The future is here, finally, and it bites

In a week in which the UK passed the grim milestone of 100,000 coronavirus deaths, pretty much all other bets are off. Least of which, any carping about being denied life's simpler pleasures. You could, I suppose, measure the COVID timeline in terms of what has been curtailed and when.Take, for example, No Time To Die, the new Bond film: originally scheduled for November 2019, then shunted by reshoots to February last year, it was then kiboshed altogether by the emerging pandemic. The latest date, we're told, is this October. 

But whereas the Bond producers will easily earn their investment back, the music industry has been faring less well. There’s been no shortage of releases over the last ten months - many recorded stoically in home studio lockdown - but it’s live performance that artists seem to make their money from these days. Which means that if you’ve got an ambitious album and tour concept, these last few months will have been frustrating. 

Take, then, Steven Wilson, whose sixth solo album, The Future Bites, is finally released today. When I first spoke to him about it, it was the autumn of 2019, and the album was, by then, mostly ‘in the can’, bar some final tweaks. The next Christmas, when we met, he was justifiably excited by the concept being developed for the album, which would roughly follow a theme of commenting on the trappings of modernity (including online shopping - ironically before it became such a lifeline), and the ambitious, multimedia approach that would accompany its release. And then the virus struck, pushing back, first, the album's release, and then an extravagant tour that would see him headline London’s O2 Arena. 

That, in itself, was a massive milestone in his solo career. Because, let’s face it, you don’t just get to play the O2 if you don’t have the chops - or the audience - to fill it. Sadly, rescheduling has forced the O2 gig to be cancelled altogether, but a new tour will commence in September that will see Wilson play major cities, including a date at the legendary Hammersmith Apollo. It is, though, heartbreaking, as The Future Bites represents, without doubt, Wilson’s most adventurous breakthrough to date - in a more-than 30-year career that has seen him responsible for more albums than I can actually count, what with his Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, No-Man and numerous, relentless other projects. That’s a big claim, I know, but hear me out.

First, though, the history lesson, because I realise that I’ve been prattling away about someone you may not have even heard of. Which is, Wilson admits with heavy reluctance, par for the course. As a piece in The Times today points out, he may well be the most successful British rock star who can go shopping at his local Waitrose without being asked to pose for a selfie. And, yet, I’ve witnessed punters camped outside Parisian theatres hoping for a glimpse of him, or standing en masse in restaurants to raise their wine glasses in adulation. 

Despite this, however, and despite his last album, To The Bone, reaching number three in the UK (kept off the top by two blokes named Ed Sheeran and Elvis Presley…), and despite even selling out the Royal Albert Hall three nights running on the album’s tour, Steven Wilson is still the rock star you’ve never heard of. Mainstream radio even gives him a giant swerve, which I find baffling. To The Bone represented a change of direction, not only with a new record company (Universal offshoot Caroline International) and better promotion (which even saw him appearing in an extended live interview on BBC Breakfast), but with a record that blatantly embraced Wilson’s love of 80s pop. There was even an ABBA-esque single, Permanating, which delightfully confounded the fans that had followed him from the era of his proto-prog band Porcupine Tree, which had sort of evolved from an at-home bedroom project and into one of the more sizeable touring forces of the 1990s and early 2000s. 

However, that P-word - “prog” - may well be the sprig of garlic that keeps radio programmers at bay. He is unashamed of his association with the form (the oft-told story of his upbringing is that his first two musical influences were the Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon and Donna Summer’s Love To Love You Baby, gifts exchanged by his parents, Maureen and Mike, one Christmas). As an adult, his professional sideline remixing albums for King Crimson and Yes has maintained further links to the genre. However, he has also produced multichannel versions of albums by Roxy Music, XTC, Ultravox and Tears For Fears, revealing more than just an ear for more expansive pop.

Which brings us, kind of, to The Future Bites. Before getting into its thematic concept, it is a markedly different album to much of what Wilson has been known for. But not all. While Porcupine Tree may have been born out of a teenage soup of long hair and Home Counties rock guitar, Wilson’s own interests were being spread across an eclectic range of styles, some of which manifested themselves in the No-Man group with long-term friend and collaborator Tim Bowness. On his adolescent bedroom wall in Hemel Hempstead there was a poster of Prince who, along with David Bowie, has been a constant figure in his musical DNA. While his professional music direction would take a somewhat avant-garde rock route, electronic music would always be in his listening palette. Which is why the first thing you notice about The Future Bites is just how unlike a rock album it is. Throughout, it delivers atmosphere over bombast, restrained drum machine beats over epic tom-tom crashes, and while Wilson has always been quite deft at melodic songwriting, melodicism drives the textures of all nine tracks.

What also drives them is the underlying theme: the modern world. Wilson is, like me, 53 (we were actually born a week apart), but don’t mistake that statement for some prematurely aged fellow railing at things. The theme is more a reflection on the Internet age and how online behaviour pervades every aspect of life, from our perception of news to our absorption of information, how we relate to culture and even our addiction to online consumerism. Such a premise could sound dystopian, I agree, but the narrative Wilson puts forward is wry and observational. And it blends seamlessly with a musical approach that surely - surely - must place him more than ever onto the mainstream radar. In this regard, one track stands out for its employment of one Elton Hercules John, arguably pop’s most extravagant consumer, who Wilson arranged - through a friend of a friend - to have intone a series of consumer durables for Personal Shopper, a pulsing EDM track that offers a delightfully cynical take on online impulse buying. “Buy for comfort, buy for kicks/Buy and buy until it makes you sick”, Wilson sings, before Sir Elt kicks in with a shopping list that includes sunglasses, teeth whitener and even - cheekily - deluxe edition box sets…of which I confess to being guilty of…

Purist fans might baulk at the apparent absence of guitars on the album (there are, in fact, plenty, it’s just that they’re not turned all the way up to 11), but you get a sense that in being more atmospheric - and electronic - Wilson has given himself more room to move within. Thus, King Ghost is lush and reflective. On the other hand, 12 Things I Forgot chimes in with a snappy line in acoustic guitar accompaniment to a beautiful, strident pop song about regretful reminiscence. 

Both, however, bring out the best in co-producer David Kosten (aka Faultline), whose own solo work as well as production for Bat For Lashes and Everything Everything has accentuated a gift for texture. There are shades here, too, and in the background, of some of the myriad influences that play on Wilson’s ear, perhaps, labelmate Tame Impala on the scintillating Man Of The People (which, add Neil Tennant, could give the Pet Shop Boys a serious run for their money) or, at a squint, the funk of Wilson’s teenage hero, Prince, on Self IQ.

I may, in this review, have given the impression that The Future Bites is some wild departure from Wilson’s usual fare, and it is indeed another tonal shift. Some of his hardcore fans might rankle at that, but anyone who’s been paying close attention to his career will have noticed that change has been constant. Some changes, he’ll admit, have been more subtle than others, but he has never accepted the view that he is beholden to any one form of music, even if that dreaded ‘P’ word follows him everywhere. 

If there is any sort of compromise, it’s on the closing song, Count Of Unease. It’s what I call a proper closing song. I used to have this theory that, when putting albums together, artists would always programme them so that the final track of the record provides a sunset, a touch of autumnal melancholy. As a teenager, I would hear that final track fading out and feel sad that the whole experience was over. I later found out that, in the pre-digital days, how a vinyl record was sequenced owed more to the physics of certain types of songs requiring more plastic to accommodate bass and rhythm. I still don’t understand the science, so I will gladly settle for the notion that the closing song is indeed a farewell. Count Of Unease is that song, and to bridge to my previous point, is eminent of both the electronica throughout The Future Bites, but also the aural clues that have been there in Wilson’s music, right from the beginning. For all Porcupine Tree’s flights of prog-meets-metal grandeur, there were also lighter-touch moments of atmos and grace. 

Here is just that. But, rather than representing closure, it sets Wilson up for the next record (work of which is, I gather, already in progress), and the first strokes on a blank canvas that remind those just coming to his music that there are no rules to hit. He will always do whatever he damn well likes, and is all the more interesting for it.

Tales from the other end of the planet: Steve Kilbey's Eleven Women

Music will do strange things to a fellow. In normal times, it’s what turfed me out of bed at Rude O'Clock to queue for a must-have “exclusive” on Record Store Day that would, quite probably, be freely available later in the year. And at a more sensible price, too. It’s the same mild insanity that once sent me on a 12-hour road trip just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers album (for context, I was on holiday in Mammoth Lakes, California, and the nearest Tower Records was in Fresno. To me, a 750-mile round trip seemed a logical use of free time). 

By similar token, I once went to Montreux for the day just to see Prince. The lengthy return train journey, plus two days off work, was totally worth being crammed into the Jazz Festival's Stravinsky Auditorium, wedged against the stage edge with a heaving crowd of 4,000 behind me, just to see Prince deliver three sweaty, cramp-inducing hours of funk, with hardly any hits. It will always be one of the greatest musical experiences of my life.

My last marathon music trip was again in California: in May 2019 I found myself in Los Angeles for work and discovered that legendary Aussie wooze merchants The Church were playing up the road. The fact that "up the road” was Santa Cruz, a six-hour, 380-mile yomp up Interstate 5, was somewhat immaterial. What was important was that The Church were playing, in its entirety, Starfish, the record that introduced me to them. With the luscious Under The Milky Way and Reptile, it was an album of the moment, produced as so many were in that period with an emphasis on mood and jangly guitars. It was the band's deserved breakthrough, placing them in the pantheon of global Antipodean rock exports in the 1980s, like INXS, Crowded House and Midnight Oil. Until 2015 I’d somewhat lost touch with The Church, until I was alerted to them playing the poky New Morning club in Paris, where I was living at the time, and in promotion of a new album, Further Deeper. It was, however, something of a disappointment, largely down to frontman Steve Kilbey appearing somewhat worse for wear. Thankfully, the Santa Cruz experience four years later was a wholesale improvement, making the drive up from LA, the overnight stay and the glorious trip back down California's more scenic Highway 101 all worth it. You can read my recollections of that gig here.

Kilbey has, however, been a fascinating character to follow, from afar. An enigmatic frontman, his dabblings in music, poetry, painting and even acting, are not the symptoms of a dilettante character but, simply, manifestations of one of those people who just have an abundance of creativity about them. Thus, his latest solo album, Eleven Women, is the product of a prolific output over the last 30-odd years, being his 12th solo release (in 2014 it was reported that British-born Kilbey had 750 original songs registered with Australia’s copyright agency, the APRA). In fact, Eleven Woman was the fourth new record Kilbey had been involved in last year, like so many others in his profession, applying himself creatively during the lockdown at home in Sydney. Kilbey, however, hadn’t even planned to make a solo album, having expected to spend 2020 touring and recording with The Church.

Picture © Naomi Dryden-Smith

The result is an album that is at turns heartwarming and enjoyably baffling. Loosely, it’s a series of 11 sketches about women, similar in premise, I suppose, to Eleanor Rigby, but with a lens distinctly similar to that which Kilbey applies in his painting. You could - at risk of a convoluted metaphor - look at Eleven Women as pencil sketches with dabs of paint on some, full colour washes on others, and more intricate brushwork elsewhere. There is psychedelia, such as opener Poppy Byron, with its mesh of guitars - some jangly, some Balearic - and 60s-vibe congas. Or Where Gloria Meets Rachel, which purrs along with a beautiful 12-string and mandolin shimmer. Kilbey’s post-punk sensibilities show through on Woman Number 9, which has echoes of Bowie’s Berlin period, although the vocal owes more to Syd Barrett’s whimsy as much as anything else. 

Over the 11 tracks there is a driving curiosity to Eleven Women, as it takes subtle left and right turns, the music and Kilbey’s at-times obscure lyrics combining to maintain constant interest from start to finish.  Some, like Shiba Chiba and Queen Of Spades veer into pure pop, while the moody Lillian In Cerulean Blue takes Kilbey’s bassy vocal into Ian McCulloch territory, a clear contemporary of The Church's breakthrough early alt-rock era. Kilbey’s vocals are, it has to be said, never the surest, but then there are plenty out there (or were out there) who were never exactly pure, either, from Dylan and Leonard Cohen to Mark E. Smith and even Morrissey. It depends on what you’re looking for, I suppose. On a track like Josephine (no, not a cover of Chris Rea’s AOR staple), a rustic, folky ballad, Kilbey’s singing weaknesses are highlighted, but on the quirky Birdeen, it reaches a similar tone to Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett (yeah, yeah - lazy Australian trope, I know), which fits the song with perfection.

It was only after listening to Eleven Women that I discovered it was a classic lockdown production, recorded in just three days. That might suggest an artist in a hurry, but my reading was that Kilbey wanted to create immediacy. Albums can, if the people behind them are so inclined, take an inordinate amount of time to produce: just look at the decades between Peter Gabriel’s output, or the 18 months Bruce Springsteen laboured for to create Born To Run. Eleven Women doesn’t suffer from rapidity at all, even if Kilbey only recorded a couple of takes for each song. Rather than produce something slapdash, he’s created something warm, quirky, at times humorous, always genuine and quite unique.

No words. Just a number.

A little old blog like this is hardly going to make much impact on the way things are going with the coronavirus in the UK, but it's difficult not to pass comment on yesterday's grim milestone of the nation passing 100,000 deaths. 

In March, with fatalities already emerging around the world, Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK's chief scientific adviser, said the following: "If we can get this down to 20,000 [deaths] and below, that is a good outcome in terms of where we would hope to get to with this outbreak." 

Ten months on, we've reached five times that number, and are currently witnessing a rolling daily average of 1200 deaths within 28 days of a positive test. While Vallance's counterpart Professor Chris Whitty offered some respite yesterday, revealing that the death rate was flattening, the UK is still experiencing the equivalent attrition of ten medium-sized airliners crashing with all on board every single day.

I'll admit, the virus has filled me with crippling fear from the outset, ever since I discovered - ironically around the same time as it reached British shores - that I was extremely clinically vulnerable to it. My own brush with COVID in November was mild, but could have easily gone another way. A piece in The Times today picks out a handful of disparate victims. It includes a 21-year-old care home worker with no known underlying health conditions; a 25-year-old, healthy GP surgery administrator; a fit, 6ft 5in hospital worker aged 52; and so on. There's little denying that some 97% of all virus deaths have occurred within people with such underlying problems, but there is also a frightening rate of death amongst the young and the healthy, complicating the view that COVID-19 only affects the old, those from ethnic minorities or those with so-called co-morbidities. In other words, any one of us.

My clinical vulnerability led me, last week, to have a vaccination, for which I am truly grateful. My near-91-year-old mother had hers a few days before, for which I am even more grateful. My partner, a primary school teacher, still required to go into work every day, has to wait in the queue like everyone else under the age of 50. You can't help feeling that vast sections of the population are simply ticking timebombs. The vaccination programme, however, is not the point I have quarrel with. Frankly, it's been amazing that we've gone from 0-60 as it is in getting the vaccines developed and administered to almost seven million people in Britain, given that it was only at the end of December 2019 that the coronavirus was identified as a potential danger to global life. Throughout the pandemic, a vaccine was seen as the exit path out of the crisis, and once it is administered to everyone, there's no scientific reason to think that it won't be. But that's of little comfort to the bereaved families of the 100,000 victims COVID-19 has cut down in this country.

However, when the public enquiry comes - and come it surely will - serious questions need to be asked of how the Government handled the outbreak. Lessons must be learned and implemented. It's no use Boris Johnson apologising and saying that he did everything that could have been done: because political decisions were made which, without any doubt in my mind, enabled the virus to spread. Why, for example, are we only now talking about borders being shut and strict quarantine rules being put in place, when last March our airports were operating as normal, with passengers arriving at Heathrow from any hotspot in the world, getting on the Tube and heading off into the community? Why was Track & Trace such an unmitigated disaster? Why was the distribution of PPE so badly handled? Why were care homes treated as fodder for the virus to reap its worse through patients discharged from hospitals? Why were schools not closed when they could have been? And just what impact did the Prime Minister's tolerance of Dominic Cummings' Barnard Castle jaunt have on public attitudes to following the rules? 

The UK now stands with countries of significantly higher populations - like the United States, India and Brazil - as having one of the world's highest death rates from the coronavirus. When the pandemic broke out in places like Spain, Italy and France we all drew breath sharply and hoped that it wouldn't happen here. Well, it has, and now the UK has Europe's highest death rate. An island. 

It's not so much an issue about politics versus expertise. You can take the COVID-sceptics' view that the likes of Witty and Vallance are doom-mongers, but they are also just doing their job, to the best of their ability, in providing objective medical and scientific facts. Political decision-making has been clearly behind every intransigent delay in putting critical measures in place. Whether it's Johnson's perennial need to appease his backbenchers, or simply his own desire to be a people pleaser, there are fundamental flaws in his character which have played their part in the UK's response to the pandemic. 

I don't envy anyone in government right now - genuinely. The oft-repeated statement that we're facing the greatest crisis since the Second World War is fully justified. But what got the UK through those six years was a mixture of human resilience, application and a collective spirit. When I've seen people refusing to wear masks, or holding christening parties, or any of the other breaches of lockdown rules, I see more than just examples of miscreants needing to be told to "put that light out", but a societal failing that requires greater enforcement. And that has needed tougher decisions made sooner rather than later. Because, at risk of appearing selfish, I have no desire to go out of this world in the same way as 100,000 of my fellow citizens have done, and I certainly don't wish it on any of the people I love. 

Be careful of what you wish for, Part. 94

Picture: Twitter/@TTuchelofficial

A day and a half has passed since Frank Lampard was fired as Chelsea head coach, providing a brief window of time in which to consider his downfall, and give thought to his successor. Frankly, Lampard’s departure still stings, though I suppose that sensation, as with all managerial firings - at Chelsea or anywhere else - will recede. Reading some of the coverage, including The Athletic’s forensic examination of what was going on behind the scenes at the club, probably means there should be no room for naïveté or sentiment. The bare facts are that Chelsea were in a slump, Lampard’s results weren’t showing any sign of improving, and the club hierarchy either couldn’t see the path out of that, or were prepared to give it time. That’s football, but also, more specifically, Chelsea.

I won’t pretend that the nature of Lampard’s departure has left a bitter taste in the mouth. True, his win average was only 52%, but then Manchester United’s Ole Gunnar Solksjaer currently stands at 47%; true, Chelsea were sitting ninth in the Premier League this morning, whereas at the beginning of December they were first; and, yes, the performances in the last few weeks were, at times, lifeless and prominently lethargic. But then what club doesn’t go through such schisms? More time was needed to get the best out of all the players under Lampard’s charge, even the under-performing Werner and Havertz, though the contentious Kepa (allegedly one of the sources of internal rupture between the manager and de facto club chief executive Marina Granovskaia) is probably beyond redemption.

I’m not going to present myself as Captain Hindsight (© B. Johnson) here, and say “I told you so”, but I can’t be the only Chelsea fan who was nervous when the club’s all-time record goalscorer was appointed in 2019, with only a season of club management under his belt. My nerves, though, weren't so much about Lampard's inexperience, as the surefire prospect that he would, inevitably and eventually, get sacked and how, then, would we deal with that. Experience of the club’s appointments of Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli, promoted from the playing staff under a previous regime, should have taught us that such fan-friendly romantic measures can end in tears. Lampard’s appointment was, I suppose, no different, and would have been much the same if the club had appointed John Terry or, even, former youth coach Brendan Rodgers. 

The media narrative was always that Frank’s personal connection to the club bought him more time than most under Roman Abramovich, but the bottom line is that no one gets time under the oligarch, “favourite son” or not. Personally, I’m of the slightly cynical belief that Lampard was a PR appointment at the time: with the club dealing with the loss of Eden Hazard and facing a UEFA transfer ban, replacing Maurizio Sarri with another continental technocrat of any standing was going to be unlikely to pull off. Installing Lampard to put a smile back on fans’ faces after the moribund Sarri tenure, connecting with the terraces, so to speak, at a time when there was no other option but to play Chelsea’s much-vaunted youth product, made a lot of sense. This quickly became a “project”, a neat way of positioning an experiment, but it served all purposes. But, as Pep Guardiola pointed out yesterday in his press conference: “People talk about projects and ideas. They don't exist. You have to win or you will be replaced.” And as two-times Chelsea manager José Mourinho added, with only tacit sympathy for his former protégé: “It is the brutality of football, especially modern football. When you become a manager you know that sooner or later it is going to happen to you.”

I don't think Lampard was ever going to get a long run at the job, regardless of his personal history with Chelsea. The club has made clear, with the lengthening roll-call of managers, that it is not interested in legacies, and if it has any interest in heritage, it is only fleeting. The managerial turnover is not a reflection of an impatient proprietor as much as one who just wants relentless success. If anything, it’s extreme fan behaviour. More reasonable fans, however, and especially those who’ve supported the club through good times and bad, and could therefore claim a more emotional bond, will disagree. Chelsea is not some faceless corporation whose financial results are a functional measure of success. Football is more than that, which means that attachments to managers and players go deep. We can be indifferent to some personnel comings and goings, especially with the commoditisation of journeymen figures. But some, who wear the badge with pride, and who have a genuine connection with the fanbase, mean something. They’re also becoming few and far between.

The argument, here, is that we have to move on, just simply because the club has. The manner with which Lampard was fired yesterday - called back into West London while he was driving out into Surrey and the club’s training base in Cobham - says it all. We don’t know the precise detail of the conversation he would have had with chairman Bruce Buck and Granovskaia (whose relationship with the manager had deteriorated in recent months, even before the slump in form), but reports say it was brief and terse. Lampard was even denied the opportunity to say goodbye to the players, who’d ominously been told to report to Cobham later than planned. Having experienced being both firee and firer, I can attest that these meetings are always - always - cold and businesslike. I can’t imagine it would have been any different for Lampard. As it will be, inevitably, for his successor. And his successor’s successor. And the one after that.

So what, then, of the next one? Thomas Tuchel arrives at Stamford Bridge with a reputation for technical excellence and the in-vogue managerial nationality of being German. Having been through their fair share of Italians, a couple of Portuguese, a Spaniard, a Brazilian, a Dutchman and an Israeli, plus that rare Englishman, Tuchel brings the Teutonic approach to Chelsea, an apparently admired football culture that has been led by Jürgen Klopp along with Leipzig’s Julian Nagelsmann and his assistant Ralf Rangnick, both of whom were in Chelsea’s sights but didn’t want to move mid-season. Tuchel is thought of as being an intellectual manager (predictably nicknamed 'The Professor'), someone whose early retirement through injury as a player, at just 25, led him to sink into deep philosophical study about football. He replaced Klopp at the bizarrely-named 1. FSV Mainz 05, where he lasted five years and was considered to be an out-of-the-box thinker, continuously tinkering with formations. 

It clearly impressed Borussia Dortmund, who brought him in, once again as a replacement for Klopp. However, things there eventually became strained, with chief executive Hans-Joachim Watzke saying the club had become “worn out" dealing with Tuchel’s reported control freakery. When he went to Paris Saint-Germain in the spring of 2018, Tuchel issued explicit instructions to the team’s chefs on menus and diet plans for his players, and even monitored their sleep patterns. His departure from PSG, last month, came after further ructions with the club’s hierarchy - notably sporting director Leonardo - over transfer policy and his use of star players, Kylian Mbappé and Neymar. PSG, arguably the only superstar team in France’s Ligue 1, were left in third place at Tuchel’s departure, a position that has caused much head scratching over his appeal to Chelsea. If you can’t be the league leader in, effectively, a one-team league, what chances does he have of meeting Roman Abramovich’s exacting expectations, expectations that couldn’t even retain someone of Frank Lampard’s club history?

Time will tell. The suspicion, however, is that Tuchel - like Lampard - will only be a short-term solution. Given his reputation for trouble, no one sees him as going the distance on a three-year contract (he has signed an 18-month deal with the option of an extension). That may just be Chelsea’s way. The combined £116 million spent on Timo Werner and Kai Havertz will make getting them playing to standards Tuchel’s immediate objective. Getting Chelsea back up the Premier League table will be the other one. There is some hope, however, of what Tuchel is not going to do, as so many of Chelsea’s shotgun managerial appointments do, and that is immediately start playing out-of-favour members of the squad. What’s not known is his philosophy on youth, for which Lampard was admired for bringing on Tammy Abraham, Mason Mount, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Reece James and Billy Gilmour. Lampard was largely forced into playing this Academy product due to the transfer ban, but Tuchel’s perspective will be framed by the £200 million-plus Chelsea spent in the summer. One spot of interest in the summer signings is Thiago Silva, the 36-year-old centre half that arrived for free from PSG. His role is seen as pivotal to shoring up the defence, so it would be reasonable to expect that a reunion with Tuchel could be of benefit. How the German does it, will be the subject of scrutiny. Whether he clashes heads with a notoriously intolerant leadership at Chelsea will be the constant subject of rumour. It’s hard to get excited about the new man coming in, partly because the pain of Lampard’s departure is still raw. But, also, because you know he won’t be around for long. 

When will they ever learn?

Well, we can't say we weren't warned. Frank Lampard's sacking has been on the cards, even before the mid-season slump. Some rumours suggest that the club was unhappy with things at the end of last season, Lampard's first in charge, and one which began with a transfer ban, the loss of Eden Hazard, and a reliance on fast-tracking youth, and ended with a FA Cup Final appearance, fourth spot in the Premier League and qualification for this season's Champions League (which, by the way, Chelsea are into the last 16).

But, then, this is Chelsea. Whatever the end-of-term report last summer said has merely been compounded by the indifferent form in recent weeks, losing five of the last eight league games and, then, not losing well. Yesterday's win over Luton Town in the FA Cup Fourth Round was a welcome fillip, but with more potential banana skin league fixtures coming up with Wolves on Wednesday and Burnley on Sunday, Roman Abramovich is clearly not taking any chances. The FA Cup is one thing. The Premier League is something else entirely. 

And, so, the wheel at Chelsea Football Club turns once more, with another manager making way after a short tenure. A penny, then, for the thoughts of Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp and even Ole Gunnar Solskjær, none of whom produced spectacular results in the early days of their time as managers at Manchester City, Liverpool and Manchester United, and yet have, generally, come extremely good. Lampard has had just 18 months in charge, admittedly with six or so of those with £200 million-plus worth of new players under his belt, including the likes of Timo Werner and Kai Havertz, Germans of whom much has been expected, and yet haven't yet delivered. The thinking now is that Lampard will be replaced by a German-speaking manager to get the best out of the pair, with Leipzig's Julian Nagelsmann and former PSG boss Thomas Tuchel high on the list, as well as Southampton's Ralph Hasenhüttl.

As this blog (and its predecessor) has catalogued, depressingly, Chelsea's impatience is frustrating. Then again, you could argue, somewhat coldly, that Chelsea's habit of dispensing with managers so frequently has been key to their success. It does, though, leave this fan in particular feeling dispirited. Club loyalty isn't bought by success. While we have, in the Abramovich era, enjoyed a success that wouldn't have seemed possible when I first went regularly to Stamford Bridge, with Chelsea playing in front of crowds of 7,000 in the old Second Division, we have always enjoyed a sense of entitlement to being something bigger (and in those days, far bigger than we actually were). Today, Chelsea are considered part of the "big six", a fact that still sticks in the craw of Liverpool and Manchester United fans who've experienced their own wilderness years (adding Tottenham to that cabal for good measure). But we are where we are, and Abramovich's largesse has got us there. And so it's only natural that he should be ruthless in protecting his investment. But with each managerial sacking - especially with someone universally liked, and particularly so, in the case of Lampard - a little piece of the love for Chelsea dies.

I get it. It's a business, and if you run a business badly, your board will remove you. But football is also a different animal. It's sport, performance sport. Elite players are not plug-and-play components, and while I don't even pretend to understand the science that goes into football coaching, I know that you can't just match up a coach and a set of expensively-assembled players and it all falls into place. And even when it does, new challenges come along. Again, just ask Guardiola, Klopp, Solskjær, Mourinho, Arteta or any one of the other Premier League managers who, at various times, walk the tightrope.

Time, we know, is not in the football manager's gift, and Chelsea managers in particular know this more than most. What frustrates me more than anything else about Lampard's sacking is not his exalted status as the club's all-time record goalscorer and a proper club legend, but that he hasn't been given time to develop the project. Success under Abramovich has to be instant. This, I also believe, is because he has too many people in his ear who are more concerned with what the football commentariat has to say than the actual reality. It feels like Lampard has been talked into the sack by media headlines saying that, though I'm sure the decision-making process was a lot more thorough than simply looking at the back pages.

Taking out, for a moment, the emotional attachment fans have to Lampard, he represented a challenge that always was going to need time. In his maiden season in charge, it was clear that the youngsters (and club youth products) he was forced to play, like Tammy Abraham, Mason Mount, Reece James and Callum Hudson-Odoi actually represented a promising future. They still do, of course, especially Mount, who was given the captain's armband yesterday against Luton and looked like it was his destiny, especially having been at Chelsea since he was six-years-old. Managerial comings-and-goings are part of football, so even to these youngsters Lampard's sacking won't be a surprise. These kids will not have been immune to the ruthlessness with which Abramovich has axed his managers (which isn't all that different to the attrition rate under Ken Bates). But taking the helicopter view, it's a worry that, having been brought on so far, a change of manager and the likelihood of someone with absolutely no past connection with this talented group will impede their development. Look how many loan spells Abraham had before any first team head coach would give him a start.

It remains to be seen who Chelsea will go with now, but it's safe to assume that the names of Tuchel and Nagelsmann appearing in the press is no coincidence. Tuchel, in particular, will be a divisive appointment, given his departure from PSG and the nature of his relationship with the French club's hierarchy. The bottom line, though, is that there doesn't seem to be the ideal Chelsea manager. None last long, not even a favourite son like Lampard. The last such gamble on a younger manager was André Villas-Boas, appointed in June 2011 and fired the following March. His replacement, Roberto Di Matteo - another club legend - went on to win the Champions League itself...only to be fired in the November after a dip in form. And so the cavalcade of managers - some popular choices, like Carlo Ancelotti, some less popular, like Rafa Benitez - has come and gone. At the same time, the club has won four league titles under three different managers, five FA Cup finals under as many head coaches, and three European trophies under three bosses. Yes, there may be some method in the madness, but it leaves the bitterest of tastes in the mouth. As The Times' chief football writer, Henry Winter, wrote prophetically this morning: "A personal wish would be for Lampard to be given until the end of the season, given a chance to get Chelsea back into the Champions League, and if he fails, at least Abramovich can look a club legend in the eye and say thanks but goodbye. Lampard certainly deserves that respect." That he does, that he does.

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It was no less a political analyst than Bruce Springsteen who called it in 2016: “The trouble at the moment is you have Donald Trump, who is talking about rigged elections,” he told Channel 4 News, prophetically before the-then presidential candidate returned to his obsession with rigged elections four years later. Springsteen goes on in the interview to predict that Trump would lose. He clearly got that wrong, but it was his next statement that struck home then as it does now with even more purchase: "He's such a flagrant, toxic narcissist that he wants to take down the entire democratic system with him if he goes."

“Toxic narcissist.” Two words that perfectly capture the man who became the 45th President of the United States, and when he did, subjected us to four years of unrelenting madness. You can decide for yourself whether this was real insanity or a form of eccentricity, but madness it has mostly resembled from the get-go, from the all-caps rants via Twitter to the endless revolving door of firings and hirings of cabinet secretaries and key staffers, plus the fanbase-bating dog whistles towards targets as varied as Mexico, Europe, China and even the UK’s “Muslim problem”. 

To his defenders, he’s been a breath of fresh air. “Drain the swamp,” he promised, as he took on Washington’s institutional culture and the mainstream “fake news” media (i.e. any outlet who didn’t sycophantically provide ra-ra for him). Week in, week out, day in, day out, the  “Me! Me! Me!”  tweets and self-regarding speeches have been endless. Quite what Trump actually achieved over these last four years in office is, actually, hard to ascertain. Jobs - at least until the pandemic - are up, they say. The economy - at least until the pandemic - is up, they say. The populist view is that America never had it so good, they say. History will judge.

Picture: Channel 4 News

Later in his Channel 4 interview, Springsteen added the following to his appraisal by saying how Trump was so unreflective: “He simply has no sense of decency, no sense of responsibility about him. The words that he’s been using over the past several weeks really are an attack on the entire democratic process. I think it’s very dangerous. He does have a lot of people’s ears, and I don’t think he’s going to go quietly, gently into the good night, I think he’s going to make as big a mess as he can, and I don’t know what that’s going to mean, but we’ll find out shortly.” Well, fast forward four years, and we are where we are. Tomorrow Trump will leave the White House, board Marine One and chopper out to Andrews Air Force Base. From there he’ll fly to his own Camelot, Mar-a-Lago, the sprawling but surprisingly modest golf resort in Florida that will presumably be the bunker in which he plots his next move. It's anyone's guess as to what that will be, even if we can optimistically hope for a period of quiet reflection out of the spotlight. Donald Trump, we have seen over these last four years, doesn’t do quiet reflection.

What he does leave behind is a ruptured America, scarred by the events on Capitol Hill and fearful for what might happen now. And well they might be, when you see scenes of heavily armed militiamen, like the 'Boogaloo Boys' roaming city streets with a staggering belligerence. This is not Mogadishu or the lawless reaches of Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq. No, we're talking about streets in the world’s biggest economy and its most powerful democracy. In fact, right now, there are more American soldiers in their nation’s capital city than currently in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq combined. That might be overblown precaution, but then it’s clear that the attack on the Capitol had been strongly hinted at beforehand by chatter on the Dark Web, so a chastened law enforcement establishment will not want to make the same mistake again before tomorrow’s inauguration.

The scenes outside and inside the Capitol on 6 January filled me with genuine sadness. I’ve spent more time in the United States as a visitor than any other country, spending annual holidays and long weekends there, visiting for work and even living there for two years. In fact, I was at home in California during 9/11, the last time the country felt genuinely afraid, but which rallied in the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. 9/11 showed America at its most resilient. Trump has shone a light on America at its most divided. 

He was always going to be an unconventional president, but that, going back four years, would have been a polite way of calling it. Twitter comes in for a lot of attention, but then, rightly so. It’s been his medium of choice. Rather than use conventional presidential mouthpieces, the 140 character limit (later raised to 280) provided unbridled access to his audience. At first it was even amusing: the actual Donald Trump (emphasised by the @realDonaldTrump handle) tweeting, not a team of millennial social media hotshots with Harvard degrees. No, the prez himself, from his very own iPhone, and often at a time of day when many assumed he was sat on the Shanks Vitreous, performing his morning ablutions as he ripped into individual opponents, institutions and topics that raised his ire. This daily, diarrheic river would drive the narrative of the next 48 months or so.

But, even if you regard this as eccentricity or, merely, an unconventional leader at work, another view emerges that goes beyond egomaniacal craziness. Eight months after he was sworn in, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote an excoriating profile, questioning whether he was, in fact, really all there. It was fascinating and frightening. Taibbi’s conclusion was that President Trump had become a very difficult personality to Donald J. Trump, celebrity property developer and reality show host. Irrationality, Taibbi argued, was, on some level, working for him. Until last November’s election result, the daily madness just became par for the course, the Twitter rants more tiresome, the firings and hirings monotonous, and even the brain farts about foreign targets (e.g. “Rocketman” Kim Jong-Un) sinister bluster. Somewhere along the way, however, we’ve gone from a Johnny Rotten figure saying “Boo!” for shock effect, to the apparent marshal of an insurrection. Trump’s leadership since the election has looked more like that of a cult chief, desperate even, with his “stolen election” rhetoric, blatant untruths and conspiracy theories, and even the hectoring of Georgia’s Secretary of State by phone. 

6 January seemed to be the final act. In hindsight, that rally in front of the White House now resembles an effective call to arms, Trump's very own Agincourt speech. The loud post-election grumbling about votes and other apparent injustices - the repeat cycle of 2016's theme - escalated to the point that Trump was now the leader of a fully mobilised militant cult. His  tacit endorsement of the extreme component of the audience assembled on Pennsylvania Avenue, fuelled by Rudy Giuliani’s call for “combat”, lit the blue touch paper. The crowd that stormed the Capitol had more than a wild staring eyed nature about their zeal. One pony-tailed backwoods type who leered into a television camera even resembled Dennis Hopper’s whacked-out photographer in Apocalypse Now (“Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet warrior in the classic sense.”). Trump as Colonel Kurtz? It's not that ridiculous.

The Capitol insurrection might not yet be the final act: the 20,000 National Guard troops, augmented by Secret Service special forces and a beleaguered police, are still expecting more, and even worse. Trump's final day in office is unfolding, and with it the potential for further mayhem, not least of which, the pardoning of hundreds - something in the president's gift - that could even include the president himself. Even this adds further to the exhaustion we’ve all been suffering from. I actually stopped following Trump on Twitter a while ago, as it was actually affecting my mental health. But now, in theory, it’s over. 

Whether you think Joe Biden will be a good president or not, we can’t have anything worse. Regardless of your politics, America was, mostly, doing fine until Trump came along. To return to the punk theme, that musical movement came along, briefly made some noise, shook the tree a little, and then things returned to normal. Trump as America's first punk president? Not so wild an idea. But instead of presenting a refreshing alternative, he's left a legacy of division, drawing out demons that have always been there, but thankfully had been kept hidden. Brexit had a similar effect here, and comparisons between what happened in Washington and the murder of MP Jo Cox shouldn’t go unnoticed.

The way forward, however, is now partly in Biden's hands, and partly in the hands of a Republican Party that made a Faustian pact with Trump to acquire power. Even if the Congressional impeachment vote last week showed a resilient latent support for Trump within his own party, the sentiment more broadly is that he’s a spent force, and a toxic one, too. If an impeachment trial in the Senate does render him unfit for any further public office, thus denying Trump a tilt at the 2024 vote, the party will have to move on and reflect. Right-wing fanaticism, however, didn’t end in April 1945 with a self-applied bullet in the Führerbunker. Acolytes of that particular strain have festered ever since, as Arnold Schwarzenegger's impassioned video the other week drew necessary comparison to.

Like it or not, Trump hasn’t gone for good. Even if he does choose to spend his time now trying to fix his ailing business empire or just playing a lot of golf, the Senate impeachment trial will keep him and his cult firmly in the spotlight. The madness is not quite over. Perhaps, though, America will be given the chance to heal, and return to the kind of political discourse led by intelligent reason, and not the ravings of a glorified bar room braggart, a Homer Simpson character perched on a stool in Moe's Tavern, giving forth his views on anything that enters his noggin.

Bored! Bored! Bored! Bored! Bored!

Those of you of a certain age and dispensation will recall the final episode of The Young Ones, which finds the Scumbag College quartet in the garden, their finals over, and numbed with boredom. 

To break the slump, Ade Edmondson’s Vyvyan comes out of the back door, swinging a cricket bat and shouting “Bored! Bored! Bored! Bored! Bored!”, before cartoonishly battering Rik Mayall about the head, rhythmically accompanied by more shouts of “Bored!”. I know how he feels.

When Lockdown I occurred last March, Britain was on the cusp of an agreeable spring that became a glorious summer. The tedium of house arrest was, for me at least, kept at bay by - in no particular order - a new job, a garden, blue skies, the absence of commercial aircraft and the sound of birdsong. By the time Lockdown II arrived in October, Christmas was already in sight and there were things to do. The lifting on restrictions six weeks later enabled a partial return to the things that felt like freedom: sitting somewhere other than your home for a coffee; the simple pleasure of shopping; and, in my case in particular, a return to the discipline of swimming three or four times a week.

Lockdown III already feels different. Even after just two weeks. I’m not going to question its wisdom - perhaps we should never have come out of lockdown in December, given the state we are now in. But the weeks ahead are, I’ll readily admit, not looking good for mental wellbeing. When the highlight of my weekend is an arduous visit to the dentist, and a welcome opportunity to interact, in person, with someone I neither live with or work with, you know things are bleak. I’m now at a stage when I’m clinging to excursions to Waitrose and our local Italian deli, which sells salads and coffee at its front door, as opportunities to change the vista. Travel documentaries now provide release rather than an aspirational glimpse of places to go when this thing is over. I’ve now stopped reading the weekend holiday supplements, such is the cruelty of seeing pictures of idyllic beaches, swimming pools and even city centres we won't be able to visit for a second year running.

A few years ago I decided to have therapy. Now, before you start thinking that I’ve gone all 'Hollywood victim' with this, it was simply a measure I thought might be useful, rather than a response to any episode. I’d just moved to Paris, started a new job that later became an even more intense one, I’d split up with my then-girlfriend, and I was contemplating my ageing parents’ health. So, if Tony Soprano could confer with Dr. Melfi as a central part of his narrative, what harm would come to me in seeking a friendly ear? 

I’d be hard pushed to say, conclusively, that therapy ‘cured’ me of whatever I felt the need to talk about, but one thing came out of it that has stayed with me ever since: freedom. Early on, we discovered that seeing planes in the sky, presumably heading off somewhere, made me yearn for escape. Travel became my escape, and living in France and working for an international company meant that I was regularly fulfilling my wish. But, now I think of it, living in the heart of Paris and with a Métro station right outside the front door, I had one of the greatest cities in the world at my disposal.

In fact, on the return journey from those Saturday morning sessions near the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery, I would catch a bus that, vaguely, seemed to be going in a westerly direction back to the 6th arrondissement where I lived. Without anything in particular to do on a Saturday, those bus journeys through the districts north of the Seine were, of themselves, not spectacular, but at the same time, provided fascinating snapshots of Parisian street life and neighbourhoods going about their business, queuing for the boulangerie or discussing politics while waiting to buy the weekend cut of beef. 

There’s nothing, I suppose, that stops me doing that now, except that meandering bus journeys are out of the question during lockdown, meaning that a good long walk is all that’s left. It’s fine, especially when you interrupt it with a takeaway coffee at the midpoint, but a meagre ration nonetheless. I was deeply envious of Boris, last week, allegedly getting out on his bike for a seven-mile trip from Downing Street to the Olympic Park. Yes, I know that political conveniences dictate that he was breaching the spirit of what we’re all supposed to be observing, but I couldn’t help feeling somewhat approving. Assuming he rode the seven miles via surface streets, and didn’t have his Plod detail drop him off, he would have sailed through the City and the East End on his way to Stratford, riding through some of London’s most historic parts. It may not be the capital’s most salubrious district, but it would have been somewhere else. And that’s what I’m missing right now.

How many times must an angel fall?

As if things haven’t been gloomy enough this week, if you want a proper wallow, track down Francis Whateley’s David Bowie: The Last Five Years, shown on Friday as part of BBC Four’s Bowie Night, in honour of what would have been the Starman's 74th birthday. It’s not about how the documentary ends - because five years ago this morning, the world found out - but for one particular period in the penultimate act of his career. 

The time in question is, in the longer history, a relative blink of the eye, but it represents a glimpse of the real David Bowie, an individual who, for a large proportion of his musical career, was shrouded - mainly intentionally - in guises and crafted personas. In October 2003, Bowie commenced the Reality Tour, a 112-date campaign that would, over five legs, snake through Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and New Zealand in support of Reality, generally thought to be his best album since 1980’s Scary Monsters And Super Creeps. It was a grueling tour with shows lasting two and a half hours each as the band merrily worked their way through almost 40 years of music. In fact, around 60 songs were rehearsed for the tour, drawn from almost every decade in the Bowie canon, from singalong hits to a lesser known cover of The Pixies’ Cactus and Sister Midnight, originally found on Iggy Pop’s The Idiot. 

In Whateley’s film, band members, like bass player Gail Ann Dorsey, guitarists Earl Slick and Gerry Leonard, drummer Sterling Campbell, and longtime keyboard collaborator Mike Garson, speak with fondness of the David Bowie they were playing with. They enthusiastically embrace the exhaustive song catalogue, playfully finding new ways to perform it. But it’s clear that the Bowie they were touring with was comfortable in his own skin. The tour DVD shows him having fun, smiling and wisecracking his way through gigs that, night after night, appeared to be carefree celebrations. Moreover, it’s the off-stage footage that is the most revealing - hanging out with Slick in an amusement arcade, or larking about with a cutting impersonation of Paul Whitehouse’s ‘Brilliant!’ character from The Fast Show. It felt like you were watching David Jones of 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, as any ‘regular’ bloke in the pub.

While never an aloof figure, few probably knew the real David Bowie. Even himself, something apparent in Alan Yentob’s landmark Cracked Actor documentary in 1975, when an emaciated, cocaine-addicted Bowie - The Thin White Duke - swigging from a carton of milk in the back of a limo was, by his own admission, on the road to cliché rock star oblivion. What makes Whateley’s film so heartbreaking is that the David Bowie at the beginning of his final years on this planet was the very opposite of that casualty in the limo. Rather than reject his body of work - as so many performers of a certain vintage will do - he was celebratory of it. Things weren't always so.

While he’d disparagingly referred to his ‘80s commercial success (the Let’s Dance and Tonight albums, and even 1987’s Never Let Me Down and its subsequent Glass Spider Tour, with it’s overblown choreography and theatrical bombast) as his “Phil Collins years”, the 90s proved a different decade for Bowie. Musical fashion during the Britpop age turned its attention elsewhere, despite the likes of Blur and Oasis representing a reverence for the musical legacy of Bowie’s generation. Bowie, though, had also turned his attention elsewhere. His Sound + Vision tour in 1990 had been a conscious ‘retirement’ of the jukebox (“Knowing I won’t ever have those songs to rely on again spurs me to keep doing new things, which is good for an artist,” he said). His sojourn with the punky faux-grunge Tin Machine then seemed to draw a line more fully. 

Like another Doctor Who-style regeneration, Bowie emerged with the spotlight somewhat off him with the largely electronic Black Tie White Noise album in 1993. Four years shy of turning 50, he embraced contemporary influences such as hip-hop, while also reuniting with Nile Rodgers. Some suggest this was a mild mid-life crisis, but in truth, it was simply the magpie tendency that had acquired genres throughout his career showing through once more. It also manifested itself in the understated soundtrack to BBC TV’s adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha Of Suburbia, which remains one of my favourite collections of Bowie music. Indeed, as the 90s progressed, Bowie explored further new avenues, with drum’n’bass and a more industrial sound, as can be found on 1. Outside, Earthling and the gentle Hours…, released in relatively quick succession between 1995 and 1999.

There is no doubt that the 90s saw a quietening of the mania that had followed Bowie since the beginning of the 1970s. And, yet, it’s something of a myth to suggest that the decade saw a complete rewrite of his character. This is attested to by Brilliant Live Adventures, a box set of previously unreleased live performances from the 1990s being progressively released like those encyclopaedia collections you used to see advertised after Christmas. 

The first, Ouvrez Le Chien (Live Dallas ’95) was released in October, with the second, No Trendy Réchauffé (Live Birmingham ’95) appearing in December, both with an eclectic line up of notably hit-light content. 

The third instalment, LiveAndWell.com appears next week, and will feature tracks recorded on the 1997 Earthling tour, and again skewing away from the traditional Bowie canon, with Hallo Spaceboy the only single and even the bleak V-2 Schneider instrumental from the Heroes album included. Brilliant Live Adventures’ six entries - the final three yet to be announced - may well prove to be collectibles for the most avid of fan. 

Previously, these 90s shows had only been available to users of Bowie’s pioneering web platform BowieNet, and it could be argued that they might well have stayed there (Bowie’s choice of songs in this period was never always met with the satisfaction of audiences who’d turned up to hear pop hits - “This is bollocks! We want Let’s Dance!”, a punter was heard saying at one gig). He had, in this period, been defiant: it had been a deliberate effort to shift away from the material that had driven the first couple of decades of his career. Bowie was also somewhat belligerent over how it would land, regarding the exercise of choosing relative obscurities as educational.

However, it wasn’t just the fanbase that grew indifferent. Even sections of the press turned, with “edgy” younger hacks making disparaging remarks, seemingly for reactionary kicks. Bowie’s former press officer, Alan Edwards, relayed to The Sunday Times late last year the story of how, in personal notes he wrote during the 1999 tour, Bob Dylan had just been made a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, but in the UK, Bowie was no longer being treated with anywhere near the reverence he once had. 

On 27 June, 2000, Bowie recorded a brilliant show for the BBC (later released as a third CD of a limited edition package of the Bowie At The Beeb compilation), during which he bound through classics like Wild Is The Wind, Ashes To Ashes, This Is Not America, The Man Who Sold The World and Let's Dance. It is still one of my treasured possessions, apart from anything else, for the vitality and freshness he brought to these songs. 

During the recording at the BBC Radio Theatre in London, Bowie enthralled the audience with hilarious stories about the set list he was performing. And, yet, Edwards couldn’t persuade a single journalist to come along. “The press wax lyrical about David now, but I had wads of tickets I couldn’t give away in the 1990s, because he was not deemed cool,” Edwards told The Sunday Times. 

Two days beforehand, Bowie had headlined the prestigious Sunday night slot at Glastonbury, delighting an enraptured 150,000-strong crowd with a 33-song romp through all the classics. Yes, the very songs Bowie had consciously rejected during his tours in the preceding decade. BBC2 aired the set in full last June, the first time it had been shown in its entirety, and almost 20 years to the day it had been staged. And it was mesmerising. The Glasto show has been rightly held up as the perfect Sunday night ‘legends’ performance, not just for the hands-aloft communal entertainment, but because we got the real David Bowie. From his baroque suit to his artfully tousled shoulder-length hair (a throwback to his late-60s folkie persona), this was a smiley, blokey Bowie. The man who fell down-to-earth, if you will. “Having a good time?” he threw out to the crowd at one point. This wasn’t the usual stage platitude. He was, genuinely, having a ball. “This is cool for us. I’ve not been here for 30 years, and it’s fucking great. I’m really hot and sweaty, I wore a stupid jacket, I’m too vain to take it off.” 

Glastonbury has been branded Bowie’s comeback, but in reality it was only a comeback from a relative wilderness. And if it was a comeback, it didn’t last all that long. For the following couple of years he withdrew into family life following the birth of his daughter Lexi. Now New York-based, he performed Heroes at The Concert For New York, the 9/11 benefit at Madison Square Garden in October 2001.  The following June came the Heathen album, another of my latter-career favourites, on which Bowie was joined by chums like Pete Townshend and Dave Grohl, as well as producer Tony Visconti, who had been a part of Bowie’s emergence at the end of the 1960s. It was a somewhat reflective record - not directly influenced by the events of the previous September, but certainly attuned to the anxious mood that emerged in America as a result. I was living in California at the time, and Heathen became a constant companion on the new contraption I was constantly plugged into. I believe it was called an iPod.

The following year Bowie released Reality which, when stood up next to Heathen, revealed a Bowie in his mid-50s and clearly contemplating the world around him. Moreover, it was an album of genuine warmth, full of ‘proper’ songs and a simpler, beginning-middle-end structure. The reception Reality met was as accepted as the comfort with which Bowie and his band went out on the road to tour it, which brings me back to the heartwarming - and heartbreaking - nature of the words at the start of this post. 

The Reality Tour, originally scheduled for ten months, came to an abrupt halt on 25 June, 2004, when Bowie experienced chest pain while on stage at the Hurricane Festival in Germany. It was a blocked coronary artery requiring an emergency bypass. And it ended his touring career. The public appearances that followed while he recuperated were few and far between, with the occasional awards show, and the odd performance, such as joining David Gilmour at the Royal Albert Hall in 2006 to do Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb and Arnold Layne. It was David Bowie's final stage performance on British soil.  

Earlier that year he’d pledged to take a year off - “no touring, no albums”. It was a pledge he stuck to, mostly. One notable exception was his blisteringly funny appearance in a 2006 episode of Ricky Gervais’s Extras. He and Gervais had struck an unlikely friendship after Bowie had become a fan of The Office. 

“He loved comedy,” Gervais has said since. “He was amazing in Extras. I sent him the lyrics and I said: 'Do something quite retro, like Life On Mars, and he went: 'Oh yeah, I'll just knock off a quick Life On Mars then…’!”. The resulting appearance, in which Bowie, sat at a nightclub piano riffs a song about Gervais’s jobbing actor character Andy Millman (“Chubby little loser!”) is a piece of comedy gold. It was also a Bowie continuing to show his true self, though, still in character.

Extras wasn’t, of course, some kind of ironic finale. But it certainly marked an absence that would only be ended on 8 January, 2013, Bowie's 66th birthday, when we read via son Duncan Jones’ Twitter account that his dad had something new to say. And, thus, the mournful Where Are We Now? - the song which gave this blog its name - appeared without warning, with its nostalgic lookback at Bowie’s Berlin residency, itself an intentional withdrawal from the madness of 1970s fame. The following March, an entire album appeared, The Next Day. The world fell in love again with David Bowie. 

Suddenly, enigmatically, he was catapulted back into near-regal seniority, a member of rock's top team. A retrospective exhibition, David Bowie is..., went on tour after its run at London’s V&A (which I saw there and again, two years later in Paris). What we didn’t know, however, was that the show's subject was in the midst of a terrible, 18-month battle with liver cancer. This was to be the muse for two more surprises: the album Blackstar, released on Bowie’s 69th birthday, and his death two days later. “Look up here, I’m in heaven” he sang on Lazarus, “I got scars that can't be seen," and in the second verse, “Look up here, man, I'm in danger. I've got nothing left to lose”. Only Bowie could have seemingly stage-managed his own demise in that way. It obviously wasn’t so contrived, but to release his most personal album ever, one clearly alluding to his failing mortality, and then dying two days later seemed, well, perfectly Bowie.

Visconti maintains that Bowie had more music in him when he went, and was as shocked as everyone else by the news. But David Robert Jones had always had a vision. He even predicted the Internet. Perhaps the Major Tom of Space Oddity and Ashes To Ashes was, in reality, his alter-ego, and the Starman was simply projecting a future echo. The upshot is that it is too easy to get maudlin today on the fifth anniversary of his death. And I won’t. His career will always be the gift that keeps on giving (and the continuous output of posthumous releases seems to underpin that point). It’s just that when I look at those scenes of the real David Bowie on tour in 2003, you can't help wishing you could sit with him, one last time, in a South London pub. Having a laugh. Bowie bantz.

Lazarus flies again

Today, on what would have been David Bowie’s 74th birthday - and two days before the fifth anniversary of his death - marks the start of a flurry of new Bowie activities that will continue well into the year. 

At some point today, the quick-fingered will be able to order a very limited edition single featuring previously unreleased cover versions of John Lennon’s Mother and Bob Dylan’s Tryin’ To Get To Heaven. The 7” single will be limited to just 8147 numbered copies - 1000 of which  on cream coloured vinyl - and will only be available to buy from this afternoon from the official Bowie store and Warner Music’s Dig! Experience of trying to buy the series of 1990s live albums being released progressively on these sites has proven frustrating as limited numbers have sold out almost as soon as they’ve been made available.

However, there is more this weekend to both celebrate The Dame’s birthday and commiserate his death. Starting today, a recording of the musical Lazarus will commence a short streaming run via Dice for three  nightly performances. The show was co-developed with Bowie just as he was fighting the cancer that eventually killed him. It ran in New York before transferring to London, where I was privileged to see it for myself, poignantly on the first anniversary of his death. 

Despite receiving mixed reviews from theatre critics, it provided a fascinating, if unusual, finale to Bowie’s life and career. The idea behind it was his, and saw the production revive the character he'd played in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth. In that, Bowie was the alien Newton (essentially, the persona Bowie had cultivated in the first half of the 70s), stranded on Earth and coming to terms with modern day America. Lazarus updates the story, with Newton (played by Michael C. Hall) now living in a shabby New York apartment and longing to return to his home planet. It wasn’t lost on any in the audience - after Bowie had died - how personal the theme was, the result of the singer, playwright Enda Walsh and director Ivo van Hove, developing the storyline and selecting songs from the extensive song canon to propel the narrative. 

Much of Bowie’s death was surrounded in clearly intentional mystique, and as Lazarus's genesis made clear, he was clearly approaching the final curtain with typically considered reflection. Even his actual demise seemed choreographed, coming exactly two days after the release of the unexpected final album Blackstar. The final act of stage direction from an artist who, throughout his career, had cultivated a series of guises as vessels for his art. 

Bowie knew he was dying as Lazarus was being developed. At one point, he told van Hove that he would be stepping back from rehearsals due to illness requiring treatment. Still, though, only a tiny circle of people were aware, which meant that when Blackstar arrived, as enigmatically as 2013's The Next Day - his previous surprise album - there was hope of a renaissance in the 69-year-old’s output. 

The clues, however, were there in Blackstar: the bleak lyrics, with references to morbidity; the surreal video, featuring a beatific Bowie singing in heavenly glory; another scene, in which the corpse of an astronaut rests on a planetary surface, pointing to the final resting place of Major Tom. They all pointed to the outcome that was announced on 10 January, 2016. Perhaps, now, not so subtly, though at the time the Blackstar single was released in November 2015, no one knew what was truly to come.

Lazarus was an unusual memorial, but on the other hand, exactly what you would have expected. While it could be accused of resembling a trendy secondary school drama teacher’s personal hobby horse, it provided people like me with a chance to grieve and celebrate Bowie’s music at the same time. I’ll happily admit to having “something in my eye” at the end of it. It was, of course, no substitute for seeing Bowie perform one last time (I only got to see him live once, to my eternal regret), but Lazarus and its adoring audience felt like a fitting commune for the Starman. Long may we wallow.

On Sunday, Where Are We Now will look more extensively at Bowie's last years, and the apparent contentment he'd found during his final tour.

Paging Dr. Hiddink

Picture: Chelsea TV

For many people, myself included, today is the first day back at work after a welcome break. It was an opportunity to sleep in, to recharge and, even in the strange circumstances we find ourselves, enjoy a Christmas with the ones we love (or, at least, those we’re allowed to spend time with). For Frank Lampard, I suspect, this Monday morning is simply the continuation of a nightmare that has not, apparently, been ended by his wife Christine elbowing him in the ribs to wake up and stop him turning restlessly.

Yesterday’s performance by Chelsea was one of the most toothless, abject displays I’ve seen by The Blues in all the years I’ve been watching them. Which is many. And I’m still only talking about the first half against Manchester City, who had monstered the home side with three goals within the first 34 minutes. If there was one consolation, it’s that Lampard’s side held at only three for the remaining sixty-odd minutes, Callum Hudson-Odoi’s 92nd-minute strike never more than a token. 

The almost immediate conclusion, as the final whistle blew, was that the pressure on Lampard had just been cranked up considerably, with Chelsea ending the Christmas period in eighth place and a woeful record of three defeats in five games that netted only a single win. At risk of stating the bleeding obvious, this is not what Roman Abramovich shelled out £250 million in the summer for. That’s the stark truth, regardless of the more rational analysis that results are never instant, no matter how much you spend. If you look at the indifference afforded Jürgen Klopp, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and even City’s Pep Guardiola in their first months of management at their respective clubs, progress takes patience and time. Unfortunately, those are commodities the Russian oligarch has repeatedly shown limited supplies of. 

Time, in particular, is relative. A month or so ago, Solskjaer’s future at Manchester United was in grave doubt. Today they sit just behind Liverpool on goal difference alone, on the back of a ten-match unbeaten run. For Lampard, a month is a long time. “I know that it doesn’t come that easy,” he said after yesterday’s savaging by City. “I know where we’re at, whether it puts pressure on me or not. A month ago, everyone’s asking me when I’ll sign a new contract and now people will be saying different things because in quick succession over a tight, busy period, we’ve lost four games of football.” 

It’s true: when Chelsea were on the up they were suddenly being talked about as title contenders. But with every opportunity over the festive period they’ve had to add points and climb the narrowly spaced top six, they’ve blown it. Stoically Lampard has maintained the manager-under-pressure mantra of “My job is to keep working”, but if reports this morning are to be believed, the Chelsea hierarchy has already started shortlisting potential replacements. That in itself is to be predicted, given the capricious history of the club’s owner, but it doesn’t diminish the dull headache produced by the prospect of yet another managerial schism at the club and, in particular, one involving one of the club’s most celebrated former players.

“I played here for a long time,” Lampard said yesterday. “I understand that the minute you lose a few games in a short period of time, then everyone looks and ask questions and the expectations are different this year, because everyone says, ‘Well, you spent this amount of money?’. The reality is [that] a lot of the younger players that have come in are new, are young, have been injured, have not played together. It’s the first time I’ve been able to play Ziyech, Pulisic and Timo Werner in the same team. If we’re expecting the relationship between them three to be the same as [City’s] Sterling, De Bruyne and Silva, then there’s a lot of expectations that are not real.” As ever, an intelligent and cogent argument from Lampard, and to anyone else, it stands up. But Roman Abramovich isn’t anyone else. As this blog has documented on many occasions in the history of Chelsea’s revolving front door, managers have come and gone with alarming regularity. The most notable departure for me is always that of Carlo Ancellotti, hired as the exalted Milan maestro, who delivered a league and cup double in his first term at Chelsea, and was gone by the end of his second for having the temerity of only achieving a Premier League runners-up spot.

“This club has to take some pain to get where we want to get to, because any build or rebuild - and the ban that we had, and the players we have brought in - takes pain,” added Lampard. True, but the transfer ban of the 2019-20 season is starting to become old news. And the players he brought in during the summer - most notably Werner and the high-expectation Kai Havertz (even taking his bout of COVID into account) - should by now be at least showing signs of pulling their weight. And that comes down to leadership.

That was in short supply yesterday. Actually, it was non-existent. Until City slackened off after the break, job done, Chelsea were anaemic in all departments. The entire backline was caught all at sea by City for all three goals by Ilkay Gundogan, Phil Foden and Kevin de Bruyne. Club captain César Azpilicueta, normally so dependent out on the right, was constantly caught out; his inside centre-back Kurt Zouma looked disinterested; veteran Thiago Silva - nominally, the player brought in for his leadership - appeared uncommunicative; and even left-back Ben Chilwell, one of Chelsea’s brighter acquisitions, looked off his game. The defence wasn’t helped, either, by a midfield providing absolutely no protection whatsoever, or offering much stimulus when they did have the chance of going forward. And as for the frontline, utterly toothless. Werner summed up his current run of form by kicking the flag instead of the ball on a corner late in the day.

It’s times like this that Chelsea fans and commentators alike get nostalgic, and reach for the past. It wasn’t so long ago that the current Blues boss was part of a spine that had Petr Čech at its base, John Terry in command at the back, Lampard in the middle, and Didier Drogba at the top. Lampard, now, needs to tap into that. While Drogba could go missing in games when he wasn’t interested (similarly, Diego Costa more recently), when in the mood he was as tenacious a street fighter as Terry was the ‘Captain. Leader. Legend.’ blunt instrument at the back. It won games. It won titles. It may not have won friends, but that’s not what you’re in football for.

The solution? Well, it would be easy to pontificate from the sofa that Lampard needs to make more use of Olivier Giroud and less of Mason Mount, who has, it should be said, deservedly been a first-choice pick, but even he looked bereft of ideas yesterday. Werner needs time to regain confidence, N’Golo Kante needs to find the tenacity that made him such a mesmerising watch in central midfield when he arrived from Leicester City. And elsewhere, heads need knocking together so that concentration improves, and players start showing a bit of interest in what they’re doing. As on yesterday’s performance, that was in scant supply. And it’s precisely that sort of indifference that traditionally prompts Abramovich to look up Guus Hiddink to see if he’s got any plans for the next few months.