Meh...it's finally the end of the season

There’s a small but unlikely chance that, over the next 48 hours, corporate IT departments might see an uptick of calls from employees whose F5 buttons have become exhausted on their company-provided computers. Then again, they might not. My lack of conviction on this theory is down to one simple fact: if Chelsea Football Club does part company with Antonio Conte, no one will be the least bit surprised, making it unlikely that there will be much browser refreshing going on at all.

Surely, Conte is on his way out, despite winning the Premier League title in his first season at the club and, now, the FA Cup in his second? Well, yes, but... Chelsea's football board will meet sometime over the next two days to discuss the Italian's future (presumably Roman Abramovich will join by conference call, given his suspect visa issues...). However, things aren't straight forward: even if Conte has seemingly been talking himself out of a job for most of the season - with his constant niggling over squad strength along with some dismal team performances - he is, today, still in post with another full season to run on his current contract. Secondly, although Chelsea have changed the compensation policy for sacked managers (which was getting ridiculous, given the attrition rate), Conte would take away a reported £9 million should he be fired. Assuming that his coterie of assistant coaches would also receive payoffs, Chelsea are believed to be reluctant to sanction another payoff, especially when it's clear - by the scale, or lack of, outlay on new players - the club has cut back on the lavishness that defined the early Abramovich years.

Chelsea managers appear only to last as long as either their perceived effectiveness, or their apparent compliance. Conte has probably exhausted both. Even after Saturday's FA Cup Final triumph over Manchester United, the he has still been defiant towards his employer: "When you decide to take a coach like me, you must know who you are taking, who you are charging for this job," Conte said, once again seemingly starting a fight with no one but himself. "I cannot change my personality. I cannot change my idea of football. Today was the only way to lift a trophy. If you want to change, then we can change our idea, but you must change many players," another dig at the club's apparent lack of player investment, a frustration for Conte that appeared to begin as early as pre-season, and went on to be the undercurrent of his second season in charge.

Twitter/Chelsea FC

By everyone’s admission, this has been a disappointing season for Chelsea, for which the FA Cup - still one of the greatest trophies in football - provides some compensation. But only so much. The Premier League title was always going to be tough to reclaim - it just is - but the extraordinary acceleration by a Manchester City, now fully galvanised under Pep Guardiola, meant that an equally extraordinary effort would be required by Chelsea to keep pace. Throw in a sparkier Liverpool this term and a José Mourinho in his second season at Manchester United (usually the mid-point of his tenure at a club and therefore his most profitable), plus competition on four fronts including a return to the Champions League, and the challenge for Conte and his team couldn’t have been bigger. Saturday’s result at Wembley not withstanding, Chelsea simply didn’t rise to the challenge.

Granted, this season's fifth place Premier League finish is clearly better than the 2015-16 disaster, which could have been a lot worse than the 10th place Chelsea managed to salvage in the end. But, still, there has been too much history repeating itself from that title defence this season, in particular, in the way Conte's frustrations with his bosses have been picked up on by his players. When his shoulders have dropped, so have his players', though nowhere as bad as that miserable period between August and December 2015 when Mourinho flew Chelsea into a canyon of negativity and "palpable discord" developed between coach and team. Conte is, by general comparison to Mourinho, a considerably more chipper individual, but his constant scratching at the open wound between him and his board could prove to be a fatal mistake. Not winning things because you don't have the players when the club has spent some £180 million on players is not a wise thing to complain about when you work for Abramovich. It's just strange that the Russian hasn't pulled the trigger already, after the dismal run of games in January and February, or even after the final Premier League game of the season, a 3-0 humiliation away to Newcastle.

It's been noticeable that Chelsea have shied away from the money-no-object marquee signings that transformed the club from perennial underachievers pre-Roman to trophy hoarders since the Russian took over. That said, last summer's acquisitions of Álvaro Morata, Tiemoué Bakayoko, Danny Drinkwater and Antonio Rüdiger carried some kind of industrial logic: Morata to lead the line as Diego Costa's replacement, Bakayoko to partner N'Golo Kante in central midfield (as they do for France) or Drinkwater to partner Kante (as they did for Leicester in their title-winning campaign). However, with the exception of Rudiger (who was outstanding on Saturday at Wembley), the most polite assessment you could give is that these players are still adapting to the Premier League, the club, or both. After an initial show of goalscoring prowess, Morata ended the season with just 11 goals; Bakayoko was, at times, an embarrassment (especially against Watford, getting sent off to the relief of everyone); Drinkwater made just 12 appearances, seven as a substitute. More arrived in the winter window, with Olivier Giroud joining from Arsenal and Ross Barkley from Everton. While Giroud has quickly become a fans' favourite, Barkley has become a forgotten man. Even the sight of him warming up at Wembley gave the air of a peripheral player, rather than the great English hope many had billed him as. Questions, quite rightly, have been asked as to not only who the club is buying, but by what criterion players are being bought. And, with technical director Michael Emenalo no longer at the club, who is making those decisions.

Eden Hazard has hinted that a condition of him staying at Chelsea will be the quality of players they bring in over the summer. Even if he has blown hot and cold this season, Hazard has been the club's most outstanding player (demonstrated again on Saturday at Wembley). Some fans are resigned to the 27-year-old moving to Madrid, perhaps in the belief that we've had the best out of him, but he is still a player who makes the difference. If he goes, he needs replacing, like-for-like. Likewise Thibaut Courtois, who has been somewhat ambiguous about whether he'll be around beyond the summer. Again, on Saturday, he demonstrated what a top-drawer goalkeeper he is.

At the end of the 2017-18 season, and despite winning the FA Cup for the sixth time since 1997, there is a deeply unsettled vibe around Chelsea. We should be happy. We've won silverware, we're in Europe again next season (albeit the Europa League), and we could be Arsenal. We can't win the Premier League every year, but this season just didn't feel like Chelsea tried. Yes, there were impressive wins in August, September and into October, but there were also too many draws and defeats that suggested the mental strength just wasn't there. True, Chelsea had a decent run in the Champions League (for which the opportunity to see Lionel Messi in the flesh was one I'll savour for a long time). The FA Cup, too, has provided some satisfaction, but there have been too many laboured performances this season in which it was clear that Conte was either being deliberately obstinate to make a point, or simply had run out of ideas when things weren't going well. On this last item, there is some debate: at Wembley, the sight of Willian and Pedro in a permanent state of warming-up right in front of us was frustrating, and you could see the Brazilian, in particular, growing ever more anxious as the clock ticked down. These are not great signs of a warm relationship between a key player and his manager. On the other hand, you could argue that Conte stuck to a plan - defend at all costs - and knew what he was doing. The trophy he held aloft on Saturday evening might be testament to the fact that he did.

So here's the Chelsea board's dilemma: sack a man who has, regardless of how or when, produced silverware, almost on demand, or stick with him for the remainder of his contract, even if it is clear (and has been for some time) that the relationship with his players is less than perfect. And what if they do sack him, and bring in a Luis Enrique or Maurizio Sarri or another exotic-sounding careerist from La Liga or Serie A? Will that necessarily do any good? Would Enrique or Sarri deliver a title in his first season, such as Conte, Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti and interim managers Roberto Di Matteo, Guus Hiddink and even the despised Rafa Benitez have done? And, to raise the thorny issue at the heart of Conte's frustrations, what about player investments - is the club prepared to spend big again this summer?

Twitter/Chelsea FC

Talking to other Chelsea fans on Saturday there is a state of resignation that Antonio Conte has gone as far as he can, that the FA Cup is a suitable reward for a job done, but that it is time for the club to move on again. Two seasons is not much, but Chelsea have seldom, in the modern era, been about building domains. When he bought the club, Abramovich envisaged turning Chelsea into AC Milan or one of the Spanish giants, playing exciting football in Europe every year with a squad of galácticos. That ambition has been, at least, partially realised over the last 14 years. However, entrance to Europe requires excellence in England, first, and before the club makes any decision on Conte's future it must first examine what happened this season in failing to make the Premier League Top 4. Manchester City were unstoppable, just as Chelsea had been the season before, but what kept Manchester United, Tottenham and Liverpool ahead of The Blues in the final reckoning, to keep them out of Champions League places?

Perhaps Chelsea thrive on change. Perhaps the club's strategy is that long-term managerial appointments are a recipe for complacency. We might never know. But if the mood of the terrace is to be heard, there is a sense of weariness towards Conte. Whether it has been the timing or lack of substitutions to inject life into otherwise stubborn performances, Conte has regularly demonstrated a 'I know best' obstinacy that, while true that he probably does, has not translated into something to get behind from the stands. And if we sense it, players like Hazard sense it, which means surely it's a problem that can only be solved one way...

20 years on: the rebirth of cool...and Apple

Last Wednesday Apple reported quarterly earnings of $61.1 billion, almost $10 billion more than the same quarter a year ago. Its 2017 annual revenue was $229 billion. To put that into perspective, the UK's annual defence budget is about £50 billion. That Apple is loaded is common knowledge. That consumers like me are still prepared to fork out for premium-priced products to keep that turnover going says much about the company's brand resilience, despite it lacking any true, must-have innovations for some time.

But at risk of sounding like a Apple fanboy, my ownership of multiple iPhones, iPads, iPods, Macs (including the MacBook on which I write these words), is the product of an infatuation that began almost 30 years ago. In the very early 1990s I, like many others in the media professions, was introduced to the Mac as a production tool. Apple's desktops were in most newspaper and magazine offices as the digital, desktop publishing revolution transformed the business of ink. Working, first, on Apple's SE PCs, I migrated to larger machines as I moved from the Sky TV press office to the company's in-house creative services department. There, the ease and simplicity of the Mac I was provided with allowed me, completely untrained, to master the production of print advertising. Within my first week I'd mastered programmes like QuarkXpress and Illustrator, and had produced my first billboard - a poster for The Simpsons, which was about to launch on Sky One. Six weeks later, I saw the finished poster for real on a 96-sheet billboard on the A3 in New Malden.

Near Sky's offices in Osterley was an Apple reseller. Occasionally I'd go past it and, like Mike Myers in Wayne's World eyeing up that white Fender Stratocaster, would press my nose up against the glass window, drooling over an Apple PowerBook. Clever product placement of these laptops in various films had made them extremely desirable, which also made the one I kept drooling over completely out of range of anything I could afford. And, to be frank, there wouldn't have been much justification for me owning it. But it did look effortlessly cool.

Apple ownership arrived, eventually, 20 years ago, on May 6, 1998 when, under the leadership of the late Steve Jobs, the company unveiled the product that would, finally, satisfy my Apple infatuation, and at the same time, would set the company on the path to unprecedented riches that it enjoys today. That product was the iMac. Essentially a 15-inch portable TV with a computer built into it, that, however, wasn't the appeal, or the point. With its translucent 'Bondi Blue'-coloured casing around a 15-inch CRT tube screen, matching keyboard and mouse, it was everything the home PC user needed in one, neat unit. Even the grab handle led some eccentrics to treat it like a laptop.

The first model was somewhat rudimentary, and functional upgrades progressively followed, along with the expansion of more colour choices ('Blueberry', 'Grape', 'Tangerine', 'Lime' and 'Strawberry'). But that first iMac, however, was an instant design classic. Jobs and his team - in particular, Sir Jonny Ive - had brilliantly thrown away all the aesthetic norms of a PC - beige or grey boxes - and created something that looked good out in the open, not just hidden away in an office. Even the mouse and keyboard matched the 'fruity' colours of the computer itself. The iMac was (and, seven generations on, still is) an extremely daring move. It was also relatively affordable, too. $1,299 might not sound cheap, but that was half the price of most other Apple computers on the market. Finally, Mac ownership was within reach.

The iMac was an instant success. By January 1999 the previously struggling Apple had more than tripled its quarterly profit. Demand was, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "insatiable". Moreover, the iMac reinvented Apple as a cool consumer electronics brand, and by introducing a machine with such popular appeal (the word "fun" had never been previously associated with computing) the naysayers who believed that Apple was just a niche brand selling to professionals were soon being proven wrong. Visit a coffee shop today - especially one within the catchment of a major university or college - and that ubiquitous, illuminated Apple logo will be glaring right at you from the lids of MacBooks. So much for niche.

I bought my first iMac in Amsterdam in 1999, a year after Apple had launched it. Now, I was not only owning my first PC, but I was also finally owning a Mac. At the beginning of 2001 I moved to Silicon Valley and bought my second iMac, a second-generation model front-loading CD slot and better connectivity. Soon I was embracing the "digital lifestyle", thanks to a USB-based 'hub' device as attractive as it was functional, colourful and, relatively speaking, powerful, too. With its convenient means of ripping and storing CDs, I now had a digital jukebox. The purchase of my first digital camera in the summer of 2001, followed by the iPod's arrival the following October (an introduction somewhat overshadowed in the US by the pallor left by 9/11 a month before) completed my conversion to the twin cults of Jobs and Apple.

It's not an exaggeration to say the iMac saved Apple. It turned a professionals-only computing business into a consumer brand. In the 20 years since that first iMac was unveiled, I've upgraded my Apple fleet in overlapping steps: the original iMac gave way to the first flat screen model, that gave way to sleeker and thinner models. The iPod gave way to larger capacity models, Nanos and then Apple's next masterstroke, the iPhone, followed by the iPad. There are parallels here to the tale of Trigger's "award-winning" broom in Only Fools And Horses - owned for 20 years, but with 17 new heads and 14 new handles. Of course, this continuing Apple fandom is partly the result of clever Apple marketing, but it shouldn't be dismissed, either, that Apple's design excellence - both inside and out of its products - has kept me on board all this time.

Apple has its justified critics (not least of which the mess it has made of iTunes - transforming what has been a brilliantly efficient music management program for the iMac into a morass of user-unfriendly layers designed to push consumers to the Apple Music platform). But much of what drew me to that first iMac, 20 years ago, continues to draw me to its products today - design, simplicity and, yes, just a little sprinkling of fairy dust.

Record store daze

Two weeks on from this year’s Record Store Day, Danny Baker may have finally calmed down. His Twitter rant, on the eve of RSD, about record company "vampires" exploiting poor saps like me with limited-edition, available-for-one-day-only pressings of records we probably already own, was particularly fruity. Over several tweets Baker (for almost half a century a voracious record collector himself) frothed with some justification about the Record Store Day "racket" and "this stupid treasure hunt" being "so much less about indy [record] stores than creepy eBay limited editions". And those were some of the milder remarks.

While some of Baker’s eruptions were a tad overblown, he made a good point in that local independent record shops - much like a Christmas present puppy - should be for life, not just one single day. This is an argument supported by Garth Cartwright, who has just written the deliciously insightful Going For A Song: A Chronicle of the UK Record Shop.

"Record Store Day certainly increases turnover for shops and gets them some attention," says Garth, "but the whole RSD 'limited edition vinyl' thing is a scam. You need to be nice to record shops like you are nice to your mother - all year round, not only one day a year!".

Nevertheless, record shops this year reported another day of boffo business, with some doing as much turnover on that day's trading than in the usually moribund entire post-Christmas period. This year’s best sellers, such as David Bowie’s triple-live LP Welcome To The Blackout, helped generate a 16% increase in RSD album sales, with 60,000 LPs sold in the UK as part of the exercise. Rachel Lowe of Brighton’s Vinyl Revolution told the industry trade magazine Music Week that April 21 had been "the best day we've had since opening" and that "the revenue will help our young shop immensely but the publicity and goodwill will last much longer".

Picture: Surrey Comet

Jon Tolley of Banquet Records in Kingston-upon-Thames said that RSD was "hands down our busiest day of the year" and a "great shot in the arm" for the business. He told Kingston’s local newspaper, the Surrey Comet, that Banquet had seen more than 1,000 people queuing up, some since 6.30am the previous morning. "Our business year revolves around Record Store Day, which really lasts at least a fortnight," he said. "It’s a great time to not only celebrate physical music but also the weird and wonderful independent shops who sell it."

Such "weird and wonderful" shops provide a strong component of Garth Cartwright’s book, for which the New Zealand-born author travelled the UK, talking to shop owners, record collectors and even musicians to map both the national history of record shops as well as the state of play today. Going For A Song builds a fascinating picture of record buying culture that transcends the traditional tropes of musty shops staffed by cocky cynics like Jack Black's High Fidelity character, as well as some of the characters who made record shops cathedrals of their worlds - famous patrons such as Bowie and Elton John, and former employees like Dead Or Alive's Pete Burns, Dusty Springfield and, of course, the aforementioned Baker. Some shops, such as Dobells in London's Charing Cross Road, played an integral part in the evolution of Britain's post-war musical habits as a mecca for jazz, blues and folk records, while Liverpool's NEMS department store - whose record section was managed by Brian Epstein - became key to The Beatles' own story, and was, by the 1960s, the most successful record shop outside of London.

Garth Cartwright

Incredibly, though Ground Zero for the British Record Shop was neither in London or in the rock and pop era: it was Cardiff. "Cardiff is home to Spiller’s, the world’s oldest record shop," reveals Garth. "It was founded in 1894 to sell wax cylinders (amongst other electrical goods) and developed its focus on only selling records in the 1920s - and continues doing so today. Why is sleepy Cardiff home to such a historic shop? Because in the late 19th Century it was a booming port and much of the coal trade came through here - a boom town - which meant there were people with lots of money around. And people with money tend to buy new technology. Wax cylinders and wax cylinder players weren’t cheap when they came on the market."

It's long been believed that, as word reached these shores in the 1950s of rock'n'roll, Elvis and the blues, cities with strong maritime links became gateways for imported American music. Garth says there's a little bit of myth to this theory: "Liverpool, another booming port city, and Manchester, a massive industrial city, became home to important record shops," he says, "but I actually don’t think the transatlantic liners provided so many records. What I’ve learnt is that the UK has long been obsessed with American music - minstrels were popular here in the 19th Century and there was a banjo craze at the start of the 20th. Then jazz exploded across the UK, post-World War One, and record labels - both majors and indies - were releasing some jazz, blues and country '78s from then on."

Garth notes that the record industry in the 1960s was (and still is) profoundly London-centric. From a record shop point of view, however, London is only a bit-part player in the story. "Brian Epstein could not get The Beatles a record deal as the London-centric labels were absolutely contemptuous of music from outside 'the Smoke'. That he did came through him being such a good client of HMV, with NEMS selling large amounts of [their] records."

Regional shops became intertwined with their local music culture. "There were regional music scenes, like Merseybeat, across the UK and all reliant on their local record shops," Garth says. "There was no Radio 1 until 1967, so the record shop was where you went to hear new music. The Beatles used to colonise NEMS’ listening booths! The Diskery in Birmingham - still trading today! - was a big place for the early Northern Soul DJs. Selectadisc in Nottingham too. Not that these shops were specialist soul shops - they sold everything but ensure they got R&B 45s for the local mod scene."

Specialist music shops, however, continue to be resilient in the UK music scene, albeit in proportionally smaller numbers than mainstream outlets. "There remain a handful of 'ethnic' record shops that continue to sell music related to their communities," says Garth. "Southall - which once was home to great Indian record shops - now has the Afghan Music Centre. At the bottom of Brick Lane there’s Sangeeta Ltd which still stocks CDs and cassettes from Muslim artists in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Melodi Muzik in Green Lanes is a Turkish shop that focuses on Turkish music and musical instruments and football paraphernalia. Supertone in Acre Lane, Brixton, is an old school reggae shop that also stocks what the owner calls 'big people music', i.e. old R&B, Elvis and Jim Reeves LPs that older West Indians love. In Brighton there’s The Record Album, a vinyl-only shop established in 1948 and run since 1960 by George Ginn - he specialises in soundtracks and showtune albums. George is a lovely man and has a very eclectic stock in the sense of stocking some really weird albums - John Wayne’s one spoken word album! Fabulous!".

The depth and scale of Garth's research for the book is impressive, as is his clear enthusiasm for the characters and stories he encountered along the way. But the book does also reflect the clearly changing landscape: "I landed [in the UK] in 1991 and record shops then were everywhere - from megastores run by Virgin, HMV and Tower Records, to junk chains on the high street like Our Price and basement dance shops selling techno 12"s and beyond. Today very little of that remains: I miss places like Mole Jazz and Beano’s - Europe’s largest second-hand record shop in Croydon. The Tower Records in Piccadilly had really deep stock."

Greenwich's finest - Casbah Records on Record Store Day

© Simon Poulter 2018

Today, says Garth, there are still plenty of good independents on offer with, even, new players opening up: "After the crash of the CD and the megastores, and the high street Top 40 chains, people have retrenched and decided that they like buying vinyl and going to good independent stores. Eel Pie Records [in Twickenham] is a great example of a new shop that has a musical vision - Phil and Kevin love music and have worked in the industry for years so they’ve gone about opening a record shop that reflects their passion and knowledge. They’re not attempting to compete with the supermarkets. Instead, they’re championing fresh, independent music. This is the way forward."

"There’s lots of good shops," he adds, from the specialists I mentioned before through to longstanding outlets like Reckless Records, Sound Of The Universe, Honest Jon’s, Soul Brother and new places like If Music in Soho and Lorenzo’s Record Shack in Peckham." Garth, who lives in south-east London, regularly visits Camberwell's Rat Records as well as my own local emporium, the very brilliant Casbah Records in Greenwich (dangerously located just 600 yards from my front door...).

While the record shop landscape has changed, as chains like Tower Records, Virgin Megastore and Our Price have vanished from high streets over the last couple of decades, the business is still relatively vibrant. Margins might be thin and rents might be high, and while we shouldn't get too carried away by the so-called vinyl "boom", shops like Casbah remain the knowledgeable, if slightly intimidating experiences they've always been. Garth is somewhat cautious: "I think the club-going, DJ-ing youth are into buying records on vinyl, but most people just want to listen to music on their phones." Times have changed, he says: "Back in the 1950s and '60s most people bought their records in Smiths and Currys, and Mantovani was the most popular album seller in the UK," but adds that there remains a resilient core of consumers - semi-obsessive middle-aged blokes like me as well as Millennials and hipsters - keeping the trade going. "So long as there is a developing community of record shoppers I believe there’s a future for good record shops," he concludes.

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Garth Cartwright discusses Going For A Song: A Chronicle of the UK Record Shop in the next Word In Your Ear podcast - details of which will be published here. The book is published by The Flood Gallery and can be ordered via their website.

Mood music

Picture: Philips

If there's one thing I know about music it's that it's there when I need it most: soothing on a Sunday morning, uplifting on a Saturday night, energising on my way to work and relaxing on my way home. Just yesterday I finally got around to playing my Record Store Day purchase of David Bowie's Welcome To The Blackout (Live London 1978), and hearing rich and previously unreleased arrangements of Heroes, TVC15, Ziggy Stardust and Alabama Song put me in an extraordinary soak of good humour.

Several years ago, when I was working at Philips, we collaborated with the Canadian neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in a PR exercise to tie together the findings of his book, This Is Your Brain on Music - a deep examination of how we humans relate to music - with our personal audio products, used by gym bunnies in their endorphin-generating, natural high-producing workouts.

Levitin's book outlined how elements of music - timbre, rhythm, pitch, harmonies and so on - influenced neural function, neurochemistry and even cognitive psychology. Music, Levitin revealed, has a profound effect on cognitive, emotional and even physical health, and from an early age, too: the auditory system of a human fetus is fully functional after just 20 weeks and year-old infants will respond to the music they’d been exposed to while still in the womb. At the other end of life, Levitin wrote, music had a beneficial part to play in the care of Alzheimer’s patients, helping them connect with the depths of their ravaged memories. Music therapy has indeed been a well known practice for almost 60 years, dating back to 1959 when American composer Paul Nordoff and special needs teacher Clive Robbins started the work that would later lead to the Nordoff-Robbins charity and the incredible work it does in helping children and adults (such as stroke victims) with cognitive skill development.

Picture: Bank of England

So, knowing that music has a profound effect on mood, what about its effect on the economy? In a speech published earlier this week by Andy Haldane (left), the very forward-thinking chief economist of the Bank of England, he outlined the role of so-called 'Big Data' in providing semantic insight into human behaviour and how, in good times and bad, that might influence the economy. "Capturing people’s true sentiments and preferences is devilishly difficult," Haldane revealed, saying that "non-traditional" methods of opening up the consumer's mood were under examination.

"To give one recent example, data on music downloads from Spotify has been used, in tandem with semantic search techniques applied to the words of songs, to provide an indicator of people's sentiment. Intriguingly, the resulting index of sentiment does at least as well in tracking consumer spending as the Michigan survey of consumer confidence," a reference to a study which interpreted key themes from lyrics in songs in the Billboard Top 100 in the US and how their popularity corresponded rises and falls on market indices like the Nasdaq, Dow Jones and the S&P 500. The study, called The Rhythm of Markets, found that even a 1% increase in the frequency of the word "anticipation" led to a 0.444% drop in the Nasdaq.

Haldane also suggested that music might not be alone: "People’s tastes in books, TV and radio may also offer a window on their soul," he said, adding that gaming , in particular, might also be useful, since some games providing virtual environments that made observing behaviour easier than in the real world. Multiplayer online games and the fantasy World of Warcraft already had "primitive" economies that economists were studying, Haldane said, adding that such games could facilitate the study of player reactions to policy intervention on monetary and regulatory issues.

Quite how all this will have a defining impact on fiscal policies remains to be seen. I'm sure Mr. Haldane's need to be tapped into every vital sign affecting economic mood gives credence to mining Spotify download statistics to see what its subscribers might be feeling, given the sometimes impulsive nature of plugging into the platform to satisfy a particular musical craving. But as someone who still prefers physical music formats (and the purchasing of it) to lift my mood, the only fiscal correlation I can draw from the mood created by musical habits is that my disposable income will be significantly less in the days and weeks immediately after Record Store Day, or when there's a decent-sized box set on the way.

Picture: Spotify

A glimpse into the future...but for whom?

Twitter/Chelsea FC

In three weeks' time Antonio Conte could be collecting a FA Cup winner's medal from whomever Prince William deputises to the task while he's busy delivering the best man's speech at his brother's wedding. If Chelsea do beat Manchester United at Wembley on May 19 it will be a welcome reversal from last year's abject display against Arsenal in the same contest (one for which - without any bitterness at all... - I bought a ticket for myself and my best mate for his 50th birthday...), in which Conte's then-Premier League title winners forgot to turn up. Or, at least, they turned up with Victor Moses, who forgot what occasion he was playing in.

Some say Chelsea are cup specialists. There are those, too, who maintain that no other club in the modern era has made the FA Cup Final quite their own. In this regard, they have a point: in the competition's modern history Chelsea have won the cup seven times out of a total of 12 appearances. They won the last final at the old Wembley in 2000 and won it in the first final of the new stadium in 2007, beating Manchester United by a single Didier Drogba goal. For those of us who were there, this was sweet revenge for the humiliating 4-0 defeat by United in 1994 (even if that experience - which led to a European Cup Winners Cup run - somewhat marked the 'return' of Chelsea to the big time, having spent the 1970s and 1980s in a dark, financially ruinous an largely anonymous, success-wise, place).

Indeed, it would be three years later when the team, under Ruud Gullit's management, captained by Dennis Wise and peppered with internationals like Gianfranco Zola, Frank Leboeuf, Gianluca Vialli and Roberto Di Matteo (who famously scored after just 42 seconds), would beat Middlesborough 2-0 and win their first 'grown-up' silverware for a quarter of a century.

"Chelsea are back!" we sang, and they were. I won't bore you with all the stats that have followed, save to say that the FA Cup has been an ever-constant in much of the Abramovich era, a period that, yes, has seen Chelsea win the Premier League five times, but has also seen them win the Cup four times in the last 11 years. That, however, isn't the point of this post. Nor is the cycle of management - you know the drill: Chelsea hires head coach, wins a trophy or two, parts company with head coach, hires head coach, wins a trophy or two, parts company with head coach, repeat ad nauseam. Nope. Not this. Even if, surely, Conte's appearance with Chelsea at Wembley later this month will be his last in charge.

No. Because when Roman Abramovich assumed ownership of Chelsea, apart from wanting to turn it into London's AC Milan, he also gave instruction to his minions to create a successful academy system that would generate future stars for the club. On paper, at least, that hasn't happened. John Terry is, arguably, the last youth product to have achieved first team regularity (although, this season, Andreas Christensen could be considered to have broken through, tentatively). Looked at from a broader, historic perspective, the Chelsea academy hasn't been without longer lasting successes: Jimmy Greaves, Bobby Tambling, Peter Bonetti, Terry Venables, Ron Harris, John Hollins, Peter Osgood and Ray Wilkins all came through its system, along with more recent graduates like Terry, Ryan Bertrand and Robert Huth. However, the absence of sustained careers at the parent club remains a key issue for the current era. Perhaps it's not even the academy's mission? Perhaps generating new talent, who glimmer with prospect for first team appearances before being sold or loaned out is merely the business model, nothing more than a form of husbandry and a secondary process to first team recruitment? For fans this isn't without its frustration. Chelsea loaned out academy product Ruben Loftus-Cheek and replaced him - for £40 million - with the profoundly disappointing Tiémoué Bakayoko. There are many more examples.

Twitter/Chelsea FC

Which brings me - six paragraphs later - to events last night at the Emirates Stadium and the point of this post. Chelsea won their fifth consecutive FA Youth Cup, an achievement you have to go back to the Busby Babes of the 1950s to match. Thrashing Arsenal 7-1 on aggregate recorded the Chelsea Under-18s their seventh FA Youth Cup trophy in all since 2010. The feeling amongst football writers is that it is unlikely to be their last, either, and that a fifth consecutive trophy could easily become a sixth, seventh or more.

Imagine a first team recording such persistent success. They'd be regarded with the same superlative as Manchester United's dominance under Sir Alex Ferguson, or the modern Barcelona, or Liverpool in the late '70s and early '80s. And yet, when you think about it, seven years of success for a youth side should mean, applying basic mathematics, that there has been a steady flow of graduates into the Chelsea first team. The truth is, there hasn't been. Amongst the current crop, Callum Hudson-Odoi (who scored twice last night) has had a few runouts this season under Conte, during which he has looked a very exciting prospect, with lightning pace and an exceptional turn of foot. Others, like Dujon Sterling and Ethan Ampadu have also enjoyed the odd taste of the big time as substitutes. The $64,000 question is - what next? Will that be it?

Another key question is about the future of Jody Morris, the Under-18s manager. A Chelsea academy graduate himself, once a combative midfielder who came through the ranks alongside Terry and made 124 midfield appearances between 1996 and 2003, he has quietly got on with playing a huge part in the youth team's remarkable run of success since being appointed four years ago. While it might be highly unlikely that he would be considered an immediate replacement for Conte, should he leave (and with a predictable list of European exotica being lined up), surely a record like his won't go unnoticed?

All of which begs the more existential question about what is Chelsea's strategy when it comes to players and managers alike? To win five consecutive trophies suggests that the club is sitting on a gold mine in Morris and his players. No one, though, would be so naive to suggest that any of their success would translate instantly into the first team: but, all the same, it would be a tragedy to see that talent just ebb away to other clubs. I might be ludicrously idealistic, but why not get some of these youngsters blooded in properly at the top level, and see what raw, precocious talent can do? Alan Hansen's infamous statement in 1995 that "You can’t win anything with kids" has often been proven right, even if it was immediately proven wrong by Fergie's youngsters (Gary Neville, 20; Paul Scholes, 20; Ryan Giggs, 21; Phil Neville, 18; Nicky Butt, 20; and David Beckham, 20) going on to win that season's Premier League. The trouble is, is any club willing to give it another go now?