Dress-down Monday: what to wear when you're WFH

So, to bring you up to speed, we were first told by Boris to work from home “if we can”. Then it was “go back to work, if you can”. Now it’s back to the kitchen table/spare room/sofa once more, “if we can”. Blink, and you may have missed the middle instruction. I didn't, but then, the company I work for has very sensibly adopted a WFH strategy from the outset of the pandemic, and that's fine by me. In fact, throughout this coronavirus-riven last six months I have only worked from home. I've only set foot in my nominal place of work once, and that was for the interview that landed me the job in the first place. Since then, my office has been, initially, the kitchen table, and then, when my bony arse and the dining table chairs decided they were incompatible for the better part of nine hours a day, the front room took over. The sofa and a £5 IKEA coffee table (you know the ones - all white, 55x55cm, made entirely from MDF) became my workspace. The thing is, it has all just worked. What has been weird is that in six months I haven't worn anything resembling formal clothing once. In fact, if memory serves (and that's now getting hazy), the last time I wore my bespoke three-piece suit - bought for a wedding last year - was that job interview, save one family quiz night when I thought, "for a laugh", wearing it would make me - as co-host - look like a game show presenter. It didn't. 

Over the course of these six months I have also lost almost 20 kilos in weight, rendering most of my pre-lockdown work attire ridiculous. Shirts done up would make me look like an ex-con released after serving a very long sentence, and worn tieless, are now so capacious that to leave even one button undone exposes so much chest wig I'd resemble a yacht-dwelling Mediterranean arms dealer. Suits are now so oversized, shapeless and beyond salvage that I wouldn't even pass muster in a Talking Heads tribute act. All this is just as well as I haven't, really, been required to look like anything over the last half-year. On my daily round of Skype meetings, my colleagues have presented a variety of WFH dress styles, from those who - and fair play to them - wear a formal work shirt every day as it helps them get into part, to a multitude of T-shirts (including one today bearing the name of Metallica). All is fine. None of it leaves anyone thought less professional; the work gets done, we move on.

Now, I appreciate that all these descriptions are of the waist up, but if people are wearing their joggers or, in my case during the warmest months of the year, shorts, no-one cares, or should do. So let’s bring in here Ayesha Vardag, Britain’s self-styled “top divorce lawyer” and "the Diva of Divorce", according to TIME magazine, who has issued instructions to staff at her eponymous law firm on what to wear, presumably while physically in the office. In fact, Vardag - in a leaked e-mail reported in The Times and other newspapers - has driven down into some considerable specifics: “I don’t mind cravats, formal waistcoats,” she said, giving a nod to a form of modernity not seen since Bertie Wooster was living in fear of his Aunt Agatha. However, V-neck sweaters and “woolly vests” (i.e. the tank tops and sleeveless cardigans I am also prone to wearing when the weather turns cooler) are also out. I will admit to have worn a black V-neck under my suit for a number of years, ever since Gianluca Vialli brought Italian fashion to Chelsea in the mid-90s, though my appropriation of the style was more out of hiding my gut than trying to look like Luca… Anyway, “Super-tight trousers” are also on Vardag's verboten list, as are shoes with too pointy a toe. 

Pronouncing that lawyers should “look like a pro, not a pretty young thing”, Vardag also turned her attention to female members of staff, noting that women “can still of course be discreetly sexy and colourful and flamboyant at the same time according to your preference”. Women at the firm should “never be tacky or tarty and at the same time never be drab. It’s a delicate balance which most of you know instinctively. The naked look, with lots of flesh, is not OK.” To this Vardag added that she favoured “a Chanel/Dior/Armani look”, including “elegant” shoes, “not flip flops.” Well, duh. Woe betide anyone, either, who failed to maintain their hair, instructing that it “should always be squeaky clean and should at least appear natural”. “Brush your hair!!!,” the memo continued. “Check the mirror before you come out in the morning! Do not look as if you were dragged through a hedge backwards! Consider putting it up if it’s very long.” And for anyone who might be struggling in the Barnet department, Vardag offered her own help: “A chignon [no, me neither…] packs a lot of power punch. I can show you how to tie a scarf and set a chignon if you like. I’m that old.”

“It’s a Savile Row look we’re espousing,” Vardag's missive outlines. “Generally, double cuffs and cufflinks can transform the quality you project. Go for fewer items in your wardrobe, of quality.” In defence, Emma Gill, one of Vardags’ partners at the firm, told The Times that “as a top law firm, our clients demand high standards of professionalism and this is reflected in our dress code policy. While this is embraced by staff, the occasional reminder is in order to make sure we maintain our high standards.” Well, OK. While we’ve all be frothing about the long-term impact of the coronavirus on working practices - and whether we’ll ever return to the nine-to-five, Monday to Friday - little attention has actually been paid to the somewhat ludicrous proposition that mixed-pattern working could mean suits for some, three days a week, jogging bottoms and T-shirts on two days a week. Or not at all. In fact, no one really knows what will happen long term. The government and it’s Olympic-strength flip-flopping on everything might not help, either. 

Years ago, when I worked in the Netherlands, my then-company instigated a ‘dress-down Friday’ at its Amsterdam headquarters in the hope of instigating a more casual atmosphere for the final day of the working week. This, for some of my male Dutch colleagues of a certain age and background, meant wearing trousers in a variety of alarming hues (in fact, of a vibrancy even Michael Portillo in his railway journey documentaries, in which he wears ever-more shocking pastels, would reject for being ‘too much’). For others, it meant adopting the less adventurous American week-round office style, namely chinos and the ubiquitous button-down shirt. At my last company - a Silicon Valley-headquartered software business - de rigeur officewear consisted exclusively of jeans (the expensive-looking indigo kind, not the oil-stained, ragged-at-the-knee variety) for men matched with a double-cuff smart shirt and a blazer of some sort. Those wearing it thought they were edgy software sales types, but when everyone is dressed the same, it's no less a uniform than bankers all in pinstripes. 

This did serve to remind me of the French word for a suit: “costume”. Because that, in essence, is what all of these practices are. Whether you’re wearing a two-piece suit, blazer and jeans, or a tweed jacket with mustard-yellow jumbo cords, it is still nothing more than conformity. For that matter, we could all turn up dressed as Scott Tracy from Thunderbirds and it would matter very little. The fact remains that I actually look forward to the day when I can put on a smart suit and shirt, and lace up one of the pairs of formal shoes I’ve got gathering dust in a wardrobe. And I’m not in any way someone who likes to conform like that. I guess, though, it does come down to your personal style, but also the type of work you do. But it also depends on what your employer actually expects. Only 55% of workplaces have a dress code, according to the website Salary.com, and very few companies outline their expectations when onboarding new employees.

For many workers, it's trial and occasionally error. Many's the newbie who turns up on Day 1 wearing collar and tie or an expensive designer suit, only to discover they stand out amongst an office crowded by more casual business attire. When I worked in Silicon Valley I was told that wearing anything other than the local camouflage would stand me out as a 'suit'. So, jeans and whatever it was for two years. "If you work in law, regularly meet with executives, or otherwise hold a high-level position, you might be asked to come dressed 'business formal' or in 'boardroom attire'," advises lifestyle guru Jacqueline Curtis in a post on moneycrashers.com. "This is the highest level of professional dress". She recommends tailored suits in dark, neutral colours for men, a white shirt with a high-quality tie in "muted" neutral colours. "No novelty ties," she points out, instantly flagging the obscenities worn by The Fast Show's resident office "laugh", Colin Hunt. "Shoes should be closed-toe oxfords in brown or black, not loafers," she adds. So, what about my preferred brown suede numbers? Women are advised to follow a similar conservatism - skirt or trouser suits in neutral colours, closed-toe heels in similar non-startling hues.

Reading Curtis's advice, however, I recognise how few professions require such office attire these days. Even bank dealing rooms. The norm seems to be "business professional" which seems to sit somewhere between conservative and casual, and is more broadly open to interpretation. And then, if you're lucky, you'll work in an environment where it - mostly - really doesn't matter how you dress, as long as you don't cause offence or look like you've turned up in your decorating outfit. The bottom line, says Curtis, is to "err on the side of caution", especially when new in an organisation. Keep it “clean, tailored, and professional” is her advice. I suppose, then, the best guide is to simply understand your stakeholders, those you work with, those you work for and those you would, in normal times, encounter from outside your organisation. 

However, these aren't normal times. Your guess is as good as mine as to when they will be normal once again, by which time I'll have lost even more weight, and frankly will look ridiculous in anything I might have worn even six months ago. Which means taking out another mortgage on a new wardrobe that does fit, but let's cross that bridge when we come to it, eh? For now, I'll continue to dress appropriately, safe in the knowledge that the only people who can see what I wear below the waist Monday to Friday are my family, occasionally fellow customers at Waitrose during a lunchtime run, and the postman. Oh, and the cat, but her opinion really doesn't count.

It's the vinyl countdown - Record Store Day is with us again

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

To some of us, buying records - and I mean the round, mainly black objects with a hole in the middle - is more than the fetish those who remain indifferent to physical music ownership might think it is. Each to their own. For everyone who maintains that Spain can't be beaten for a holiday (remember them?) another will insist on Greece. For Nike see Adidas. You get my point.

Music's digitisation, first with the CD and, latterly, streaming services, has undoubtedly set free consumption, and facilitated it into our busy, mobile, portable lives. However, it also abandoned the pleasures of opening a brand new record, removing it from the sleeve while still studying the artwork and liner notes, and then sitting down to listen. Well, at least, that's my justification. It's also why I'm one of those happy to be ensnared by Record Store Day, the normally annual vinyl-buying splurge designed to help out independent music dealers as they compete with the few remaining record chains, the Amazons of this world, the supermarket checkout impulse-buy points-of-sale, and streaming.

COVID-19 has forced RSD to this year postpone the regular April fixture into three smaller 'drops' - the first in August, a second today and the third next month. August's drop met with no shortage of custom, with record shops reporting brisk in-store business and the now-familiar queues forming at sunrise by punters keen to bag special releases and the odd rarity. It is, at the end of the day, a purely indulgent, self-serving frenzy, but the punters get something unique and the shops do a decent bit of business. Those that get it right, of course.

One emporium local to me, which didn't open physically on the day (unlike plenty who did), decided to do its RSD trading entirely online, with a clunky system by which you registered interest in a release in advance and then waited on the day for an e-mail at 6pm to say you could then go online and buy it. When this didn't work at the time when everything was supposed to be up and running everyone went to the shop's website and promptly crashed it, rendering Record Store Day a frustrating Saturday evening hitting 'refresh' a lot. For  RSD read RSI. Now, I appreciate that the shop in question may have stayed shut out of consideration for its staff, but it's the kind of experience that doesn't do well for customer loyalty. And makes me wish I'd been queuing up at the crack of dawn to spend my money somewhere that managed to get it right.

Perseverance, however, paid off in the end. Stupid or not, we got what we wanted from retailers who had got their e-commerce acts together: releases as disparate as The The's latest RSD-only single (a regular occurrence, but you wish Matt Johnson would do a new album, rather than these one-offs...) and a compilation of Memphis soul obscurities, the obligatory release from The Dame (BowieNowChanges) and a vinyl reissue of Peter Bruntnell's sublime Normal For Bridgwater. Happy days. Today's drop will be a little more modest (just 89 releases as opposed to August’s 345), but that may not be the point: whether you’re interested in a Two-Tone 40th anniversary compilation, Paul McCartney’s debut solo album, The Yardbirds classic Roger The Engineer or even Britney Spears’ Oops! …I Did It Again, it's sometimes worth taking a punt on RSD, buying something you've either never heard before, or haven't owned since you had it as a crudely taped copy back in the day. That’s half the fun of record curation in middle age.

“The real thing, the real joy, is in the tactile relationship, between you and the artist,” says Simon Tyler, who runs the splendid Creekside Vinyl in Faversham, Kent. He points to the physical object itself: “This square piece of cardboard with a 12-inch round record slipped inside," he says, “It's a magical object.” Not surprisingly, Simon says that the magic begins with the record shop itself, a point I wholeheartedly agree with. The imposition of lockdown on in-store retailing severely curtailed the pleasure of browsing and discovering something you didn't even know you wanted. Or in the case of shops like Simon’s, a natter with a friendly and knowledgeable proprietor. 

“Firstly,” he says, “you hear the shop as you walk along the street. The strain of music drifting out of the double doors turns your head. ‘What’s that? Is it? Oh God, yes! I haven’t heard THAT for years!’.” Once inside, the tactile experience draws you in further. “You see row upon row of albums calling to you like a siren,” Simon says, describing his own shop’s experience, in a calming corner of Kent's oldest and quaintest market town. “You walk across the threshold and let your fingers browse across the top of the records. You see familiar pictures and faces, and new images that offer a strange fascination. They tease you; they reveal and yet conceal the secrets within.”

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

Simon’s view is obviously biased, owing to running a generously stocked shop full of vinyl records, but he’s spot on. Some people can enter a fashion boutique and feel tempted to buy the place up; record shops, for me, hold the same appeal, such is my interest in buying something new or something worth hearing anew.

There is, as Simon says, a magical experience to opening up a freshly-bought record, but to me it is more about the listening experience. That, I recognise, sounds like I've swallowed the music industry's Kool-Aid and gone back for seconds. Records are, though, magical objects, which may go to explain figures from the BPI, the UK's recording industry body, earlier this year which revealed that many people who buy LPs never actually get round to playing them (and not just those like me who acquire too many and then struggle to find time to listening to them). 

Moreover, the BPI found that as many as a fifth doesn't even have anything to play their vinyl on. This reflects strangely in light of vinyl enjoying sales growth for 12 consecutive years in the UK, now accounting for one in every eight albums bought as a physical format. 

Over 4.3 million vinyl LPs were sold in the UK last year, a 4% increase on 2018. In the United States, vinyl sales have just surpassed sales of CDs for the first time since the 1980s, accounting for $232 million of music sales in the first six months of this year, as opposed to just under $130 million for CDs, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. That, the RIAA has revealed, is a 4% increase for LPs and a 48% decrease for the shiny silver discs. This might also reflect the times we’re in, but despite my love of vinyl I’ve still continued to buy CDs that I might want to play in the car. However, seeing as lockdown and all of that has meant I’ve hardly used my car since March, my listening has been largely done at home over the last six months. 

However, while all this love for vinyl is admirable, it can’t be ignored that physical sales continue to drop, and the pandemic isn’t helping. Industry figures have shown that overall physical music sales continue to drop exponentially as streaming has grown, both for ‘free’, ad-supported services as well as premium subscriptions. That, at the end of the day, is not good news for the artists themselves, who get a lesser cut of the action than they do with physical sales. For the so-called ‘heritage acts’, like Fleetwood Mac, who’ve re-released back catalogue material on vinyl to relatively healthy receipts, physical sales might offset lower income from streaming. For those in middling industry positions, now also denied the opportunity to play live - which, these days, is what makes them money, the virus has hit them hard.

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

Record Store Day, at least, will provide a momentary fillip for the artists who take part - even if their releases aren’t even taken out of the shrink wrap, a phenomenon identified by the BPI in its All About The Music yearbook. “A proportion of people are buying vinyl because they’re a superfan,” said Rob Crutchley, the book’s author, when it came out in April. “Even if they don’t actually have a turntable they’re still keen to support the artist and have the artefact itself."

"There is still a strong core of fans who also value the opportunity to acquire, own or gift recorded music on physical format,” Cruchley added, pointing to the custom of artists using Record Store Day to give fans something unique. “Sometimes it can be because they’re catalogue titles that are being re-pressed in a new edition - maybe a run on a different coloured vinyl - other times it might be a new title that has a limited press on a certain format.” 

This, then, points to the irrationality of consumerism overall. I’ll be the first to ’fess up - mainly to my partner - at buying albums that already exist in my collection. In some cases, it’s for new sonic experiences - remastered, refreshed editions on 180g vinyl that have improved upon recordings made many years ago and now benefit from modern studio and reproduction techniques. Or they’re albums bought on CD early in the day, often when the new digital discs were effectively crude transfers from analogue recordings. In some cases, they’re albums I’ve only ever heard on cassette tape, furtively 'borrowed' from my brother and recorded while my dad was out at work. 

“The joy of records is in the experience,” says Simon Tyler. “That joy is deeply personal, and long may it continue.”  Record buying is, then, one of the cycles of life. There is little real justification for buying an album again “because it sounds better”, but the same applies to replacing that VHS copy of The Godfather, with the DVD, then the Blu-ray Disc and ultimately the 4K Blu-ray version to play on your super-duper new flatscreen TV. And I know you wouldn’t buy a new copy of a classic book because it’s been given a new cover, but there’s a difference. There really is.

Let’s get the next one out before we get the next one out

Picture: Michael Kovac/Getty Images

To another pet topic: James Bond. We haven’t even got our peepers on the much-delayed No Time To Die, Daniel Craig’s final outing as 007, without the rumour mill grinding away over who will be his replacement. This week's outbreak has been prompted by online reports Tom Hardy has landed the gig, claims so convincing that, apparently, betting has been suspended on all other candidates. There’s no confirmation or denial from anyone actually in the know, of course, but you'd also hope that the subject wouldn't even be on the table until No Time To Die actually hits screens in November ( assuming Boris - that’s the prime minister, not some Spectre supervillain - doesn’t have other ideas). 

Be that as it may, the resurrection of speculation about Hardy - a longtime resident of the list of potential 007s - has instigated more debate about the optimum age a Bond actor should be. Hardy is currently 43, and if he won the role, would be the oldest new James Bond since Roger Moore was cast in Live And Let Die aged 46. Moore would make his final outing as Bond in A View To A Kill at the age of 58 (not far off retirement age for a British civil servant), and his love scene with the-then 30-year-old Tanya Roberts was somewhat icky. 

There is, though, no formal recipe for what makes a Bond. In Ian Fleming’s books, the character was in his mid-to-late 30s, a little older than Sean Connery when he was cast in Dr. No, and older still than George Lazenby when cast in On Her Majesty's Secret Service at 29. Daniel Craig, was 38 when Casino Royale came out, and has without doubt redefined the character for the cinema. So, when Eon Productions do come to cast 'Bond 26' - and if Hardy is the man for the job - they’ll be contending with an actor who'll be, probably by the time the film comes out, in his mid-40s. Not that it should be an issue: with roles in films like Mad Max, The Revenant and The Dark Knight (as well as Layer Cake with Craig), Hardy has built up a repertoire of playing solid, physical characters, which would continue the trend set by Craig’s more muscular Bond (as opposed to Pierce Brosnan, his predecessor, who took the character back to the suave, less brooding, days of Moore, though thankfully with well-cut Brioni suits, rather than those awful safari jackets and flares).

Despite Hardy being installed as the nailed-on favourite to next play Bond, there is still no shortage of other names being talked of, with posh boys James Norton and Tom Hiddleston (largely the result of playing a Bondesque character in The Night Manager), Bodyguard’s Richard Madden, Michael Fassbender and even Idris Elba in the frame (despite now being 48). 30-year-old Jack Lowden from Dunkirk appears to be the youngest name mentioned. However, this is speculative, and pointless speculation at that. Plus, we shouldn’t get too carried away, even if Hardy’s name refuses to go away. 

The week's news flurry was the result of a post on a fairly obscure blog, The Vulcan Reporter, which, as its name might suggest, has history as a portal for Star Trek stuff. Quite what authority it has, then, to make the claim about a new Bond being cast by the normally militarily tight-lipped Eon is not known. Even if The Vulcan Reporter has taken a complete punt - one, by the way, that every newspaper in Christendom has reported on - it isn’t a bad shout. Hardy has, somewhat like Daniel Craig, been able to quietly move between parts throughout his career without establishing one that would prejudice the audience's view of him as a Bond. Roger Moore, of course, had already played Simon Templar - not a million miles from 007 - in The Saint on TV before he made Live And Let Die. Hardy has played both heroes and villains, including both Ronnie and Reggie Kray in Legend, as well as Al Capone.

Would an even more rugged Bond work for these times? When Casino Royale appeared, The Bourne Identity had beaten Bond to it by four years, redefining the spy-based action thriller for the new Millennium. While Casino didn’t need to replicate Bourne, there was certainly an amping up of action sequences to match him. The opening parcour chase in Madagascar threw down a marker at an instance that Bond would not take his new cinematic rival lying down. Hardy certainly could compete with the physical aspects of maintaining the Craig Bond’s exhausting action sequences, as the No Time To Die trailers have emphatically previewed. Plus, any actor needing a north star here need only look at Tom Cruise, still doing his own stunts in the Mission: Impossible franchise (something I bore witness to one frosty January morning in 2018 when my girlfriend and I were walking to the Tate Modern and just happened to see Cruise sprinting across Blackfriars Bridge while being filmed for M:I6).

The big question, though, is whether Hardy can do suave. Again, Craig nailed this 007 characteristic against expectation (as did the criminally underrated Timothy Dalton, who played a fine Bond in The Living Daylights and Licence To Kill). This, though, is harder to gauge: Hardy’s history of characters has not pandered to any one class of character, but this may be to his advantage. 

There’s nothing in the script that says that, just because Bond knows his claret from his Beaujolais, the actor playing him should do, too. After all, Sean Connery was a former milkman of a working class Edinburgh background. And, almost 60 years since Dr. No, his shadow - justifiably - still hangs over the role. And, I suspect, always will.

Anyway, before we get too carried away over Tom Hardy or anyone else playing Bond in a presumed 26th film, some time in hopefully the near future, we really must get the current James Bond out in front of the world. No Time To Die should have had its premiere in April, but COVID-19 did its best, and even 007 - who has, in the past, overcome the most dastardly plots to threaten the world - was pushed back to November. So, maybe, let’s focus on getting the next Bond film out, before we start talking about the next James Bond, eh?

Time for a Monday Moan? Not just yet

Picture: BBC Sport

Long-standing readers of this blog might recall a tradition that set in during José Mourinho's brief final season as Chelsea manager. After signing a new contract on August 7th, 2015 (which, incidentally, would have expired only last year), Mourinho oversaw a run of games that saw Chelsea pick up just 11 points from their first 12 Premier League fixtures, and exit the League Cup to Stoke by October. By December 17th, when Mourinho left Stamford Bridge for a second time ("by mutual consent"), the club had lost nine of its 16 league matches. Chelsea were in something of a death spiral and, at the moment of the Portuguese's departure, were one place above the relegation zone.

Along the way, my posts became exponentially more exasperated, to the extent that, like my very first missive in the blogosphere (a rant about England's exit from the 2010 World Cup, written the morning after), I established a history of letting rip on the first working day of the week. During Mourinho's progressive denouement at Chelsea, my Facebook updates to promote such posts became known as The Monday Moan.

That I mention this today, the Monday after Chelsea lost yesterday - and didn’t lose well - is something of a coincidence: it is too soon, two games into the new season, to get into a cycle of misery, especially as they won their first, last Monday, against Brighton, and they were, yesterday, playing the newly-crowned English league champions. But this is what football is about. A bad result at the weekend - even one as gloriously sunny and summery as this one was - is all it takes to start the week in a fug. But (and here’s where a football fan’s acute sense of denial instantly kicks in) there is need for some - some - perspective.

To summarise, Chelsea, with their expensively assembled, £230 million of summer acquisitions, were facing Liverpool at the Bridge in only their second competitive game of the season. In some respects, a tough break to meet last season’s champions so soon, but then to think that way is to already take on a defeatist view. Chelsea, after all, did finish fourth - an unlikely outcome, given the challenges of a transfer ban and relying heavily on youth last season. But that shouldn't necessarily mean that meeting Liverpool is anything less than a peer encounter. Chelsea-Liverpool has always been one of the fixtures I’ve attended religiously, dating back to the late 1970s, when the Merseysiders were imperious and the Londoners were in the mire of financial crises. That, to the 11-year-old me, was less apparent. What drew me in was that these two teams represented the classic football confrontation: the blues and the reds. Human Subbuteo. And thus it has continued for 40-plus years, all through the storied (and well-documented - see my post from June, Red Rain) history of encounters between the teams. 

So, then, yesterday. A cagey start by both sides saw Liverpool increase their presence, pressing Chelsea high and clearly setting out to test a largely unchanged defence, their Achilles heel all last season. That approach won out on the stroke of half time when Andreas Christensen lost his head and rugby-tackled Sadio Mané to the ground as he charged through on goal, to be rightfully dismissed after a VAR review of the initial yellow card. No one, least of all Christensen, should have had any complaints. After the break, Liverpool came out to face ten-man Chelsea with renewed, ominous purpose, Mané proving the tormentor twice, scoring within five minutes of the interval, and again, four minutes later. Perhaps Chelsea could be credited with keeping the scoreline at 0-2 for the remaining 35 minutes of play, but it was the nature of those two conceded goals that require the attention.

That £230 million has mostly been spent on attacking players, and given Timo Werner’s exciting pace (and a couple of decent chances yesterday he’ll regret), and the gradual introduction of the £71 million Kai Havertz, Chelsea could have one of the most fearsome attacking line-ups in the Premier League, given all the other options in Frank Lampard’s toolbox. But, as has been recanted verbatim over recent months, it’s at the back that changes are needed, and needed fast. Ben Chilwell, the left-back Chelsea coveted for some time, is yet to make his debut due to injury, meaning the defensively weak wingback Marcos Alonso continues to have put his lack of defensive pace and positioning on display. So it proved with Mané’s first goal, the result of Liverpool sending the Senegalese winger, plus Keïta, Alexander-Arnold, Salah and Firmino into the final third, baffling Chelsea’s defenders (now with Tomori replacing Christensen). Firmino beat Alonso to cut the ball across for Mané to head into the goal. For once, Chelsea’s Kepa Arrizabalaga couldn’t be blamed, directly. For what happened next, he could.

They say that if you’re already in a hole it’s a good idea to stop digging, but Arrizabalaga has clearly not heard this adage. As if he needed to add to the growing list of calamities, what seemed like a bread-and-butter clearance out to Jorginho was intercepted too easily by Mané, who simply poked it into the net with the casual ease of someone sweeping a tin can out of the way.

Almost to a newspaper, every back page today has said the exact same thing: Édouard Mendy cannot arrive from Rennes soon enough. We’re told that the goalkeeper's £20 million signing is imminent, but on this display from Chelsea's current stopper, Frank Lampard’s first duty this morning was probably to bang on Marina Granovskaia’s office door with a demand to know where she currently is with the Mendy deal, and to even offer a few quid of his own money to tip the balance of any last-minute wrangling.

Taking a step back, Chelsea weren’t helped yesterday by reticence. It was almost as if they were intimidated from the outset by Jurgen Klopp’s champions. They certainly allowed Liverpool’s high press to get the better of them, meaning that the Londoners’ defence was, once again, thin ice waiting to crack. The suggestion, here is one of a gulf in class, but when you look at where Chelsea have spent their money this summer, I genuinely think that they’ve got what it takes to compete within the top four. But it will take time. The veteran Thiago Silva, signed from PSG, has yet to make his debut, like Chilwell, meaning that the obvious weaknesses in defence have yet to be strengthened. Havertz is only two games in, and while Werner is looking sharp, he’s still, understandably, getting his timing right. With the other newbie, Hakim Ziyech, injured along with Christian Pulisic, arguably, the natural heir to Eden Hazard, Chelsea’s expensive new line-up is yet to take shape. Lampard, though, for all his exalted status amongst the club’s fans, also needs to learn better of what to do with these assets. One criticism of last season was that he wasn’t able to settle on an optimum defensive line-up, and that appears to have continued into this season. None of his central defenders appear rooted in the role (with Antonio Rudiger not even in yesterday’s squad), so with a risky goalkeeper and a never-the-same line-up in front of him, the inconsistencies have been laid bare.

Ever the diplomat, Lampard tried to put a supportive arm around his first-choice keeper. Accepting the Spaniard’s “clear mistake” for Liverpool’s second goal, he said after the match that: “We have to keep working, Kepa has to keep working.” Though acknowledging that it had been two games out of two that Kepa had dropped a clanger (conceding Leandro Trossard's goal last Monday against Brighton), he said: “Players need support, particularly from myself. I give that to all the players. Kepa has to keep working, nobody tries to make mistakes in football, it is the nature of the game. You have to be strong, you keep going and that is where he is at." Quite what Lampard’s mood is like privately is up for debate.

What he does know, or at least should know, as he opened up training this morning at Cobham, is that all the spending on top European attacking talent will amount to nothing if his defence continues to leak goals like they did last season. And, at risk of sounding ungrateful, the addition of just two new defenders (well, I say ‘new’, but Silva is now 35), means that more, much more, needs to be done with what Lampard already has in the department. In Reece James and Fikayo Tomori, for example, two youngsters of genuine promise, but still with much to learn. Stability - rooted in a goalkeeper who knows what he’s doing and can command those in front of him - is essential. That won’t come quickly, or easily.

But, to step back a bit further, there's a reason why I'm not yet ready to reinstate the Monday Moan. Yesterday's game was a tough schooling for Lampard, and from the one club Chelsea fans would have preferred not to have received it from (well, maybe the other club, if you include Tottenham). Two games in, it's too soon to press the panic button. For context, go back to 2016 and Antonio Conte's first season in charge. By September 11th, Chelsea's early season wins had been arrested by a 2-2 draw with Swansea. Then came back-to-back defeats - to Liverpool and Arsenal, the latter a humiliating 3-0 reverse. Conte had seen enough and switched to the 3-4-3 wingback system that would propel the team to Premier League champions eight months later, and with a 13-point margin over runners-up Spurs. The point here is that it really is too soon to moan, even if, this morning, it's fully justified.

How No.66947 became Selma again

Living in the Netherlands for the best part of ten years, I only occasionally encountered traces of its wartime past. Once a year, out of some sense of duty, I would visit the British and Commonwealth cemetery in Oosterbeek, where Allied casualties of the Battle of Arnhem are buried. Each gravestone tells its own story of one of the most tragic episodes of the latter stages of the Second World War.

When German forces invaded in 1940, they were not only annexing another neighbouring country they were adding another key territory from which to launch attacks - and, an eventual invasion - on Britain. The Dutch paid a terrible price. In the aftermath of Arnhem, even with the Allies moving further into Europe after D-Day, the Nazi occupation grew ever-more brutal, with starvation and fuel shortages rife during the winter of 1944. The occupation - at times as fanatical as anywhere in the Third Reich - lasted until the ultimate German surrender in May 1945.

As such, the Dutch commemorate their war history with both sobriety and celebration, even now. Every May, the 4th is a sombre day of remembrance, Dodenherdenking, with a grand ceremony on Amsterdam's Dam Square attended by the Dutch royal family, the government and other dignitaries. At 8pm in the evening, the country falls silent. The following day, the 5th, is Bevrijdingsdag, a much livelier celebration of freedom.

In Amsterdam, as you walk or cycle around the centre you are bound to come across the remarkable Anne Frank House, the living museum which depicts arguably one of the most famous - and infamous - stories of the Nazi persecution of Dutch Jews during the Second World War, a persecution that decimated some three-quarters of the Jewish population. I remember hearing stories of life during occupation from an older colleague of mine at Philips, who was a young boy during the German occupation. Some of his tales were almost comical, when told from a child’s perspective: one in particular was about him being given a toy drum for a birthday, and then having to keep it quiet as his family went into hiding, moving from house to house as the authorities closed in on them. Others were less amusing, but they fascinated me with their unique perspective on life under brutal subjugation, an alternative view of war than that imparted by my own parents who were children growing up at the same time in Britain, and under very different conditions on the home front.

Another perspective has arrived in the form of My Name Is Selma, the remarkable memoir of the sprightly, articulate Selma van de Perre. Now 98, her book tells the story of what happened to Jews and other persecuted minorities in the Netherlands, but framed by her own experience as a member of the Dutch resistance. Selma was 17 when the war began, and once the Nazis commenced their programme of arresting Jews and deporting them to concentration camps, Selma successfully managed to evade capture, much in the same manner as my late colleague and his family did. Eventually, she joined the resistance and, working as an agent under the name ‘Marga’, took part in missions to disseminate underground information. Luck played a major part in her work. In one mission, she went to Paris to exchange documents with a resistance spy based at the Nazi headquarters. Today, she says it was a mission she just got on with, "without thinking about if you have ideals,” she told the Dutch newspaper Het Parool earlier this year. “You can't just talk about them. We were also naive.”

That luck ran out in 1944 when she was arrested as a political criminal, her Jewish heritage still hidden, and sent first to the Dutch transit camp at Vught near Eindhoven (which wasn’t without its atrocities), before being moved to Ravensbrück in northern Germany, a camp almost exclusively for female prisoners. There she remained defiant, continuing to use her adopted name rather than her own, only reclaiming her real identity when the war ended and the camp liberated. There is, however, no doubting that life in Ravensbrück was hell, and at one point a prison doctor even thought she was close to death. “I refused to give the Germans their way,” Selma said to Het Parool. “I clung to thin threads of life and eventually made it.

Selma van de Perre and Louise Minchin on BBC Breakfast

Today, even at the age of 98, she is anything but clinging to life. Interviewed last week on BBC Breakfast by Louise Minchin she appeared remarkably robust, articulately speaking in perfect English - as the Dutch tend to do - the result of having lived in London since the end of the war when she landed a job at the Dutch embassy. "Every day I am happy to be alive,” she says today. She continues to live independently (her husband, Belgian journalist Hugo van de Perre, died in 1979), still cooks for herself and does her own shopping. Even now, she’s the very picture of defiance. “Until recently I played golf, but I stopped,” she told the Dutch newspaper. “I thought it was getting a bit too dangerous. You know, if you fall as an old person and you break something, then you're done.”

Things first became dangerous for Selma after the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. As Jews, Selma’s family were designated second-class citizens. Two years later her father was captured and deported to be murdered in Auschwitz in December 1942. Her grandmother, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces also suffered the same fate. The following  July 1943 her mother and teenage sister were arrested in Eindhoven where they were hiding. Selma didn't hear anything from them again. They, too, were executed almost immediately on arrival at the Sobibor death camp.

Motivated by her family’s fate and inspired by the self-sacrifice of a young activist who’d committed suicide rather than betray compatriots, Selma threw herself into working for the resistance. “They were short of young people, so I said yes.” Taking the name Marga from a dead non-Jewish baby, Selma’s work for the resistance took her all over the country, riding her luck throughout. Her eventual arrest on 18 June, 1944, two weeks after D-Day, led to a continuous fight for life in Ravensbrück, where she assigned to the ‘aisle of death’ part of the camp and known only by the number 66947. Nearly 100,000 women and children died at the camp, from a combination of executions, hunger and disease. Many were subjected to medical experiments, torture and hard labour. “It was three to four people to one bed,” Selma revealed. “Thousands slept on the floor.”

The camp’s liberation brought more than just physical freedom for Selma. In Malmö, where Swedish diplomats had taken freed prisoners, she was asked her name. “Margareta van der Kuit,” she said at first, using her adopted name, before realising that her identify should be restored: “My name is Selma. Selma Velleman [her maiden name].”

Selma van de Perre in London, 195
Picture: Selma van de Perre

“People still ask me why the Germans never found out my real identity,” she says today. “As Marga, I never raised any questions. That has been my luck.” Like most Dutch people, Selma retains a profound sense of pragmatism about her wartime adventures. “I took the right decision at the right time several times,” she says, and also didn’t stop to think about sacrifices. In Ravensbrück she found food for a pregnant women: “No matter how good it smelled, how hungry I was, I never ate any of it.”

Today, Selma's memories are lucid, and the book gathers together in fascinating detail the events of almost 80 years ago. She became a journalist after her husband - himself a Belgian correspondent - passed away, writing for the Belgian newspaper De Standaard, amongst others. Settling in London and taking British citizenship, she started work, "reluctantly," on her remarkable story. “I didn't really want to,” she says, but her brother’s children convinced her otherwise. “‘You must write it down’, they said. ‘You are the last of that generation still alive’.”

Still, though, the writing process didn’t come easily, bringing back many disturbing memories, especially of the disappearance of her own mother and sister. “When I lie awake at night or early in the morning, I think about them,” Selma revealed to Het Parool. “Then I wonder what they experienced in the cattle wagon on their very last trip. You remember that image until you die.”

In the book she writes: "Inside me is a terrible hole that will never heal. In my head I construct in the most horrible detail what has been done to them. I wonder if Mum and Clara knew what was going on, those two lovely, innocent people who had never hurt anyone. I wonder if they were holding hands when they died; I wonder if Dad was thinking about us in his last seconds, or if he panicked too much to think about anything. Even now, 75 years later, I lie awake at night and say to myself, 'Selma, go to sleep; you can't change what happened just by thinking about it'. ”

Despite her age, Selma continues to be active in maintaining public consciousness of the grim piece of human history that is the Holocaust. Every year she lays a wreath at the Women of Ravensbrück memorial on Amsterdam’s Museumplein. She has also given lectures to students at Ravensbrück. Her story isn’t just about what happened to her fellow Jews in the Nazi camps but what happened to those who were able to return home: “Don't forget the cold reception for survivors when they returned to the Netherlands,” she says. “Nobody was interested in what had happened to us.” Selma’s book not only celebrates the true identify she denied herself while working for the Dutch resistance, but also the point that Dutch Jews weren’t rendered entirely helpless by their persecution. “In reality, countless Jews worked with non-Jews together in the resistance – much more than we knew during the war,” Selma writes in her book. “Often, it was assumed that Jews who escaped deportation immediately went into hiding but that wasn’t always the case. It wasn’t in the interest of Jews to be identified as such. This explains to a large degree why so few Jews had been recognized for their actions.”

“I was one of many Jewish people to fight the Nazi regime and my story illustrates what happened to thousands of Jews and non-Jews alike,” she says of her book. “I have recorded the small details that made up our lives, the sheer luck that saved some of us and the atrocities that lead to the deaths of so many. This book is written as a testament to our fight against the inhumanity. The horrors of the Second World War and the bravery of the people who defied them must never be forgotten. I hope this book will contribute to their lasting memory.” It certainly does. What a remarkable woman.

Universal exports - David Hepworth's Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There

In early December 1992, 25 years of age and recently furnished with a decent redundancy package, I touched down at Los Angeles International Airport with mouth agape. The America I’d grown up with, vicariously, through the myriad TV shows recorded in Southern California, was finally right in front of me. And it didn’t feel in any way unusual. 

Normally, when you travel abroad, you are immediately assaulted by new sights, sounds and smells. You visit a local supermarket and, by a rite of passage, groceries with amusingly rude brand names bring out the inner sniggering schoolboy in you. But not in LA. There, the sky was as blue as I’d seen it on The Rockford Files and the Six Million Dollar Man, my childhood television staples. The freeways were just as they were on CHiPs, the mountains just as they were used to substitute for Korea in M*A*S*H. And, yes, Santa Monica Beach was just as it appeared on Baywatch. Even the Hollywood sign didn’t seem that startling: “Oh yeah, that,” as I made the first of many ridiculous attempts to find the perfect vantage point in Beachwood Canyon to photograph it.

Of course, I loved it, and that visit to California became the first of many, including two years living there and living the dream for real. Four months after my maiden trip to the US of A, I went to New York (also, the first of many visits since). This proved to be a cultural reawakening of similar stature to my Californian experience, walking the steel and concrete canyons of Manhattan, doing the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island tours, splurging on cheaper CDs at Tower Records, eating in diners and enjoying the exchange rate benefit by cleaning out Macy’s of clothing at more than two dollars to the pound. You can repeat these patterns in any one of a number of pleasure and work trips in the 28 years since that first visit.

All of this is brought to mind by Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There, the latest instalment of David Hepworth's impressive run of brilliantly researched book-essays on pop music culture. It starts with the premise of the so-called ‘British Invasion’, the wave of British pop bands which commenced with The Beatles travelling to America in 1964, closely followed by the Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds and many others. Collectively, they effectively imported the very rock and roll that had been exported via somewhat nebulous supply lines, be they Elvis Presley’s music heard fertively via offshore radio stations, Bill Hailey’s Rock Around The Clock in cinemas, or the blues records entering Britain via its seaports, which so famously found, in that fateful meeting at Dartford railway station, kindred spirits in Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Britain, it shouldn’t be forgotten, wasn’t long out of the economic and social austerity of World War Two when John, Paul, George and Ringo landed at Kennedy Airport to make the first of three appearances in February 1964 on The Ed Sullivan Show, the top-rated Sunday evening institution on the CBS network. They had, actually, appeared before on American television the previous November when a news report covered Beatlemania in Britain. Such was the interest it generated that 4,000 fans turned out to meet the band at JFK when they landed on 7 February. While my first visit to the US wasn’t met with anywhere near the same fervour - in fact no fervour at all - Hepworth examines what it must have been like for The Beatles, four twentysomethings from lower middle class Liverpool backgrounds, to suddenly experience an America they probably had significantly less cultural experience of than I had. At least I’d seen Charlie’s Angels on a weekly basis.

David Hepworth

What must still be admired today about the Fabs’ arrival in America - their first live appearance on the Sullivan show garnered an audience of 73 million - is that it established a new relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. Just twenty years before, more than a million GIs had been been based on British shores in anticipation of D-Day, grabbing the girls and splashing their not insignificant disposable income around in country pubs to the annoyance of impoverished, ration book-imposed, horny local adolescents. “We saved your ass,” was probably the inbound refrain. But here, in Hepworth’s book, a reverse tide made gods from state-to-state out of young British men, playing mail order-purchased, American-made Fender guitars, as the rock and roll and blues America had inadvertently sent our way, was brought back in spades by these Limey upstarts. 

The Rolling Stones, Hepworth cites, were prime examples of this. Starting out as exclusively a covers band, their evolution into “the greatest rock and roll band in the world” - a description they continue to earn, 56 years later - was founded in America. Hepworth notes that their first signature hit, Satisfaction, came to Keith Richards as a riff while staying at a Florida motel. Lyrically it’s a song about American life, not a lad from a bombsite suburb in Kent who’d never set foot abroad until a couple of years before. Whether Satisfaction was autobiographical or simply a song that worked, it, Hepworth demonstrates, undoubtedly channeled the America that Richards had been infusing via his Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters imports.

While some of these fresh-off-the-boat young men (and they were, exclusively, young men) inevitably found themselves guppy-mouthed at king-sized beds and en-suite hotel bathrooms, as opposed to the provincial B&Bs they’d had to endure in Britain, Hepworth moves on from the initial landings and teen-screamfests to examine how these bands evolved in an America that, itself, was undergoing social movement with the emerging war in Vietnam in the background. 

One of the most interesting sections of the book examines what made Led Zeppelin, ultimately, the most successful British band in the US during their tenure. The contrast, Hepworth notes, is that while the early British invaders - even the Rolling Stones - had a certain cuteness about them, which somewhat appealed to American heartlanders, Zeppelin built their case with sex appeal, musicianship, amplification and sheer momentum (so the legend goes, the band were totally different animals while touring the US, or during their notorious stays at the ‘Riot House’ Hyatt hotel on LA’s Sunset Boulevard, than they were when back home in their bucolic English country piles). While U2’s proclivities aren’t as documented - or even existed at all - Hepworth also examines their ambition to conquer America. Arguably, it took The Joshua Tree and all its Mojave desert imagery to do so - but, like Led Zeppelin, they found the US to be a receptive market, and set to master it, “give it what it considers it wants and needs,” Hepworth quotes a modest Bono saying in 1981.

By the time that U2 started to break America, along with bands like Culture Club (with Boy George causing quite the sensation - remember his appearance in an episode of The A-Team?), British bands had blazed a trail. American charts in the 1970s had been dominated by the likes of Elton John, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and even Fleetwood Mac, if you can consider their ‘classic’ line-up three-fifths British. It is, perhaps, no surprise, that American comedy scion Rob Reiner chose, with co-writers and American actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, to spoof a British touring rock band in This Is Spinal Tap. Led Zeppelin’s notorious tours, in which manager Peter Grant literally took suitcases of cash away from gigs, provided a model for British acts to be as gargantuan, stadia-fillingly successful in America.

Overpaid, Oversexed And Over There is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of Hepworth tomes that brilliantly and richly get under the skin of popular music. Like it’s most recent predecessor, Nothing Is Real, and the earlier Uncommon People, A Fabulous Creation and 1971 - Never A Dull Moment it is another collection of artfully considered, not to mention highly entertaining thoughts about the music business. Each has been a superbly researched gathering of thoughts around a single theme - be it the rise of rock stars, the LP as a limited concept, or 1971 as the year everything happened (and forget anyone who says otherwise about ’66, ’67 or ’70…). 

The level of detail in Hepworth’s books is always impressive - if you like the history books of an Anthony Beevor or John Julius Norwich you will appreciate the same degree of narrative and insight - but not without the wit that Hepworth has applied in his music journalism career, in particular as editor of Smash Hits and founder editor of The Word, but also his period as co-presenter of Whistle Test with old mucker Mark Ellen. Indeed, I’ve had the pleasure of spending many highly entertaining evenings in both their company for recordings of their Word In Your Ear podcasts, pre-lockdown, in which they gently interrogate authors of similar books about music on their specialist subjects. Hepworth’s own books are also quite substantial, too, which means that, at his current rate of output, another - like the DFS Sale and the Oscars - will be coming around shortly. Which means I’d better get a move on in finishing the new one.

The secret's out - the Pink Floyd few people know

March the 10th. Almost a fortnight before lockdown in the UK formally began. It was to be the last time this year (to date) that I would sit in front of a cinema screen, having taken myself off to Richmond-upon-Thames for a socially distanced advanced screening of Nick Mason's - Saucerful Of Secrets Live At The Roundhouse. Nick Mason’s what?

The ‘Saucers’ are a supergroup of sorts, comprised disparately of former members of Pink Floyd, Spandau Ballet and Ian Dury’s Blockheads, to revive the early music of the Floyd themselves, the period when they anchored London’s psychedelic underground at student dives like the UFO club. It's the era when  Pink Floyd were infused by the sometimes childlike whimsy of the late Syd Barrett. Like Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac, this was either a somewhat different Floyd or a very different Floyd, depending on your point of view - long before Dark Side Of The Moon or The Wall, long before the band went gargantuan, long before the inevitable dysfunction and acrimony that serves the Floyd narrative of later years - but revived, though not reimagined, in its new guise, thoroughly deserving of fresh attention.

Nick Mason

The idea came, not from Nick Mason - Pink Floyd’s constant drummer throughout its entire history - but from Lee Harris, the former Blockheads guitarist. He mentioned it to Guy Pratt - latterly Pink Floyd and David Gilmour’s touring bassist - who mentioned it to Mason himself. “Lee had this idea,” Pratt recently explained to Rolling Stone. "Nick said, ‘Oh, that sounds interesting.’” Things moved quickly. The band, says Pratt, just came together: “We didn’t even have to think about it. It’s like everyone was sitting in the ether waiting to do this.”

Before long, Mason, Harris and Pratt had been joined by Spandau Ballet’s Gary Kemp - a longtime fan of early Floyd - along with keyboard player Dom Beken, and within six weeks they were playing their first pub gig. Not before long they were touring, travelling (and sleeping) on a tour bus and toasting their own bagels in hotel lobby breakfast bars, a far cry from the rarified, private jet-carried life most of the Saucers would have been used to in their past lives. That it felt like a brand new band - even with Mason turning 74 at the time - was not lost on them, but it was a love of playing the material, some of which, the first time they’d been heard live for 50 years or more, that drove them.

This comes across strongly in the Roundhouse show, which is released today on Blu-ray Disc, DVD, double vinyl LP and CD. “Syd had a strange way of writing, which made it sound like a ‘normal’ pop song, and then it would lurch into something else," Mason told Billboard. "[That] makes it such a great vehicle for us.” All the Saucers have talked of their performances as having a punk sensibility, albeit in a more venerated form. “The trouble with the later [Pink Floyd] albums," says Mason, "is that we ended up with a tendency of trying to play them [live] as perfectly as they were recorded. But Syd’s writing is interesting, because it covers really quite a wide sort of genres, so this material is so much easier to wander off and do one’s own version of, say, the slightly bucolic, almost folk song-type rural idyll of Scarecrow, or the very free-form Astronomy Domine, or Interstellar Overdrive.”

Mason, one suspects, couldn’t wait to get out and play this rich catalogue of material, which largely comes from the Piper At The Gates Of Dawn and A Saucerful Of Secrets albums, the only records Barrett played on before leaving amid increasing struggles with LSD and, tragically, the eventual breakdown of his mental health. “I’ve always been interested in the idea of exploring the old catalogue,” Mason told Billboard, saying that he was always wary of “the tyranny of the ‘Big Four’” - The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall. “After the [Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains] Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition, I was reminded how special and undervalued the early period of Pink Floyd is," Mason says. "Then Lee Harris came along with the suggestion of putting a band together. It had been 25 years since I’d been out with a band playing live, but it made me realise I wanted to play this music live again, so the timing was everything.”

Guy Pratt

“Confining the setlist to pre–Dark Side songs makes so much sense,” Pratt says in the same Rolling Stone piece. “Those songs are incredible and you never hear them. To me, it’s a new band. And a lot of them have never been played before, so it feels really fresh. It’s really punk-y and Krautrock-y. It’s got all sorts of different energies in it.”

Gary Kemp concurs: “The best review was our first review,” he recalled to Rolling Stone. “Neil McCormick [Daily Telegraph rock critic] called it ‘Punk Floyd,’ which I loved, because there is that energy Floyd had before they became posh. When we got the band together, it wasn’t like, ‘Well, let’s try and emulate those records.’ Also, we’re not trying to be a tribute band. Nick is the genuine article, so we agreed, ‘Let’s make this band as fresh as we possibly can.’”

Of all of Mason’s recruits, perhaps Kemp is the most surprising addition, especially as he takes on the Saucers’ lead vocal duties, a role never undertaken in his pop star days. Live At The Roundhouse also reveals him to be a far more gifted guitarist than his Spandau past let on (not to mention playing Ronnie Kray…). It shouldn’t be forgotten, though, that he was their  principle songwriter. “I’ve known Gary for a few years before, but I had no idea how passionate he was about it – and how well he knew the songs and knew the music,” Mason explained to Ultimate Classic Rock. “I think he’s been one of the great surprises and assets to this whole enterprise. Because everyone knows that he’s a great songwriter who has written a couple of really mega hits, and Spandau Ballet was seen as the New Romantics – hardly Pink Floyd territory – but he just seemed to slide straight into it.”

Gary Kemp

Kemp himself told Rolling Stone that his route into early Floyd came via David Bowie and even the Sex Pistols. “Syd [Barrett] was definitely an inspiration for both of those artists, and they were both hugely important to me. Also, as someone who comes from London, I kind of get where Syd’s head was at. Plus, there’s the unique style of storytelling that Syd had - never in the same voice twice. That as an actor myself helped me approach the songs in character.”

Returning to songs he hadn’t played on, in most cases, for almost five decades presented some challenges for Mason. “I remembered the basics,” he says, “but what I underestimated were the complexities that Syd had written into them. I’ve always feared becoming my own tribute band. The bands who do that, I’ve never wished to stop them. But for me, rock n' roll has always been about one’s own interpretation of the music, and Syd’s music is perfect for that.”

It’s something Mason muses on in an interview with Ultimate Classic Rock, and a song dating back to 1967, Vegetable Man. Originally recorded as a follow-up to the semi-hit single See Emily Play, Mason heard it afresh as part of Pink Floyd’s The Early Years: 1965-1972 box set “It’s sort of an unfinished work,” says Mason. “In a way, it’s a nice little cameo of what Syd did. One of the strange things [about Syd’s work] is the variety of music styles. Because some people, I think, point at Vegetable Man as a sort of early punk thing in a way, which it is. It’s got that driving four-to-the-floor sort of beat. But also then there’d be the rural, almost fairy story – Gnome, Scarecrow-type of songs. Or Bike even. And then there’d be some wilder [songs like] Interstellar Overdrive, with improvised sections and, for rock 'n' roll, really unusual things where the rhythm breaks down and you’re left with a sort of soundscape for maybe five or 10 minutes.”

While Mason has found new joy in reviving the Floyd’s oldest music, there is also an underlying sadness for the man who played such an integral part to defining it, more so than Roger Waters or Richard Wright, the other original members, or Gilmour who joined as Syd Barrett was becoming ever more erratic and eventually replaced him. “I think there’s a lot of mixed emotions with the whole Syd thing,” Mason told Ultimate Classic Rock. “Because in some ways, he was so smart in so many ways. I think there’s a bit of sadness now looking back on it – and a little bit of guilt. Not really guilt, but we handled Syd very badly. We had no idea – and still don’t really know – what the real problem was, whether it was LSD or whether it was something in his character anyway. Or whether, in fact, he was probably clearer than we ever perceived and he just didn’t actually want to be in a band, necessarily. While we thought if he didn’t want to be in a band, it was a sign of madness – because we were all at that point, absolutely committed to doing it. But I think he maybe just thought, ‘Well, I’ve done that. I don’t really want to do anymore of it.’ But instead of just going ... we should have probably let him go much earlier or separated from him earlier. But as I say, we had no idea at the time.”

Picture: Facebook/Nick Mason's Saucerful Of Secrets

Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets are, then, a strange outfit to characterise. They are, in some ways, the ultimate tribute act, but nor are they a revival band, either. Live At The Roundhouse is a joy to watch because there is a profound energy that comes through songs I’d largely never heard before. That is mainly due to my exposure to Pink Floyd having been almost exclusively the 1970s-era albums, and the continuation of that legacy through David Gilmour and Roger Waters’ separate, alienated, tours and albums that have drawn on the same songs, sounds and even themes of the “Big Four”. Mason and his band are right in positioning the Saucers as almost a brand new act, even playing brand new songs. It’s a timely reminder that sometimes it’s worth revisiting music that has developed an unfair stigma over time. Some of the early prog rock albums, for example, should be listened to objectively, and you’ll hear song structures and landscapes that appear on much more recent, acclaimed material by Blur or Radiohead. Some, of course, is less easy to listen to.

And that’s the fun of Live At The Roundhouse. Far from being a snapshot of another time, the 22-song set - which includes as many obscurities as better known Pink Floyd tracks like Interstellar Overdrive, Astronomy Domine, Arnold Layne, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun and One Of These Days - should serve as an introduction. Even, a resetting of prejudices about a band that once flew the flag for commercial juggernauts (through no fault of their own - they just made a few albums that sold in mind-boggling numbers). It just would be nice for the Saucers to be allowed out on the road to tour these songs again, but that’s a blog post for another day.

No pressure, then: the season ahead for Frank Lampard

If you’ve been hearing the noise of a chequebook creaking open and shut from Moscow, Tel Aviv, a Moonraker-style space station, or wherever Roman Abramovich bases himself these days, it’s because the Russian has made a spectacular return to the largesse that transformed Chelsea 17 years ago. The oligarch can be pretty much singularly credited for transforming the club from perennial strugglers, trading off former glories and lurching from existential crisis to existential crisis, into serial trophy winners and default members of the so-called ‘big six’.

Whatever the arguments about "buying success" (yeah, tell that to Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, PSG and, for a long period of time, Manchester United...), the outlay that marked Abramovich's first decade or so as Chelsea's owner made a notable disappearance as he appeared to lose interest, apparently the result of Britain having a downer on friends of the Russian regime. An abrupt halt was called to the redevelopment of Stamford Bridge amid suggestions (denied) that an application to renew Abramovich's 'investor visa' had been withdrawn. Even the oligarch himself was rumoured to be sounding out potential suitors for the club, though this proved to be nothing more than rumour. The club's spending profile did, though, appear more muted, to be curbed further by the UEFA ban on signing new players that took effect at the beginning of last season, just as Frank Lampard took over as head coach of the club where he is, rightfully, revered as a playing legend.

Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

You could say that Lampard, in only his second management role after just a single season at Derby County, was taking on the notoriously trepidatious Chelsea gig with one hand tied behind his back and both ankles strapped together.

His maiden season meant blooding in a talented pool of youngsters that had, hitherto, been out on a never-ending carousel of loans, along with somewhat ageing figures that, if push came to shove, would have been surplus to requirements. On top of that, he’d be shorn of the club talisman, Eden Hazard, sold to Real Madrid at the end of the season before. Given all this, a fourth place finish, resulting in Champions League qualification, plus an appearance in the FA Cup Final, could be seen as over-achievement.

In fact, at any other club it would be. But this is Chelsea. Even for a season that ended better than anyone gave Lampard credit for (most would have generously said “top ten” and left it at that), the club’s expectations of their young manager were still left unfulfilled, according to some suggestions. Luckily, Lampard spent 13 years at the club as a player, and saw plenty of managers come and go, including the revered Carlo Ancelotti, always believed to be the model coach Abramovich desired when he bought the club.

So, no pressure, then, on Lampard for his own sophomore season. Especially when the club has become the Premier League's most vibrantly active club in the summer transfer market, so far spending anything up to £230 million on exciting European talent. Kai Havertz (21), Timo Werner (24), Hakim Ziyech (27), plus Ben Chilwell (23), the veteran Thiago Silva and, we understand, the imminent arrival of goalkeeper Edouard Mendy, have all been acquired to augment a side that, last season, showed plenty of attack but lacked robustness at the back.

Hakim Ziyech and Ben Chilwell
Picture: Twitter/@ChelseaFC

There is still the possibility, too, that Declan Rice - a Chelsea academy product - might be prised away from West Ham, though not if David Moyes has his say, having slapped a £90 million sprig of garlic around the versatile centre-back’s neck. Given that Chelsea’s net outlay is 'only' £80 million in this window, due to the fact Hazard’s residual fee will eventually reach £150 million, Rice might still prove an irresistible target for Marina Granovskaia’s impressively administered kitty.

The need to strengthen Chelsea’s squad hasn’t simply been to plug the obvious defensive gaps that could, last season, have undermined things more seriously. While 2019-20 was accepted as a fallow year, given the ban and an accommodation around the youth/ageing contingent, a gulf opened up with Liverpool and, to a lesser extent, Manchester City, the latter of whom enjoy a similar lap of benefactor luxury. This time around, Manchester United continue to be a threat - perhaps more than they did last season - and Arsenal under Mikel Arteta are growing in stature, buoyed by titles acquired at both ends of August. And there is still Tottenham, but let's just leave that there for now.

Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp may have recently dismissed Chelsea’s summer spending, but the reopening of the Abramovich coffers has allowed the club to remain supremely competitive in the attacking department. Havertz is one of Europe’s hottest properties - coveted, apparently, by both Liverpool and City - and accordingly didn’t come cheap, especially at a time when most clubs have reigned in spending. Chelsea have appeared to remain in relatively good fiscal health throughout the last few months, apparently not having to make any redundancies or even (from what I hear) furloughs due to the pandemic. Even the season ticket situation remains up in the air for 2020-21 renewals (we’re still in credit for the games closed off to spectators since March). Normally they can't wait to send out the renewal notice in May. All of this doesn’t mean the largesse hasn't come at a price. There are still surplus players for Granovskaia to offload in order to reduce a wage bill that represented almost two-thirds of the club’s 2019 turnover. And that challenge will potentially include finding a home for the arguably toxic and decidedly pricey Kepa Arrizabalaga.

As Chelsea’s season kicks off, properly, tonight at Brighton, there's no guarantee that the new crop will inject last term's missing ingredients, but from the outset, they certainly look like an exciting set of additions. Lampard’s challenge is to make them gel, to fit an effective system and then ensure none of the home-grown products who stepped into the breach last time are alienated. There’s no doubt that in Havertz, Ziyech and Werner, significant competition has been provided for Mason Mount, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Tammy Abraham, the serial loanees returned to the fold by Lampard, with only the pre-ban signing Christian Pulisic to augment things. On balance, they all did well, but they still enjoyed something of a free ride without a vast amount of hard challenging from within the squad. Fresh challengers will only do them good, as long as ambitious agent-fathers/brothers/uncles don’t start agitating via the tabloid back pages.

While attention will inevitably fall on the exciting array of attackers now at Lampard's disposal, scrutiny will not ease on the defensive shape that collectively shipped 79 goals in all competitions last season. The arrival of Silva’s experience and Chilwell’s much-needed left-back capabilities will shore things up (and Rice would be a compelling addition to either defence or the base of midfield), but Lampard will also need to settle on a line-up that went through endless permutations, with eight different defenders starting in ten matches or more last season. There will need to be further maturing, too, of Reece James and, if he isn’t loaned out to Everton, Fikayo Tomori, both exciting talents but with some development still do be done.

Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

Taking the bigger picture, Lampard is, at 42, in an incredible position. He probably has more leeway than most Chelsea managers - though only just - and as long as Abramovich and Granovskaia let him get on with shaping a squad of undoubted youthful talent, the prospect of giving Liverpool and City a run for their money is high. Lampard, former Chelsea winger Pat Nevin said recently, isn’t just building a team, but “a dynasty”. Quite a bold claim. "If you equalise [the outlay] over the two years, it's not a mad amount of money with the income from Hazard and Morata [Alvaro, a £58 million distress sale to Atlético Madrid],” Nevin told the BBC. “Also, Chelsea weren't expected to reach the Champions League two seasons in a row, which makes a massive difference to their finances."

In Granovskaia, Chelsea have a shrewd businesswoman. The £71 million paid for Havertz could be realised tremendously, much as Hazard was, bought for £32 million and whose sale to Real Madrid made four times that amount. Lampard, though, won’t be looking at his squad of young talents as lucrative investments to be harvested. He’ll be focused on one thing: not getting sacked. There’s no immediate suggestion that he is in the firing line, but Abramovich, lets face it, has form. Last season’s fourth spot, Champions League football secured and a cup final appearance will never be enough for the Chelsea owner.

The conventional wisdom, then, is that Lampard’s backing by the club’s supporters, as well as his legacy in blue, would make him harder to sack than any of the predecessors strewn along the way by Abramovich. But the Russian hasn’t shelled out £200 million-plus in recent weeks without expecting an immediate return, and football results - arguably more than even financial results - are what he craves the most.