (note the lack of a comma there) so the idea of a Flintstones-sized plate of flesh and bone wasn't all that appealing. But - man alive! - what turned up was remarkable. For a restaurant that looked more like a local Starbucks (at the table next to us sat a man with a Macbook consuming the WiFi, as you would find most of the day in any coffee outlet), this was exquisite fare. Such was the quantity, I won't be eating anything today. Or this week. And possibly not until April.

© Simon Poulter 2017