I'd love to fly away, but not just yet

It is Day 35 of the COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom. Since it began I have started a new job, lost almost a stone in weight and, thanks to tauntingly sunny weekends spent in the garden (not Richmond Park) I’m showing the first brown shoots of a tan. In April. This not-going-out-further-than-the-back-door regime has entailed a lot of looking up into geographically unfamiliar Tuscan-blue skies over south-west London, a vista seemingly unblighted by the ever-present traffic pollution that hangs over the city. 

Another notable absentee has been the air traffic that usually, at certain times of the day, takes off from Heathrow in a south-easterly direction and over our house. Being a bit of a plane geek (I spent many happy hours of school holidays on the roof of Heathrow’s Terminal 3 logging tail numbers in the days when such things were allowed), I’ve been fascinated by the stark reduction in aircraft overhead. What has been taking off has been the occasional passenger flight to eastern Europe or Middle East destinations, while the flight radar app on my iPad has shown that UK commercial airspace is mostly being used by cargo planes. Environmentalists will, of course, be delighted: the blue skies and reappearance of wildlife to suburban gardens is just the return to pre-industrial times they long for. You can’t help, either, enjoying sitting in a garden with the only noise pollution being birds tweeting and children letting off steam in a distant backyard. 

It does, though, makes you wonder how we might return to normal, and what the next normal will be. I’ve always looked at planes in the sky as a symbol of escape, of getting to be somewhere else, somewhere more interesting. And with what should be the holiday season approaching, and the lockdown showing no signs of being lifted, the chances of seeing the outside tables of a Greek taverna, a Sicilian trattoria or a Spanish tapas bar anytime soon seem depressingly limited. Not that I’m craving flying anywhere. The experience of my last job disproved wholesale the idea that it’s better to travel than arrive, and even, to travel at all: in the 12 months between September 2018 and September 2019 I took 51 flights, a ridiculous programme, especially in terms of my carbon footprint, but also in arcane face time philosophy. 

If one good thing has come out of this coronavirus crisis, it’s that the Internet hasn't broken and video conferencing technology is more than adequate at keeping in touch professionally and socially. The first few weeks in my new job may have been a bit weird, in that I’ve seen more of the interiors of my new colleagues’ homes than in any previous job in my 34-year career, but that hasn't stopped being able to function perfectly adequately. Of course, if you work in a job where collaboration and spontaneous engagement is productive, e-mail, Skype and instant messages are a little limiting, but nowhere near the inhibition some might have argued they were. There’s no immediate sign that I’m going to set foot any time soon in my company’s Paddington offices, and I'm fine with that. Our technology is holding up brilliantly, everyone is making the best of it, and it has even fostered an uplifting bunker spirit. Going back into the office will be a challenge for employers, especially as they ensure safer social distancing in communal areas, in canteens, meeting rooms and lifts. The average desk distance in most modern offices is around 1.5 metres, which would require new thinking by corporate real estate planners if employees are to come back. 

Picture: British Airways

So if we’re still, as a nation, wisely reluctant to get on public transport again to get to work, I can’t see much appetite for getting on a flying toothpaste tube for a couple of hours or more for leisure. The other week it was reported that IATA, the international airline trade association, had suggested that for mass air travel to resume, airlines would be forced to fly with at least a third of their planes’ seats empty, with middle seats on single-aisle, three-abreast configuration short-haul flights left vacant to maintain social distancing. Michael O’Leary, the outspoken Ryanair chief executive has branded the idea “idiotic” and said it offered little benefit in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. O’Leary’s airline, of course, has benefited more than most from packing ’em in, last year flying more than 152 million people, placing it at the top of European carriers by passenger numbers. “We can’t make money on 66% load factors,” O’Leary has said. “Even if you do that, the middle seat doesn’t deliver any social distancing, so it’s kind of an idiotic idea that doesn’t achieve anything anyway,” he told the Financial Times. As we've seen with Richard Branson's attempt to have the UK government support Virgin Atlantic financially in the crisis, a well-paid airline CEO complaining about not making money is not going to wash too well. 

When life returns to normal for the airline industry - if it returns to normal - things will clearly be different. Business travel still accounts for the bulk of airline profits, but with video-based professional distancing being accepted like never before and, ideally, remaining the default, non-essential trips abroad for work are going to be pared back, and that’s even before CFOs impose even more draconian travel restrictions as the financial crisis grips harder. The future is certainly looking bleak for the airline industry, even if a partial lifting of the lockdown frees up the leisure travel market. Michael O’Leary believes that normality could return if airlines adopt Asian practices and force passengers to wear face masks, and airports bring in mandatory temperature and even virus testing. That still won’t stop airlines collapsing. The Airport Operators’ Association has said that passenger numbers are unlikely to return to pre-pandemic levels until 2022. British airports have seen passenger numbers slump by 97%, with up to 80% of staff being furloughed in some cases.

All this, though, assumes that 'normality' will be anything like that we enjoyed as little as a few weeks ago. There are, for now, too many variables, and even if lockdown rules in all those countries affected by this pandemic start to relax, what that relaxation will be like, and how long it will remain in place before a second phase of COVID-19 forces us back behind our front doors again is anyone's guess. The extreme view of the world today is that the virus has initiated a form of Pol Pot's Year Zero regime. It's not, obviously, but the absence of planes in the skies, and even traffic on our roads, may be one of the things that doesn't recover. Bad news for the airline industry, which has enjoyed an unprecedented boom in the last couple of decades. Bad news, too, for the likes of Boeing and Airbus, who were pumping out new planes at a rate of knots until relatively recently (Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury told his 133,000 employees in a letter last Friday that the business was “...bleeding cash at an unprecedented speed, which may threaten the very existence of our company”). It is, though, conceivable that the world will start moving again. Chinese tourists will still want to visit Paris, Americans will still want to have their photographs taken outside Buckingham Palace, and I for one will still want to see the Mediterranean again. Just not yet.

Pace yourself - this thing's not over yet

Picture: Twitter/BetterCaulSaul/AMC

There have been two stark reminders this week that we're in it for the long run with this pandemic. Firstly, I finally received a letter from my GP warning me to "stay at home at all times and avoid all face-to-face contact for at least 12 weeks" owing to rather foolishly having an underlying health condition. This, I thought, was somewhat curious as we are now in Week 4 of the lockdown, and I'd received a text message from the NHS three weeks ago today warning me, then, to stay at home for “at least” 12 weeks. So, am I now confined to barracks for 12 or is it 15 weeks? And then, if I heard Chris Whitty, the government's chief medical adviser, correctly this week, I might be here for even longer, like The Count of Monte Cristo or Rapunzel, after he alarmingly stated that no one's getting out until they find a cure, or a vaccine, or the economy collapses and it's the Zombie Apocalypse for real. Something like that.

A staple of the media over the last few weeks has been reporting on how people are (or not) coping with the lockdown. I'm not going to be flippant, and pretend that there aren't families in appalling conditions, children sharing bedrooms in cramped flats, and a serge in domestic violence; I'm also not going to believe that everyone in the UK can simply ride this thing out over the summer by setting up permanent station in their gardens, as it's a myth to believe that we all have one in this green and pleasant land. We do, however, all have access to television, which has become a universal panacea. It's no surprise, then, that box sets and streaming services are being chewed through at a rate of knots. Even I have started watching Masterchef and Bake Off, the kind of thing I'd ordinarily swerve, for want of something feelgood. Travel shows, too, have provided the escapism we've been denied by the lockdown (Sir Tony Robinson taking a train from Seattle to Alaska the other night was strangely liberating, despite being largely about the actor sitting inside a metal tube for hundreds of miles at a time). And there was Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, the batshit-mad story of the batshit-mad Joe Exotic, his big cat zoo in Oklahoma and his allegedly murderous obsession with conservationist Carole Baskin. What could have been easily condensed into a single hour (as Louis Theroux had done previously) was brilliantly strung out into seven, somewhat individually themed episodes. These could also have been rationed but, in most people's cases, were binge-viewed in three, two or even single sittings. Given the bizarre story that played out, with equally bizarre players, it was hardly family lockdown material, but there we were - all of us - craving another episode after each dose, even when it was clearly getting late.

Since it’s premiere on 20th March Tiger King has been watched by more than 64 million households (Netflix’s metric) and has become a classic example of word of mouth cultural encroachment. We watched it because “everyone” was talking about it. We weren’t disappointed. Every day there's another recommendation on Facebook, be it Stranger Things, Ozark or Love Is Blind, or from these shores, the BBC’s Killing Eve (an episode of which was filmed not 100 yards from the kitchen table at which I write this). No wonder Netflix has added almost 16 million new accounts in the first three months of the year (almost double the number of new sign-ups for the final months of 2019). Even with new productions on hiatus, Netflix promises that it won't be running out of content any time yet.

One of its jewels, and one it was smart to bet on from the outset, is Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad prequel which, it is frequently debated, has been even better than the show from which it spawned. This week its ten-episode fifth season drew to a stunning conclusion, brilliantly setting itself up for a sixth and final run, though no one quite knows when that will appear. Showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould were aiming for a season a year, but the lockdown in California has meant that production is on hiatus, although it has provided time to work on the new scripts. If you’ve not watched the final episode of Season 5, I won’t spoil it here, but like the previous seasons, 5 has been a delicious arc, continuing the metamorphosis of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman, the shyster lawyer of Breaking Bad (“It’s all good, man”), laying a few seeds that flower in the original series and even dropping a few plot lines that have left devotees of both shows wondering where and when the link will be made.

Picture: AMC television

But, unlike the much-binged Tiger King, Saul has been drip-fed to us, week-by-week, an old-fashioned approach, perhaps, but equally as effective as cliffhangers from old when the following week’s episode couldn’t come soon enough. This weekly progression has helped build not just a story curve but the season’s character curve, too. There have been standout performances from Bob Odenkirk as McGill/Goodman, as he finds himself deeper and deeper into the murky world of Albuquerque’s criminal underworld. Goodman was only ever meant to be a minor character in Breaking Bad, but with each new season of Saul, Gilligan and Gould have mined an even richer seam of ambition - and paranoia - providing obvious and not so obvious links and bridges to what we know of his future; Rhea Seehorn as his romantic partner and career-minded lawyer who, herself, starts to display a more nefarious side towards the end of the season, just as Walter White’s wife Skyler became more embroiled in the affairs of his alter-ego, ‘Heisenberg’; and the enigmatic Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut, the gnarled ex-cop (and, possibly, ex-special forces operative) doing the dirty work for nefarious drug emperor Gus Fring; and the season’s standout character, Lalo Salamanca, played with glorious, moustache-twirling, vintage villainy by Tony Dalton.

“Just IMAGINE when Better Call Saul was announced...the notion of suggesting it’d be half as remarkable as Breaking Bad was. You’d have been immediately ripped on & discredited. It’s all I see now - that it equals it, if not surpasses it. Astronomical odds of that happening.” So wrote the very excellent Canadian radio presenter Greg Brady in a tweet on Tuesday. I mention this as A) I follow Greg (and occasionally you can hear him on BBC 5 Live’s always entertaining Fighting Talk) and he follows me, and B) I couldn’t have summed up Better Call Saul better myself. That’s almost all there is to be said. With each new season, the bar has crept ever higher. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul have rightfully joined the ranks of the great entries in the so-called 'golden age of television', that period over the last couple of decades when The Sopranos, The Wire, Band Of Brothers, 24 and Homeland managed to transcend formulaic series television and become what became known as “appointment TV”, epic, cinematic television. America hasn’t had the monopoly on this, of course, as the likes of Line Of Duty, Killing Eve and, most recently, The Nest have demonstrated. But many of these examples are of shows which conform to a conventional linearity.

Picture: AMC

Better Call Saul - even more than Breaking Bad - has frequently demonstrated none of it. Moreover, Gilligan, in particular, has presided over two series with an identical love of quirky cinematography. If you thought some of the camera angles in the original Batman TV series in the 1960s were askew, some of the shot framing and scene-teeing in Saul, in particular, has been exquisite. The precedent was set in Breaking Bad, of course, with the opening episode commencing with Walt White, wearing white underpants and a gas mask, speeding off-road in the New Mexico desert in his cookshop 'RV'. All this before we had any clue as to who he was, what he was or why he was out there. Speed forward (or back), to the premiere episode of Better Call Saul, and the opening sequence begins with a individual who looks a lot like Saul living in stark anonymity in Nebraska, running a shopping mall Cinnabon kiosk, and spending his evenings replaying video cassettes of Saul Goodman TV commercials. All in black and white with hardly a word uttered. Here's Gilligan’s trademark: quirksome and often irony-laden, using idiosyncratic tracking shots or even something as simple as the reflection of an SUV in a puddle to build menace, curiosity and fear in equal measure, rather than simply resort to ‘establishing shots’ of landscapes which, while pretty, give little for the narrative to follow.

The Sopranos did similar things, with music frequently applied to underline Tony Soprano’s baby boomer, middle-aged dadness, an important reminder that he wasn’t just a ruthless capo. Both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul have traded off the fact that New Mexico is not like anywhere else in the American south, and that Albuquerque is not like any other southern desert city. Even if the criminality theme fits into any reflection of modern America, and urban America in particular, the fact that Gilligan’s shows are not set in the usual locations, like Los Angeles or New York, merely adds to the fact that we’re simply watching something else entirely. It’ll be truly interesting to see where Saul - now he has more or less become Vader to Jimmy McGill’s Annakin - takes us in the final season. Whenever that materialises...

The day football came back...briefly

I don’t know about you, but I’m passing the extended lockdown by noting anniversaries of the otherwise mundane: the last time I had a coffee at Caffé Nero, the last time I went swimming, the last time I saw someone in the flesh who wasn’t a member of my immediate household. That sort of thing. For example, Easter Sunday marked an exact month since my last haircut, and given my barnet’s normal growth rate, I’m surprised I'm not yet resembling Tom Hanks in Castaway.

It is now six weeks - SIX - since I last saw a football being kicked in anger, (Chelsea's 4-0 battering of Everton, since you ask, easily the best game I've seen this season). In other circumstances this might have bothered me, but like so many aspects of the viral crisis, there are other things that now take priority and, frankly, football is not one of them. Not that football isn’t perfectly capable of crowbarring itself back into consciousness, whether it is the idiot Kyle Walker getting caught in flagrante with a couple of “sex workers” who clearly weren’t members of his household, or his former club Tottenham Hotspur digging itself into a hole by placing half of its 550 non-playing staff under the government’s furlough scheme and imposing 20% pay cuts on other employees (despite being the world’s eighth-richest football club which recently posted record annual revenues of £461 million and a profit of around £70 million). Facing a backlash from its own fans and even some players, Spurs have wisely made a U-turn, with Daniel Levy, the club’s chairman (who earned a cool £7 million last year) announcing that all non-playing staff will now get paid in full for April and May, with only the board taking a pay cut. Last week Liverpool staged a similar volte face. In truth, clubs like Tottenham and Liverpool - 8th and 7th, respectively, for global club revenues last season - can most afford it. Others, like Bournemouth and Norwich City probably can’t and have carried on with drawing on the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme.

We are on shaky moral ground, here. Elite football generates - and spends - ridiculous amounts of money, money it earns, if it is a Premier League or Championship team, from they eye-watering deals done with television companies. Matchday gate receipts and income from merchandise and sales of dodgy burgers is, for some clubs at this level, something of a bonus. For clubs lower down, however, every last bottle of Coke sold could be the difference between a bleak future or not when this thing is all over. Here, like so many businesses across the spectrum of enterprise, there are people working at these football clubs who earn a mere fraction of the sums trawled by the players they serve. That said, Spurs should never have put themselves in the spotlight with such a PR disaster.

In a club statement Levy said: "The criticism the Club has received over the last week has been felt all the more keenly because of our track record of good works and our huge sense of responsibility to care for those that rely on us, particularly locally. It was never our intent, as custodians, to do anything other than put measures in place to protect jobs whilst the Club sought to continue to operate in a self-sufficient manner during uncertain times.” Be that as it may, but when the businesses of the very fans who keep these clubs going are facing very uncertain futures, Spurs' unnecessary insertion in the coronavirus news cycle was ill-thought through especially, without little fanfare, while other clubs have simply been getting on with it (Leeds United’s first-team squad have agreed wage cuts to assist others at the club, Juventus players have taken a four-month pay cut and Barcelona players have agreed to a 70% pay cut).

Picture: Nike

Were it not for this brouhaha, football would have dropped completely from view. I am, though, inclined to care less about whether the current season ends, or whether Liverpool’s somewhat justifiable receipt of the Premier League title, happens or not. "Staying in, saving lives" has replaced everything else in my consciousness. Last Monday I started a new job, which at least managed to supplant days framed largely by an unhealthy diet of rolling news and watching delivery vans out of the living room window speed up and down the road. Covid-19 has rapidly reshaped our priorities and interests, not that football was exactly an obsession. But I've now realised how much of my time was, pre-crisis, spent on watching, reading, WhatsApping, tweeting and blogging about football. And then, nothing. Like I'd reached the end of the universe and discovered that beyond it, there is nowt. Well, there was, until Easter Sunday when, in much the same manner as EastEnders' Nasty Nick appearing out of the blue to say "'Ello Ma, fancy a cuppa?", the football void was momentarily broken by a bittersweet memory. On Sunday afternoon the BBC cast our minds back to something which, despite coming 30 years ago, still fills football fans with tear-inducing nostalgia: Italia ’90.

The 1990 FIFA World Cup, to give it its full name was, for England fans at least, a moment of mass cultural change. Football was still in the doghouse after the 1985 Heysel disaster and, just a year before, the Hillsborough tragedy in Sheffield. The game didn’t exactly disappear, but it certainly wasn’t where it is now - or at least was before that nasty little virus arrived on these shores. Italia ’90 was a football tournament, obviously, but it managed to transcend that in England, largely thanks to the BBC’s coverage of it. Fronted by the smoother-than-silk Des Lynam (“Desmond”, as commentator John Motson consistently referred to him), the Beeb bought into the dreamy Italian vibe with Luciano Pavarotti’s rendition of Nessun Dorma from Puccini's opera Turandot as its theme tune. “You’ll be humming it soon – you’ll know the words to it by July 8”, Lynam quipped on the opening day, setting an incongruously cultured tone to coverage of a tournament normally less sophisticated. I’m not going to recall the whole thing here - Roger Milla corner flag dance and Totò Schillaci’s eye-bulging reaction to scoring a winner notwithstanding - rather than reminisce over last Sunday’s unexpected flashback: West Germany-v-England.

By 1990 England had been bereft of international footballing success for a full 24 years (“30 years of hurt” would prevail beyond Euro ’96), so England reaching a semi-final against Frans Beckenbauer’s pre-unification West Germany was a big deal. Before the tournament had begun the usual negativity surrounding England had been added to by news that manager Bobby Robson would leave after the competition to join PSV Eindhoven. Then came England’s opening game, a dismal 1-1 draw against Ireland. For the next match, against the Dutch, Robson changed the system around, allowing the-then 23-year-old Paul Gascoigne’s talents fully into the fray. England would win their group, raising prospects - “could this be the year, finally?”. Gazza became a joy to behold and easily England’s breakout tournament start. His supply to David Platt in the last-16 tie against Belgium, enabling the striker to volley spectacularly into the goal with seconds to spare in extra time, marked the youngster as the one to watch. Next came Cameroon in a quarter-final, from which England progressed, just. By this time of the World Cup, Italia ’90 fever had reached its peak. As Des had predicted, Nessun Dorma had become the soundtrack of the summer (along with New Order's World In Motion). Coupled with England’s run, with a team comprised of players in their prime, like Gary Lineker, John Barnes, Des Walker and even Peter Shilton, who seemed old in 1990 (he retired soonafter) but looked absolutely rock-solid between the sticks, we were lured by the charms of the Italian peninsular, its islands and its football culture. Channel 4's Football Italia would come not long after (and could be a whole separate blog post, as I waxed on about James Richardson laconic Saturday morning magazine show).

In that Italian excursion in the summer of 1990 there was one last challenge: that semi-final, on Wednesday, 4 July at the Stadio delle Alpi in Turin. The last group of Englishmen to get out of the northern Italian city with their dignity intact was probably Charlie Croker’s men in The Italian Job, but here was Bobby Robson’s team, on the back of lucky but scintillating results, facing the mighty Kaiser, Franz Beckenbauer, and his imperious collection of blond, mullet-haired grafters. I could go on lengthily about that game, except that I won’t. If you missed Sunday’s streamed broadcast then I hope the BBC will dig it out again sometime, and you’ll be able to relive what felt like the first truly romantic football experience of my life. It had highs and lows, and some of the best England football I’d seen at that stage, Gazza in particular proving to be so inventive through the middle, until his rashness showed through and ‘Gazza’s Tears’ became as much an icon of Italia ’90 as Pavarotti’s aria. And the lows? England hitting the inside of the German upright in normal time and then again in the extended period after Lineker’s 80th minute strike had kept them in the game, only for the penalty shootout to end in disappointment for Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle (though lucrative commercials for Pizza Hut must have alleviated the pain for the England left back).

Sunday’s airing of the 1990 semi-final brought back the memory that, in some small way, football had been excused, especially in England. It was OK to talk about the sport again amongst friends and colleagues. England hadn’t just come close to their first final in a generation - indeed, closest to winning the World Cup on foreign soil than any England side before or since - they also played with an aplomb the national side’s critics had hitherto been bating them for. Some might argue that the euphoria of England hosting the Euros six years later - and suffering a similar fate to the Germans… - beats the Italian World Cup in 1990. I just see it as a turning point in football’s reputation, when the classical surroundings of stunning Italian cities, some broadly decent games sprinkled with era-defining moments, did much to restore football. You could even say that Italia ’90 recovered the sport from the neanderthal ugliness that had periodically impaired its profile in the '70s and '80s. It was fun to be transported back 30 years to that July evening. Strangely, it didn’t make me hanker for football to return yet in 2020. Football will come back, like everything else - going to the pub, shopping for clothes, going to the gym - when it’s the right time. Yes, some clubs will suffer. Many will even go out of business, like so many other commercial activities. But it will come back.

Classic rock über alles

Picture: Led Zeppelin/Dick Barnatt

I feel vindicated. The other night, before she went to bed, my girlfriend's 15-year-old daughter was listening to Led Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times, the opening track of their self-titled 1969 debut album. The next morning I woke to read that the music I grew up with, from the 1970s and 1980s, is finding new audiences along with it original listenership thanks to streaming services.

In its latest yearbook, the BPI, the British record industry association, has revealed what the nation was listening to in 2019 via streaming services, and it is reassuring - from this old head's perspective, at least - to see how pop and rock's annals from the last six decades figure in that consumption. With the purchase of physical formats continuing their long-term decline (despite sales of vinyl records - pre-lockdown - remaining robust), music streaming in the UK grew by 7.5% in 2019, according to the BPI, which also noted that there were 114 billion plays on streaming services. Of particular note is that the '70s and '80s accounted for a greater share of so-called "catalogue plays" in 2019 than anything else, with two acts more prominent than anyone else - Elton John and Queen. No great surprise, given the success of the biopics Rocket Man and Bohemian Rhapsody: both films provided gateways to the music of two of the decades' most prolific artists, with John in particular bringing attention to both his colourful life in the 1970s as well as the extraordinary run of albums he recorded, with Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across The Water, Honky Honky Château and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road amongst the 12 recorded between 1970 and 1979 alone.

David Hepworth's brilliant book 1971 - Never A Dull Moment pondered the rich output of that specific year (Led Zeppelin IV, Who’s Next, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, The Doors’ LA Woman, Carole King’s Tapestry, et al), but the BPI stats reveal that 1977 - the year of the Queen's silver jubilee - accounted for the most number of albums from the '70s streamed in 2019, with ELO’s Out Of The Blue (featuring the feelgood Mr Blue Sky), Fleetwood Mac’s perennial Rumours (The Chain was its most-streamed song), and The Bee Gees' Stayin’ Alive figuring heavily. As did Queen’s News Of The World, thanks to We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions.

Go back further, and the 1960s provided a steady appetite of pop, rock and soul music last year. Not surprisingly The Beatles figure prominently: the Fabs' catalogue was a relative latecomer to streaming, only first becoming available on the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Tidal and Amazon Prime Music at Christmas 2015, seen at the time as an important effort to maintain the band's legacy. Four years on, their latter output dominated streams of '60s material, with the 50th anniversary edition of Abbey Road prominent, along with David Bowie's Space Oddity, various Rolling Stones tracks, and a healthy slew of Motown material, including Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's Ain't No Mountain High Enough (the second most-streamed '60s track), the Jacksons' I Want You Back, My Girl by The Temptations and Ben E King's Stand By Me.

Further forward, the 1980s also featured significantly in the BPI's numbers, some 9.2% of all streamed in 2019, with Queen once again demonstrating - whether you like them or not - just how much they dominated British music for the better part of two decades, and up until Freddie Mercury's death in 1991. Another One Bites The Dust was the most-streamed song from 1980. Given that many a lockdown family Zoom get together will inevitably descend into violent disagreement over which era - and generation of music - was the best, the 1980s often miss out on a fair hearing, largely due to the association people make with their own memories of shoulder pads and puffball skirts on Top Of The Pops, and the ubiquitous clatter of gated reverb (and the ubiquitous clatter of Phil Collins...). Thus, Britons helped themselves to the likes of  A-Ha's Take On Me, Bryan Adams' Summer Of '69, Kenny Loggins' Footloose, Bruce Springsteen's Dancing In The Dark and Tina Turner's The Best looming large in the 2019 streaming landscape.

So what, then, of more recent output? In any given week the most popular songs are always dominated by new material, and last year songs released in 2019 accounted for over a fifth of streamed plays, with those from 2018 slightly behind. In fact the top two streamed tracks for 2019 were released the previous year - Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved and Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road (no, me neither), along with 2019 releases from Billy Eilish, Stormzy and Ed Sheeran. Contemporary events also had an impact on streaming choices, too. Along with the Elton John and Queen biopics, songs featuring in TV and film productions drew people to streaming tracks like Bruce Springsteen's Blinded By The Light and, randomly, Limahl’s Never Ending Story appearing in the Netflix supernatural drama Stranger Things.

Picture: Twitter/Glastonbury Festival

There was also a boost caused by last year's Glastonbury Festival, with The Cure being a notable beneficiary thanks to their headline set. Given that there won't be a Glasto this year - or, for the time being, any marquee music events anywhere - it'll be interesting to see what the 2020 figures reveal. That said, with so many of us currently in lockdown and potentially exhausting physical record collections, streaming might possibly be coming into its own. "The reasons certain songs resonate with us are many and varied, says Rob Crutchley, author of the BPI's What The UK Streamed In 2019 report. "They can lift our mood, reflect how we’re feeling at a certain time, or evoke a particular happy memory. Older songs can enjoy a renaissance at any time, maybe by being used in a film or TV show, being shared online via social media or by being discovered in a playlist. A much-loved artist going on tour can spike interest and there is a wealth of catalogue classics that are always in great demand at Christmas time – we’re streaming the hits of today in huge numbers but we’re also enjoying delving into our rich musical heritage."

The full What The UK Streamed In 2019 report can be read here.