End of the Q

On 8 September, 1986, I started my first proper, grown-up job after secondary school. It required moving from London to the quaint Shropshire town of Ludlow to join the staff of a soon-to-be-launched magazine, LM. Leaving home at 18, just as my school contemporaries were doing the same, but heading off to university instead, I became a staff writer on a publication aiming to tap into the so-called men’s lifestyle market, drawing on the apparent mid-80s young male obsession with music, fashion and culture.

The difference, however, between us and, say Face or i-D magazine - the-then big two - was that they were embedded in Soho, while we were trying to compete from a cattle market town in the middle of nowhere, backed by a publisher best known for computer games magazines for teenage boys. Worse was to come, however. A month after I arrived in Ludlow, EMAP - the stable responsible for the mighty Smash Hits - launched Q, the self-styled ‘Modern guide to music and more’. Founded by Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, who’d been responsible for turning ‘ver Hits’ and Just Seventeen into two of the best-selling magazines on Planet Earth (I’m not kidding - at one point Smash Hits was shipping more than four million copies a fortnight), Q instantly established itself as the magazine to aspire to.

For a start, it had advertising. Major advertising. The sort of advertising that publishers courted more than any other - lucrative, big-spending brands like Coca-Cola and TDK (this still being the nascent years of the Compact Disc). Secondly, Ellen and Hepworth - by now, stalwarts of British music journalism (they were the 'muso' Whistle Test presenters who anchored Bob Geldof’s sweary bit during Live Aid) - had credibility in the music industry. Not that my magazine didn’t: it had drawn writers from the pages of Melody Maker, She and My Guy, plus this former Boots the Chemist part-time shelf-filler and school magazine writer (i.e. 'inexpensive') and was aiming itself at a 17-plus demographic. We had plenty of music, from the Psychedelic Furs and Frankie Goes To Hollywood to Level 42 (my first big-name, Top 40 interview, y’all), but steered consciously into non-music topics, such as an entire issue focused on The Big Scary Thing of its day, HIV/AIDS.

Q, on the other hand, had a different brief. For a start, it was an out-and-out music magazine aimed at the older consumer (CD-buying types in - gasp! - their 30s who, yes, may have been into Dire Straits, but because of the CD, were repurchasing their record collections to experience them with pristine digital sound™). For many of Q's readers, it was about reconnecting with the artists of their teenage years. Hence Q’s first issue featuring Paul McCartney on its cover and an interview with Bob Dylan, with Rod Stewart, Paul Simon, Elton John and Genesis following on the fronts of the next two issues. We might look back upon this now as the emergence of Dad Rock, but as Hepworth himself pointed out in a recent eulogy in the New Statesman to the child he co-parented, Q was as much a reflection of the growing acceptance that the classic rock era was, in fact OK. Not that Q - which publishes its final edition today - was ever going to be a shrine to the hoary and the old. Over 414 issues and 34 years, it evolved into something more than a platform for wistful nostalgia, pushing into a more eclectic reflection of contemporary music, whatever labels that might draw.

Wrapped up in our own launch over at LM, we were, perhaps, somewhat market-ignorant as to what was going on in the very music press we’d all grown up on. Melody Maker, the NME et al had become, at times, a little outré for their own good, like bolshy students from ultra-middle class backgrounds just trying to be edgy. Q did it differently. If it interviewed Mick Jagger - an achievement in itself - it would do so with both reverence but also the gentle, impish fun Ellen and Hepworth had honed at Smash Hits. The writers they drew on - also EMAP regulars - bought into the philosophy. One of the magazine’s greatest features became the monthly Who The Hell Does XXX Think He/She Is? interview written by the genius that was Tom Hibbert. With each issue he’d meet - and ever-so gently rib - contemporary cultural figures of the '80s and early '90s such as Jeffrey Archer, Samantha Fox, Jeremy Beadle or Kate Bush (whom, along with Ringo Starr and Boy George wouldn’t take too fondly to Hibbert’s profiling). He even got Ronnie Biggs and Jimmy Savile, the latter clearly before the world knew better.

Ultimately, though, Q readers wanted to read about music. They were musically literate and, unlike the readership of Q’s junior sibling/forebear Smash Hits, looking for more than what colour a pop star’s socks were (though don’t mock it - such ephemera, alongside song lyrics, was absolutely core to the Hits’ phenomenal success). The core Q audience wanted to read about new albums from The Who or Ray Davies as much as hear them wax on about Won’t Get Fooled Again or Waterloo Sunset. They wanted to read about Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, but also about Hüsker Dü and the Beastie Boys. Pink Floyd going out on tour again mattered as much to them as some whipper-snappers from Ireland coming along with an album called The Joshua Tree. Yeah, whatever did happen to U2?

Humour was one of the key ingredients Ellen and Hepworth imported from Smash Hits. As someone who has, in recent years, spent an inordinate amount of time in their company at recordings of their Word In Your Ear podcast (itself salvaged from the now-defunct magazine The Word), I know what gentle fun they are responsible for. Pop music and pop culture in general is, to them, a thing of bemusement more than intense Guardian-style navel gazing. Thus, the Hits' comedy tagging that bestowed David Bowie with ‘The Dame’ moniker and McCartney as ‘Mr Fab Macca Whacky Thumbs Aloft’ found its way into Q. Such japery very often served to let the air out of the pomposity that rock music often attaches itself to. In his New Statesman piece, Hepworth recalled the unbridled joy at some of Q’s caption writing: “The picture of Led Zeppelin in full flight with Robert Plant howling into the microphone was headlined ‘The Hoarse Foreman Of The Apocalypse’. Of course it was. The one celebrating the unlikely pairing of Toyah [Wilcox] and Robert Fripp, ‘Mr Chalk Loves Mrs Cheese’. Couldn't be anything else.” Plant, for one, would have liked that. The Fripp/Wilcox view possibly less so.

The reason that Q always did well, though, was that it hired the very best music writers. As an aspiring schoolboy hack in the early 1980s, I looked up to the clique of music journalists whose bylines appeared consistently in the NME, Melody Maker or Sounds. Many found their way into Q, like Danny Kelly (now a colossus of sports radio, but editor of the NME when it ran my first ever live review). Later on, Q added extraordinarily entertaining writers like Andrew Collins and Stewart Maconie. Their appointment coincided with that glorious Britpop period, when it became OK to like guitar music again, as Oasis, Blur, Pulp and the like strode the world with a British swagger not seen in a generation. It would, though, still take a while before Q stalwarts like Eric Clapton, Sting, Springsteen and The Beatles disappeared from its covers to accommodate the new breed: The Stone Roses appeared on the front of Q46 in July 1990 (before subsequent editions falling back to the Stones, the Floyd and McCartney), with Suede the next cover stars of their time in February 1993. Q, though, has never since tried to be hipper than you, daddio. In latter years it has found space for Lady Gaga, Ed Sheehan and Jake Bugg, as much as maintaining a healthy recurrence of the Wellers and Gallaghers of this world. And while, under more recent editorship, it has sought to become less dependent on the tried and tested, and even delved into murkier waters than Q readers of my vintage might have found comfortable, it has never tried to be pretentious. As a good music magazine should be, it has always presented new acts and old equally as points of genuine editorial interest.

Strangely, though, it hasn’t been changing musical tastes and listening habits that has done for Q: it’s been - like half the economy - COVID-19. “The pandemic did for us and there was nothing more to it than that,” wrote Ted Kessler, the magazine’s final editor. German conglomerate Bauer, its latest owner, had evidently tried to sell the title, but in these times of waining interest in print media overall, Q has, from today’s final edition, gone the way of so many others. The long-term decline of print journalism is one thing, but so, too, is the future of music journalism. British music journalism came of age in the 1970s, when the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and others moved the rock era on, embraced punk and New Wave, and then espoused the varieties of pop in the '80s. Sure, it became politicised by the Thatcher era, but then pop became politicised in the Cool Britannia era when Tony Blair hosted Noel G at No.10. Politics was, however, never core to the music press, even when movements like Red Wedge were trying to engage a disaffected youth. The fact remains that the youth today have found other things to obsess over, and it's not quite what direction the 1975 will take with their next album.

Gratuitous plug for a mate of mine who finally made it into Q in 2018

The demise of Q is, then, also a reflection of the demise of music journalism as a must-have in people’s lives. This is where the relevance of a monthly print magazine like Q is questioned. Even though it has, for some time, been readily available as an iPad edition, digital consumption is dropping off. Sadly, the traditions of print journalism - certainly the traditions that inspired me to sit down at a typewriter at the age of 15 - are ebbing away. The attrition is slow, but it is there.

Q, however, appears to have fallen victim to the accountants’ scourge, as publishers continue to find ways to offload venerable, traditional properties that might still have an audience, but not the kind of paying audience they once had (Q sold more than 200,000 copies a month at its peak, it’s circulation in more recent times just above 40,000). "Frankly, [Q] was never really built for the tappety-tappety world of digital," wrote Hepworth in his New Statesman piece. "When somebody put on a record by Aphex Twin, chief proof reader and leading Dylan scholar John Bauldie would look over his glasses and shout, ‘Will somebody get that fax?’ in gleeful emulation of a disapproving adult. That was the magazine’s secret sauce. Nobody was trying to be hipper than thou or younger than they were, and nobody was trying to pretend they liked things that they didn’t." And that was, indeed its charm. It was written for me by people like me. They knew what they liked, but weren’t afraid of reading about something they didn’t know they would like.

It’s here I should mention the reviews section of Q. As entertaining as the features always were, the reviews - actually, the thing that got me interested in music journalism as a career in the first place - were always well considered, evenly scored and mostly respectful. A ’three’, while clearly not a ‘five’, was still not a bad result. But while that remained Q’s constant, over 414 editions, other tides were shifting. The bottom line, then, is that its original brief could never be adapted to changing tastes.

Even after the McCartneys and Claptons had been swapped for the U2s and the Radioheads, and then the latter for increasingly more contemporary names, contemporary sources of information about music had changed, too. The sad aspect of this is that under its last editor, Ted Kessler, Q had moved so far away from its ‘old fart’ origins, that it was providing - for those who were interested - a still indispensable digest of what was on-the-money-sharp in music land. This wasn’t what Q was launched for, but it had evolved over 34 years into something that still represented the very best of music journalism. To quote Joni Mitchell - once as core Q demographic-interest as you could find - “Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you've got ’til it's gone.”

Keeping it real: Chelsea's season in review

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

If you wanted an encapsulation of Chelsea’s season, rewatch last Wednesday’s 5-3 defeat at Anfield. Because there, in 90 blood pressure-baiting minutes, we saw the best of Frank Lampard’s side and easily its worst. Simply stated, this is a team blessed with attacking potential - and that will only get better with the incoming summer signings - but, to be fair, lacking some defensive integrity. The stats don't lie: Chelsea have ended the season in fourth place - it could have been third - but have conceded more goals than any other team in the top half of the Premier League.

One nagging concern about Lampard's tenure at Derby County last season was the defensive side of his and assistant head coach Jody Morris's game, and you could easily surmise that to be a blind spot that followed the duo "home" to Chelsea. The Liverpool game certainly placed it into sharp perspective, conceding five goals - some relatively cheaply - while scoring three through decent opportunities (and from those contracted to do so: Giroud, Abraham and Pulisic). From a neutral's point of view, a 5-3 encounter between the champions-elect and a top-four team, at the arse-end of this of all seasons, must have been fun to watch, especially with the irritating pyrotechnics erupting from addresses in the L4 postal area. But if Lampard was making mental notes, as he agitatedly prowled the technical area, he should have been only underlining pre-existing observations of issues with his side that have been patently clear all season long. Namely, the defence. Or, more fairly, 'defence', without the definite article.

Keita's stunning opener for Liverpool was the result of a wayward half-clearance by Willian inside his own half, in a position that should have been occupied by a midfielder or wingback, or N'Golo Kante, had he been fit. Avoidable, then. Liverpool's second came about after Mateo Kovicic was unfairly judged to have fouled Mane, allowing Alexander-Arnold to curl in one of his set piece specials from the free kick. Even before he'd taken his run up, Chelsea's Kepa Arrizabalaga was leaving oceans of space to his left on the goal line, so much space, the crew of the International Space Station could have looked out of a porthole and concluded: "He's going to pop that one in, top-right corner". Which he did. Avoidable. Five minutes later, another set-piece (an Alexander-Arnold corner), Chelsea fail to clear and Wijnaldum has the ball in the roof of the net from 12 yards. Avoidable.

None of this ignores the quality Liverpool displayed - and have displayed all season long - as they marched towards their first ever Premier League trophy (as opposed to the five for Chelsea...). Lampard, and his underlings and club hierarchy, would do well to look at how Jurgen Klopp's side have done it. If they have any hope of matching the Merseysiders next season, the prescription during what little close season exists before everything kicks off again on 12 September needs to be rich. Kepa Arrizabalaga, despite being the world's most expensive goalkeeper, has become increasingly unfit for purpose. His rooted-to-the-line stance and absence of stature invited Alexander-Arnold to give it a go last Wednesday night, and paid the price. But it would be wrong to pin the blame solely on the Spaniard with the job-descriptive first name. Chelsea need greater imperiousness at the back.

Various defensive combinations have been tried throughout the season but none have proven definitive. Antonio Rüdiger and Kurt Zouma may have played themselves into contention as the central defensive pairing, but neither have always given the confidence that they have anything like the symbiotic relationship once seen in blue with John Terry and Ricardo Carvalho, or even Terry and Gary Cahill. Captain César Azpilicueta is still a decent defender, and the fact he's been played out left as well as right shows just what is missing out left. Marcos Alonso is somewhat lacking in both pace or awareness in the wingback role, and Emerson Palmieri doesn't provide anywhere near the competition for that place he should do. Out right, Chelsea have options, including the promising Reece James, but even he's learning, and for all his genuine muscular ability, can sometimes have lapses of concentration. In front of the backline, Lampard has been forced to play Jorginho instead of the injured Kante in the closing stages of the season, but even the Brazilian-born Italian blows hot and cold as to his effectiveness.

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

There’s no doubt that Lampard is building something at Chelsea. He is, after all, still only in his first season as head coach at the club and only in his second in management, altogether. He also came into the season with one of the club's hands tied behind its back, as the UEFA ban forced Lampard into fielding talented, home-grown youngsters. The loss of Eden Hazard didn't help, either. However, football is unforgiving, and Roman Abramovich even less so. The oligarch will, of course, be somewhat more sympathetic towards Lampard, not least of which because he saw the former Chelsea No.8 lift trophy after trophy during the better part of his 12 seasons as a player. There will, too, be some leniency over the fact that Lampard hasn’t, yet, been able to fully stamp his mark on the club. Expectation, then, will be high on how he integrates the inbound Hakim Ziyech and Timo Werner and, potentially, nabs Leverkusen’s Kai Havertz, who is apparently keen to move. Attacking creativity is already not in short supply - Christian Pulicic has given some glimpses of late as to what he can do, even with the heavy load of Hazard’s shadow hanging over him. Clearly, a refresh in the forward mix can only be a good thing, but realistically, that’s not where the money needs to be spent. It would be nice to think that Marina Granovskaia, keeper of the Roman chequebook, knows this too. If Havertz is the missing piece of the creative puzzle, wholesale changes at the back are needed.

I wouldn’t normally expound much time on anything Jamie Carragher has to say about Chelsea (let’s just say, there’s been form between us over the years), but his assessment after the Liverpool encounter was spot on: "Chelsea won’t go any further unless they change their goalkeeper,” he told Sky Sports, adding: “You see a lot of centre halves at Chelsea without seeing one really outstanding one, those are the areas that if they are going to challenge Liverpool and Man City they’ll have to rectify in the summer. They are the worst team in the league defending corners. This is a massive problem for Chelsea. Yes Werner is coming in and [Ziyech], there is talk of Havertz as well. It sounds great and it gets supporters excited but it means nothing if you don’t sort out that back three and certainly that goalkeeper."

No surprise, then, that Lampard resigned Arrizabalaga against Wolves in their Premier League season finale. Pundit and fan concerns about the keeper's justification have been compounded this season. Against Wolves, the dependable Willy Caballero did everything he was called upon to do, but at 38, the Argentine can't be considered the long-term solution for the goalkeeping position. Kepa's not a bad keeper, but his discipline and decision making let him down too often.

All that’s left of the season, then, is the FA Cup Final on Saturday against Arsenal - another storied fixture between the clubs, though neither are quite at the level of previous encounters between them. And then, there’s the somewhat weird notion of a Champions League Final 16 meeting on 8 August with the mighty Bayern Munich, something of a dead rubber, given that Chelsea head to Bavaria 3-0 down on aggregate. Chelsea have had plenty of these fixtures in recent years - famously winning the Champions League itself in 2012 at the Allianz Arena by beating the host home side. This time around, it’s a different encounter, especially given that this early in August would see both sides in the midst of pre-season friendlies. The first leg at Stamford Bridge, however, proved an education for Lampard, highlighting the gap between his side of mostly youngsters and a Munich consisting of players in their prime and at their prime. Chelsea could still pull off a shock, as they did in 2012, but overturning a 3-0 deficit against the Germans would be something of an unlikely outcome, even in this somewhat unlikely term.

In some ways, Lampard couldn’t have enjoyed an easier nursery slope on which to try out his management skills, an even more benevolent situation given how many of his predecessors have not been afforded such freedom. The 2020-21 season will be a whole different affair, and the likeable 42-year-old may face more challenging scrutiny. But, put into perspective, an FA Cup Final, a last-16 place in the Champions League, and fourth place in the Premier League is, by anyone’s standards, not bad. The thing is, Chelsea managers are rarely held up to “anyone’s standards”.

Hiss on the tape

As someone who has somewhat vigorously reinvested in the vinyl revival, I'm probably not one to pontificate over niche fads that bring back cherished items from our past, like Spangles, Marathon bars and the Three-Day Week. But the one that continues to baffle me is the habit of apparently switched-on music acts releasing their albums on cassette.

Last year, on the 40th anniversary of the Sony Walkman, I raised the question of who was actually buying these tapes (Going walkabout: 40 years of the Walkman), with Billie Eilish selling 4,000 copies of her debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in the format, and the The 1975's A Brief Enquiry Into Online Relationships becoming 2018’s cassette best-seller, both suggesting, bizarrely, that tapes had a teenage demographic. Quite what such youths were playing these tapes on remains a mystery, but then according to the BPI, the body representing the UK’s record labels, a fifth of people who buy vinyl records don’t have anything to play them on. 

Regardless of such practicalities, new figures from the Official Charts Company have revealed that 65,000 cassette albums were bought in the UK in the first six months of this year - twice as many as in the same period last year - and that by the end of 2020, more than 100,000 copies will have been sold. This remains a fraction of the total number of albums sold via all formats, but still. Growth in cassettes is faster than any other category.

So, why? "Younger consumers are buying into their collectible appeal — as they have done with vinyl," the BPI's Gennaro Castaldo explained to The Times yesterday. "They are also drawn to the retro Eighties appeal, which artists such as Dua Lipa, the 1975 and the Weeknd have recently spoken about as an influence on their music."  Artists marketing limited edition cassette releases is a cute measure, given that the age group most likely to buy them are also buying quirky retro things like skateboards and Converse All Stars. Perhaps we have Guardians Of The Galaxy to blame, after Chris Pratt's character played a mixtape throughout the film, a feature cleverly reflected in the movie's marketing (which included releasing the soundtrack on tape). It may have started a trend.

Old heads like me, however, have a different view. For a start, they were cheaper than vinyl albums. Secondly, a cassette was never more than a carrier, and not a particularly good one at that, especially when it got trapped in the player's mechanism. A feature of hedges and grass verges since the cassette died out is that they are no longer strewn with reels of magnetic tape ejected from car windows in frustration (you could also note that you don't see discarded porn magazines any more, thanks to the Internet, but I digress). Indeed, all the cassette had going for it was its size, and even then, going on holiday meant taking with you a bulky plastic carrying case stuffed with your tape collection (both those you’d bought from Our Price and…ahem…those containing albums you’d recorded off your brother's collection or Radio 1).

The cassette was purely about cheap convenience. Even with the addition of "Dobly" noise reduction on both the tapes and the players, they were never about hifi enjoyment. The vinyl revival, on the other hand, has been mostly about the fetishism of "real" audio quality, and that view will get defended - with some justification - by audiophiles until the cows come home. Even if such benefits are marginal, there is something about the entire vinyl experience - from eyes to ears - that the cassette can and will never replicate. And, yes, the aesthetic appeal is a part of it. From Unknown Pleasures to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, there is no shortage of 12x12-inch cardboard art with infinite Instagram appeal. I even recently bought a dedicated rack bearing the words “Now Playing” purely for the pose benefit. Cassettes, though, hold no such value and the 10cm-by-7cm box offers nothing to display even the most notable imagery, leaving me still bewildered by what kitsch attraction they hold.

And, yet, the surge in demand - fuelled largely by the limited edition releases - has even led to US and European factories reopening manufacturing lines for high-grade ferric oxide, a key ingredient in magnetic tape, a similar story to the reopening of vinyl pressing plants. If this is, then, being driven by a generation of teenagers more aware of the environment than any that has come before, it seems counter-intuitive that they should be buying a combination of plastic and chemicals purely to put on display (again, assuming that none of them own any kind of cassette player).

However, while the story about cassettes coming back provides a platform for venerable geezers like me (who, incidentally, spent 17 years of his career shilling shiny new digital formats for Philips) to harrumph about youngsters and their bizarre trends, the cassette and even my beloved vinyl are spots in the ocean compared with streamed music. Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved, 2019’s biggest selling hit, has been streamed 228 million times. The cassette has a long way to go, and like most fads, will be superseded by something else quite quickly.

End of the runway for the ‘Queen of the Skies’

Picture: British Airways

I’ve blogged before about the majestic Boeing 747 and how, after five decades in the air, its future was limited. Today, the era of commercial aviation that the original “jumbo jet” defined will come to an end when the very last 747 rolls of the Boeing production line at its vast plant at Everett in Washington State in the US.

The plane, a cargo version built for Atlas Air, will be the 1,574th production model built by Boeing since the programme began in 1968, the result of Pan American founder Juan Trippe challenging then-Boeing president William Allen to build a plane even bigger than the company’s 707 model, which was at the time regarded as the aircraft that revolutionised long-distance air travel. The 747, however, evolved things even further, filling an aeroplane with up to 400 seats and the ability to cover vast distances relatively quickly with powerful engines. Significantly, it enabled affordable intercontinental travel: I’m sure most Brits’ experience of places like Florida and New York were the result of flying there in a 747. I know all my visits to America were via the beautiful flying ocean liner.

Three years ago, as Covid started to wreak havoc, British Airways announced the immediate retirement of its 31 747s. The airline had, then, by far the largest fleet of the type still flying. However, even before the pandemic grounded airlines, the aircraft that democratised air travel had started to become an anachronism as more fuel efficient planes like the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 DreamLiner began replacing such an ageing gas-guzzler as the 747.

BA’s decision to end use of the 747 was, romanticism aside, a rational one. It was planning to retire the 747 in 2024 in any case - 25 years after its first -400 models were introduced - and had remained remarkably loyal to the type. US carriers United Airlines and Delta ended their 747 operations in 2017, while Virgin Atlantic (with whom I took my first US trip, in 1992) retired their 747s in 2020. Lufthansa, one of the few airlines to buy the last 747 type, the -8, are planning the retirement of their fleet, as has KLM.

In those mad days of yore when I used to get on a plane as often as some board a bus, no journey would fill me with the same excitement as one in which I flew in a Boeing 747. When I left San Francisco to move back to Amsterdam in 2003, I got upgraded to a business class seat for the flight with the now defunct Northwest Airlines, who put a 747 on the route. That meant sitting in the upper deck cabin, with a window seat looking out on the Golden Gate Bridge as we soared out of SFO. I’m not too ashamed to admit that I shed a tear - but not because I was leaving California, just the shear romance of it all. I've been lucky enough to get seats on that upper deck on a number of occasions, and it never fails to enamour, not the least, the novelty of having side storage bins that follow the contours of the Jumbo’s haughty prow.

Picture: British Airways

Even ‘downstairs’, the 747 experience just seemed like no other. Despite its enormous size, the 747 was a very quick plane. While it could never compete with Concorde for speed across the Atlantic, seven hours in the air wasn't a particular hardship to get to New York (even less on the way back to London with a decent following wind). What let BA’s fleet down towards the end was the ageing interior of their 747s, which often lacked the basic connectivity that more modern planes offer as standard. But these were, ultimately, minor quibbles. On journeys to and from San Jose in a previous job, the sensible approach would have been to take BA’s direct flight from Heathrow in a comfy 787, but with the 747 still on the San Francisco route, I’d opt for the love of Boeing’s jumbo, even though there’d be an arduous hour’s drive down to Silicon Valley on landing.

The 747’s decline is sad but it had, to some extent, outlasted its relevance. It will, though, continue in a long-running build for the US Air Force of two specially adapted jets to be used for the President (as ‘Air Force One’), along with cargo versions like Atlas Air’s new addition, a popular option for freight carriers due to the plane’s vast interior. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is also using one of his airline’s old 747s, Cosmic Girl,  for its nascent satellite launch venture. 

Indeed, the idea of large jets is not entirely over, either. Although the double-deck Airbus A380 has now stopped production, it is likely to remain in use for the foreseeable future, despite being, like the 747, four-engined. Emirates bought 118 of the type to ship large numbers of passengers to and from its Dubai hub. British Airways has even brought its own A380s out mothballs, having put them into storage during the pandemic. While not as romantically appreciated as the 747, passengers love the A380 for its comfort and, for such a lumbering giant, efficiency in flying point-to-point. 

It is, though, clear that despite the A380 enduring, twin-engined jets like the A350 and Boeing’s 777 and 787 models do the job, with less passengers, and more efficiently, from a carbon footprint point of view. The days of flying in a plane with an upper deck, and more than its sense of aviation decadence are, without doubt coming to an end.

Picture: British Airways

Let's be careful out there

It was the oddest experience. Saturday morning at a shopping centre, surely one of the most normal things before lockdown. And, yet, here I was, feeling like I was dodging rounds in Sniper Alley. We'd gone to Westfield White City to get a broken mobile phone screen fixed - as strong a candidate for the description "essential items, only" as ever there was one. And while there is a growing list of essentials to buy (not least of which being new shirts to replace those rendered as kaftans due to losing almost a stone-and-a-half in lockdown), this was no more than a lightning raid - the only branch of iSmash in the south-western hemisphere of London that could do the job urgently.

Getting there, getting in and finding the shop was the easy bit: it was what happened between handing over the phone and collecting it and its new screen that proved the tricky part. Because it meant traversing the shopping centre's floors in search of the only other immediate urgency, coffee. In turn, that then meant negotiating other people. I was wearing a mask but it was astonishing as to how many others weren't. In fact, I estimated that for every ten people in that mall yesterday, only one was wearing a face covering. Coupled to that, a patent lack of understanding of what social distancing means, not to mention the awkwardness of not following the floor markings clearly indicating direction of travel, and you had the onset of anxiety like no other.

Political zeal to get Britain shopping again is clearly going to require time and patience. The mask-wearing thing, in particular, doesn't help. Some shop staff wore masks, some not. In the one cafe at Westfield where you could sit and have a coffee, only some of the serving staff had any kind of PPE at all. And while, in the main, the admirable lengths of organisation that the centre and its tenants had gone to demarcate distancing, from floor markings to roped-off queuing systems, people still didn't know what to do, and I couldn't wait to get out of there. 

Almost a month ago to the day I posted on this channel about the new reality of emerging from lockdown. That was almost an additional 5,000 COVID-19 deaths ago. Five weeks on, and restrictions have been eased even further, which seems to have become a licence for everyone to forget why it was we went into lockdown in the first place. Even our local high street, which early on had been a noticeable paragon of mask-wearing virtue, has started to lose its discipline. It's almost as if Boris has actually said: "get out there and spend your money as you used to do", rather than "go out if you have to, and remember there is a killer virus - possibly airborne - with no cure or vaccine as of yet".

This week the prime minister is expected to make the wearing of face masks compulsory in shops amid the ridiculously late realisation that they do, actually, offer some benefit to slowing the spread of COVID-19. Even Boris has admitted that views have changed on wearing them, saying yesterday that: "The balance of scientific opinion seems to have shifted more in favour of them than it was and we’re very keen to follow that." The caveat, here, that they offer little benefit out doors, makes sense, but if we're to get back into shops again, it's clearly the way to go. Scotland even made wearing masks in shops compulsory as of yesterday. And, yet, we Brits seem to have a problem with wearing them: the Office for National Statistics has found that just 52% of adults have worn a mask, an increase, granted, but we're still well behind France and Italy and, of course Asian countries where mask wearing is simply a way of life. Even in the United States, where infections are now at the ridiculous stage, two thirds of people there have worn masks. Including, reluctantly, the president.

The UK's leading scientific institute, The Royal Society, takes the view that wearing a face mask should be strictly observed, regarding non-compliance as criminally anti-social as drink-driving. And yet the practice doesn't even earn universal support within Johnson's own cabinet. "I don't think mandatory, no," Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove said this morning on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show. It was, he said "basic good manners, courtesy, consideration" to wear a face covering in indoor environments and when mixing with the public, but remained hawkish on imposing their use. "It's always better to trust people’s common sense, to give them a clear sense of what is wise and I think that individuals and businesses are responding well to that lead.". Maybe people's common sense wasn't so well trusted on Bournemouth Beach the other week. And on my anecdotal evidence yesterday, it's still not to be trusted while out at the shops. 

"Face masks are appropriate in some settings and not in others," Gove said this morning. "Wearing a face mask when you are out and about outdoors is significantly less necessary than when you are indoors". Fair point, but if Britain's retail economy is going to return to anything like normality, everyone is going to have to play their part, so that the medically vulnerable - me, for example - can also get out there and do their bit. Until then, I'm going to remain mostly indoors, and if I do venture out, I'm going to happily resemble the fully-bandaged incarnation of The Invisible Man.

Doves on day release

Picture: Ceri Levi

A flurry of gigs last year - including one at the Royal Albert Hall in April that I was at - gave hope of new material from the mighty Doves, after a 11-year break since their 2009 album Kingdom Of Rust. During that absence, brothers Andy and Jez Williams formed Black Rivers, while bassist and singer Jimi Goodwin released a solo album. But last year's live reformation seemed to galvanise the Oldham trio into getting back together on record, and thus it seemed to be the case in January when a tweet from a studio mixing desk appeared to confirm that new material would be in the offing.

Last month saw the release of the single Carousels, serving a taste of today's announcement of a new album, The Universal Want, to be released on 11 September, which will include the sprightly second single, Prisoners, issued today. "Everything on the album is an echo," Williams, J. said today. "It’s an echo of what we were going through at the time. Getting back together, the Royal Albert Hall and everything else."

Elbow's Guy Garvey - who, along with Doves and I Am Kloot - forms part of a north-west English clique responsible for some of the richest indie rock of the last decade or so - recently gave Q an insight into what he'd heard coming out of the Doves studio: "You don't hear records like they're about to make very often any more," he said, making clear he'd been sworn to secrecy. "The necessary economy of making music means it can be sparse and there's fewer signals per tune and that forced minimalism is turning out some amazing stuff," adding, "but sometimes you want something with the kitchen sink being swung around the head. It's gonna be massive."

Picture: Doves/Jon Shard

Back in June, when the first single was released, Goodwin told the NME of the new direction: "We’re still really excited about trying stuff that we’ve never done and going to places that we as a band have never been to." Carousels, he said, was "a good harbinger of the album and just a great mission statement. Without having any agenda or a backstory as to what the record is, it just shows off our love of sonic weirdness, atmosphere and energy. We unanimously knew that this would be great as the first thing that people hear of us coming out of the gate after all this time. It’s a mission statement."

As for returning after such a long break, Goodwin added: "We find ourselves in the middle of such strange world events. It’s still exciting to be releasing music, because I’m dead proud of what we’ve managed to pull together after 11 years." Speaking about the new album, Goodwin said: "I just know that we’ve made a really good Doves record that represents where we are and where we’ve been for the past 11 years. It’s probably the most organically-made Doves record," adding that it came out of the trio chatting via e-mail. "I was meant to be doing my next solo record and they were supposed to be doing a new Black Rivers album. We started pooling all our material and the material that we couldn’t work into shape on the last record Kingdom Of Rust."

As for the hiatus, Goodwin told the NME: "Time really does fly and I can’t believe it’s been 11 years. We’re friends at the end of the day, and we just clicked back into place like it was yesterday. It’s nice to have had that space between the records. It was starting to feel like punching the clock a little bit before we took a break."

The Universal Want tracklisting:
Carousels
I Will Not Hide
Broken Eyes
For Tomorrow
Cathedrals Of The Mind
Prisoners
Cycle Of Hurt
Mother Silver Lake
Universal Want
Forest House

It's easy to criticise when you’re standing outside the stable door

Picture: Sky News

A few weeks ago I reflected on the decimation that has taken place in care homes during the pandemic (A duty of care), framed by the fact that, had my father lived beyond his actual death from Alzheimer’s last August, the chances of him surviving COVID-19 as it swept through the care sector, would have been extremely low. Today, on what would have been my dad's 91st birthday, the subject has been yanked back into public consciousness by Boris Johnson's remarks yesterday in Yorkshire that "too many care homes didn't really follow the procedures in the way that they could have" to counter the virus.

The jury is still out as to whether Boris was simply making an industrial gaffe (he was responding to the head of NHS England's call for better funding for the care sector), or there is something more nefarious behind the line he put forward. Many suspect a combination of the two. Either way, the care sector has born a substantial proportion of the coronavirus attrition in the UK, with at least 20,000 deaths recorded in England and Wales alone. The care sector has been understandably irked by the prime minister's comments. The National Care Forum's Vic Rayner told Newsnight that care homes had followed the government's guidance "to the letter", but added that it had come "in stops and starts", and with a lot of confusing, complicated additions to deal with. Others suggest that Johnson is being disingenuous: Mark Adams of the charity Community Integrated Care told Radio 4's Today that if this was genuinely Boris's view - implying that he was regurgitating a fed line - that things were "almost entering a Kafkaesque alternative reality where the government sets the rules, [care homes] follow them, they don't like the results, they then deny setting the rules and blame the people that were trying to do their best."

It's hard not to think that Johnson is setting the care sector up to take the fall for failings elsewhere in the government response to the pandemic. There is certainly evidence of a confusing communications chain: NHS guidance in mid-March said that COVID-19 patients should not be occupying NHS beds "unless [clinically] required to be in hospital". Arguably sensible at a time when the message was primarily about saving the NHS. On 2 April, however, rules on discharging patients to care homes were revised, stating that 'negative' tests for the virus weren't needed prior to transfers out of hospitals. Even then, the COVID-positive could, according to the guidance, end up in care homes as long as preventative measures like PPE and self-isolation were in use. That, then changed two weeks later when the government brought in mandatory testing for all patients leaving hospitals. NHS hospitals have denied that there was a system which farmed positive patients out to the care sector.

Unsurprisingly, Downing Street has defended the prime minister's comments, with a spokesperson saying that Boris had been simply pointing out that "nobody knew what the correct procedures were" because numbers of those with symptoms were then unknown. Johnson's own spokesman told lobby reporters this morning that the PM thought care homes had "done a brilliant job under very difficult circumstances" during the pandemic, with health secretary Matt Hancock telling the House of Commons, during an urgent question: "The PM was explaining that because asymptomatic transmission was not known about, the correct procedures were therefore not known”. He added that the government had been been "constantly learning" about the virus, and continuously improving procedures. That's as maybe, but the communities minister Lord Greenhalgh also told the Lords that the guidance given to care homes early on was "not as clear as it could have been". A refreshing piece of honesty.

Even if Boris is harbouring an ulterior motive for his comments, Greenhalgh's admission is one of the rare examples of the government being straight with the public during this crisis. From Hancock's debacle with testing targets early on (which were miraculously met on deadline day only to fall back the day after...) to the continuing disaster of the track-and-trace app, things have been far from perfect. But, then, nothing ever is, especially when entering the unknown of a new viral pandemic. In war, not every bombing mission or secret weapon works first time, or even at all. Just own up. People respond better to honesty than what clearly looks, sounds and feels like spin or obfuscation. More than 20,000 families have lost loved ones who were supposedly seeing out their final years in the comfort, safety and relative dignity of a care home, not to mention care home workers who have also died. It's insulting to their memories to simply say that homes didn't follow advice, when the testing procedure was all over the place and other measures, like providing PPE in adequate quantities, simply weren't there, or with care homes a second priority to hospitals.

The outcry over Boris's remarks is understandable. More critically, if it is a smokescreen for the examination of what happened in the first phase of COVID-19 wreaking havoc on these shores, the blame game would do well to move on so that the second wave, when it inevitably comes, can be addressed with the lessons learned.

A great day for freedom...?

Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom. 
Not from tyranny, oppression or persecution, but from annihilation. 

We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: 

We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! 
For today, we celebrate our Independence Day!

So spoke President Thomas Whitmore, prior to dispatching American fighter jets in the film Independence Day to save the world from alien invasion. The irony, obviously, is that yesterday was supposedly our Independence Day. We could queue for the first professional haircut in almost four months, or for those absolutely desperate, get a pint in a pub at 6am. Freedom for me was the strange sensation of sitting in a local cafe, ordering a coffee and lunch. Something we would have not given a second thought to before the lockdown, but now it felt like fresh air entering a stuffy room.

Except it wasn't. Even then, even feeling good about putting coins in a local independent business's coffers, I couldn't help feel anxious of other people, people from outside our bubble, people now less than two metres away after months of crossing roads just to avoid the risk of someone passing on the disease. Queuing for my haircut at 9am was civilised, if uniquely British, due to a convoluted 'foldback' system to avoid the queue extending beyond the width of the barber shop's frontage. It meant that, on arrival in what you thought was the back of the queue, you were swiftly advised by mildly indignant Billy Bleach types that "the queue starts there, mate". Cue some British eye rolling and knowing grins.

So, now, we can go to the theatre, the cinema, a library, a museum, theme parks and zoos. We can gorge ourselves in restaurants and get leathered in pubs, albeit at tables separated by distance and a sheet of perspex. But we still can't work off the lockdown kilos at an indoor gym or in the council swimming pool. For those who require a pedicure, nail bars remain shut while hairdressers have flung their doors open. Grandparents can once more see their grandchildren, but there's no hugging allowed, even though footballers can tackle and backslap each other after scoring a goal. I get it, that it's science-driven; I get it that indoor proximity makes COVID-19 easier to transfer than outside, but it still seems like inconsistency.

The virus "wants to take advantage of our carelessness", said the prime minister when announcing the easing of lockdown. And yet the beach at Bournemouth appeared to have listened to Boris not one jot. Even our local high street yesterday, which had been a paragon of mask-wearing, socially-distanced obedience for the last three months, on the very rare occasion that I ventured out, was as giddy as a drunkard emerging from the pub after a lunchtime session. All of a sudden, people weren't even observing a metre's distance.

I'm no fan of Bojo, but I think the government is genuinely trying to do the right thing in getting commercial life going again. And in that, responsibility lands on all of us to behave responsibly. But we know people won't and don't. People will simply think that the shackles have been thrown off completely, rather than been merely eased. As of yesterday, there are still 2,838 COVID-19 patients in UK hospitals being treated, including 231 on ventilators. The death toll went up by a further 67 yesterday, which may be dramatically less than mid-April, when the attrition rate was the equivalent of three Airbus A380s crashing every single day. But 67 in a day is still as many as a fully-laden coachload of pensioners driving off a cliff. It shouldn't happen, and if it did, you'd expect a rigorous enquiry. The number of infections in the UK is still significantly higher than elsewhere in Europe. Even the government's own health and science wonks are clearly worried that the British public now has the idea that COVID-19 has suddenly gone away. Indeed, if anything, it is growing across the world. Just look at the United States, where anti-liberal protesters have gathered to belligerently cough in defiance of the idea of wearing a mask.

Yesterday was not a return to normal. It was the emergence of a new kind of normal. It was a window merely cracked to let in a slither of fresh air and no more. If was a reminder of how desperate businesses have been to get something going again. My barber's, whom I've been a customer for decades, had made the effort to have hand sanitiser ready, masks if you wanted them, explicit signage on how many people could be inside the shop at any given moment, and well spaced seating for those who could come in and wait from the queue outside. Predictably, there was one knob who huffed at the measures, but for a small independent business, one which has stood on that site since 1908, staffed by three hairdressers who are effectively freelance, there was an immediate sense of relief that life was creeping back. It didn't stop me feeling ill at ease, being in that queue, an anxiety created partly from the fact that I was placing vanity over my own health (I am in a high-risk category). But it was a calculated risk. The kind you can't help the government is making on a much grander scale. You just hope it's worth it.

Sunset boulevard - Paul Weller’s West Coast album

You know, it's actually become boring to talk about Paul Weller’s rich vein of form. Because, for a purple patch, it's been going on a mighty long time. His 15th solo studio album, On Sunset, continues an output that has averaged an album every two or three years since his self-titled solo debut, incredibly, 28 years ago. It's a rate that puts most of his contemporaries - even an Elvis Costello - to shame. Much, I suspect, has to do with the restless spirit that has always charged Weller’s creativity, not just in having something to say, but also a yearning to try something new each time, dipping a quill into the different shades of ink from which the now 62-year-old has drawn his influences.

On Sunset marks another change of course, veering from the reflective, folky vibe of 2018's pastoral True Meanings, to a decidedly sunny, open-topped outing. As the title might allude, it’s an excursion into the blue skies and free'n'easy living of 1970s Los Angeles: effortlessly cool, intriguing by turns, melodically pleasing and incongruously soulful for an album crafted in deepest Surrey (Weller’s work-from-home location, Black Barn Studios in the village of Ripley - Eric Clapton's birthplace).

“Everybody likes a good tune, regardless how it’s dressed up,” Weller told GQ’s Dylan Jones recently. “Luckily, melody comes relatively easy to me – it’s a very natural part of the writing process. You’re often trying to find new ways of saying the same thing, but I can always rely on melody to see me through.” And thus it proves, with 10 tracks (15 if you buy the ‘deluxe edition’) of joyous songcraft, most making authentic nods to the '70s soul and R&B influences that, like the more orthodox mod traces of The Who and Small Faces, have fed Weller’s musical subconscious.

Perhaps, most surprising, is the unabashed West Coast association. The likes of Down In A Tube Station At Midnight and Stanley Road may have given the wrong impression of a narrow, Anglo-centric scope, but a visit last year to his son in Los Angeles brought about a reawakening to the City of Angels. “I stayed at this funny little hotel just off the Strip [Sunset Boulevard],” Weller told Jones, “and while I’ve been to LA a lot, I hadn’t spent any time on the Strip for years and so it all came rushing back – the Sunset Marquis, the Rainbow... I couldn’t believe how quickly everything had gone. I love the West Coast: not the psychedelic Grateful Dead but The Beach Boys, especially the later period. Be warned, though, this isn’t my West Coast record.” That’s as maybe, but from the cover art to the title, and from the title track’s strings, lusciously arranged by Game Of Thrones composer Hannah Peel (and with an ebbing seashore sound effect in the outro), to it’s references to palm trees, the warm breeze and drinks “in the Whiskey” [A-Go-Go] (with an unashamed touch of George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord in the intro), it’s as West Coast as Steely Dan’s Hey Nineteen. And that’s no bad thing.

It might be corny to suggest, but the warmth I know, love and, frankly, miss about California - the endless days of sultry sunshine and freshening winds blowing off the Pacific - is present throughout this record. Written and recorded before the lockdown, it nevertheless exudes freedom. The kind of freedom you get from cruising through the Santa Monica Mountains in a vintage '70s Pontiac convertible, as Weller appears to be doing in the album’s artwork. It’s there in the woozy funk of the album’s seven-minute opener Mirror Ball, with its nods to the Isleys' Summer Breeze. It’s there in the wistful thoughts of Old Father Tyme, which presciently - pre-COVID - makes the statement: “In this time of confusion, hang on to what is real. Hail the love around us, see how deep it feels.”

The contemplative frame of mind that Weller has attached to his work of late is patently age related. Though not obvious, the death of his father John - who’d managed his son’s career from the beginning (instilling in him the relentless work ethic) - might still bear presence. Certainly he is not afraid of his past, both in re-signing to Polydor, the label Weller Sr. helped sign The Jam to in 1977, but also in drawing on the organ talents of former fellow Style Councillor Mick Talbot, who appears on Baptiste and Village. Earth Beat, while we’re at it, swings like the Council’s Speak Like A Child, with the giddiness of pristine ’80s pop wrapped in modern sonics. Nor is he afraid of casting out widely into his vast pool of historic reference, calling on Slade’s Jim Lea to provide a rakish violin to Equanimity, one of several Beatley tracks which include the acoustic guitar-driven melancholic beauty, Rockets (featuring some pristine bass work by Andy Crofts).

Picture: Lee Cogswell

Looking back over the last fourteen Weller solo albums, it’s hard to truly find any which waste your time. In fact, looking at the bigger picture, most conform to an unbelievably high standard. He’ll probably hate this, but I don’t think Paul Weller ever gets enough credit. Some, lazily, still think of him as the angry young man, of Red Wedge, of Town Called Malice or ‘A’ Bomb In Wardour Street. Others go to the Paris Match posing of The Style Council. All of which were a long Weller time ago. “You’ve got to keep your tools sharp,” he told GQ. “The world is full of people who made great records and then tailed off, but maybe I care more now because I wasn’t as good as they were when I started. With me it’s probably worked in reverse, but there are still some great performers who are doing great work. The things Robert Plant has been doing have been really, really good; I’ve seen Macca and The Stones play live recently and both were absolutely brilliant.”

Frankly, he should be held in the same reverence. It might be tempting to think that On Sunset points to a career winding down, but with Album 16 already on the sketch pad, Paul Weller is showing no signs of his 28-year purple patch ending any time soon. Even if, for me, On Sunset is an absolute career high. Maybe, even his best to date.