I'm not going to rewrite my own history. Frank Lampard's removal in January still hurts (see posts passim). But what Thomas Tuchel produced on Saturday in Porto, out of the same group of players who’d started the season under Lampard, was a tactical masterclass. The result, a 17th major trophy - and for the second time, Europe’s most prestigious - under Roman Abramovich’s ownership suggests that the philosophy of silverware over managerial longevity works.
To those of a principled nature, this apparently mercenary need for cups might sit uncomfortably with a more purist, romantic view of football. But Saturday’s win over the even more lavishly resourced Manchester City, whose owner even paid for the club’s fans to be flown to and from Portugal, revealed something of the notion that it’s not always about money. That might sound rich from the fan of a club where money has, actually, bought quite a lot. But money didn’t buy that victory - directly - it was Tuchel’s tactics, plus Pep Guardiola’s decision not to play start with Fernandinho and Rodri, and add a little bit of free stardust from the Chelsea Academy.
One genuinely satisfying outcome of the Champions League Final was the sight of Mason Mount and Reece James making such outstanding contributions to the win - the former with his midfield-splitting pass to Kai Havertz for the goal, the latter for his robust maturity in preventing City’s fearsome attack from clawing back. You could also cite Andreas Christensen and Christian Pulisic, both of whom have experience of Chelsea’s youth system. Havertz’s goal was most satisfying, simply because the £71 million signing had taken a while to settle in the side since his arrival last summer, with a huge price tag on his shoulders. A nasty bout of COVID-19 didn’t help, either. Perplexingly, he’s still not the out-and-out forward Chelsea so desperately need.
Timo Werner, bless him, once again demonstrated how a full season and the injection of a fellow German to manage him still hasn’t done anything to improve his finishing. A return of 12 goals in 51 games (and just two in 23) over all competitions is by any measure woeful for a striker, especially one who arrived from Leipzig last summer, having bagged 28 strikes out of 34 Bundesliga games alone. So with the sadly outcast Tammy Abraham - another youth product - and Olivier Giroud destined for pastures new, if Chelsea are to close the gap with City in the Premier League, Werner either needs to dramatically improve his lethality, or Mr. Abramovich has to get his cheque book out again.
The youth element of Chelsea’s make-up has been the core of the club narrative over the last two seasons. When Frank Lampard took over, he had little option but to play the youngsters, thanks to the UEFA transfer ban in place. His existing familiarity with players like Mount, as well as the history of assistants Joe Edwards and Jody Morris working with the Academy, meant their progression added chapters to the fairy tale. And thus it continued when Tuchel took over, though he fell back on experience and maturity to begin with, probably as a safety net, before increasingly seeing what Mount and James could do. The same applied to Ben Chilwell, who’d joined from Leicester last summer, but seemed to take a while to win the new coach over, with the unreliable (in my opinion) Marcos Alonso getting the nod over him.
It would, however, be too easy to make Saturday night’s victory a romantic one about youngsters alone: just look at the shift the near-32-year-old captain César Azpilicueta put in, or the 36-year-old Thiago Silva, before his groin gave out, or even Antonio Rüdiger. And just how magnificent was the diminutive N’Golo Kanté, who turned 30 in March, placing him in the category of players Chelsea likes to offer limited-length contracts from now on (but would be utterly insane not to tie him down, based on the form he’s shown this season). Kanté was everywhere against City, and while it’s become something of a cliche to refer to him as two players in one, he was, once more, more than just a holding player, but frequently the origin of Chelsea’s forward runs, attacks that exposed Guardiola’s midfield folly.
Here, then, is where I run the risk of revisionism. Chelsea were in some trouble in January when Lampard - forever a club legend - was fired. It’s possible that they could have dug themselves out of it, but heads had noticeably dropped. I still can’t reconcile my thoughts: could Frank have benefitted from a more experienced director of football to manage him? Or was it just too soon, ultimately, to be managing the club? John Terry beware, if so.
Thomas Tuchel is not naive. He will know full well of the managerial toll that has come with the successes of the Abramovich era. Saturday’s result was the third occasion Chelsea have won a title at the end of a season where the manager has changed midway through. Maybe the Russian owner knows what he's doing, after all. His instincts for pulling the trigger at the right time seem uncannily sharp, but it’s hard not to wonder why those instincts weren’t apparent when some appointments were made in the first place. Avram Grant, André Villas-Boas, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Maurizio Sarri, even José Mourinho (twice) and Lampard himself were all, to some extent, experiments that failed, requiring Guus Hiddink or the detested (but successful) Rafa Benítez to be parachuted in.
Tuchel took over an increasingly listless team, instilled some defensive fortitude into them and plugged the leaks. It’s likely that he will now be offered to extend his somewhat tentative 18-month contract. If nothing else earns it, the ‘cup with the big ears’ should do so (not that Chelsea winning it helped Roberto Di Matteo - appointed in March 2012, fired the following November). Tuchel’s tactical victory on Saturday over Guardiola has, at least, quelled the disquiet over Chelsea’s end to the domestic season, with their only-just fourth place in the Premier League, having lost games at crucial moments, and Leicester’s convincing victory in the FA Cup Final which denied Tuchel his only other chance of securing silver.
But taken into another context, along the way, Tuchel has now outsmarted Guardiola three times in six weeks, which poses the enticing prospect of Chelsea mounting a credible challenge to City next term. In the Premier League, Tuchel arrested any further decline and pushed Chelsea back into European contention, just. He took them into an FA Cup Final. And - most impressively - he masterminded superb knockout-round victories over Atlético Madrid, Saturday night’s hosts, Porto, Real Madrid and then City. It’s not been lost on commentators that the near-deity Pep Guardiola’s desire to win Europe’s biggest prize continues, while Thomas Tuchel has achieved it in only five months. He’s not the Special One, but on Saturday’s evidence, he is pretty special. Wish I’d known that when I wagged the finger of doom in January and said that Chelsea should be careful what they wished for. I mean, what do I know?
Every Christmas, the shelves of the big book emporia bow with a barrage of dreary footballing memoirs - stocking fillers for dads, mostly, and invariably ghost-written by Fleet Street hacks. Rarely, if ever, are they of much real interest. Occasionally, a Roy Keane or Peter Crouch might come along with something mildly controversial or amusing, but for the most part, they chart a similar trajectory: local park ➤ boys club ➤ youth team ➤ first team ➤ different clubs ➤ retirement/management/punditry.
So it’s quite an event when a football book comes along that is genuinely worthy of note. The last, I recall, was Black And Blue, the intentionally uncomfortable read by Paul Canoville, Chelsea’s first black player. It recounts his troubled youth but also, more dramatically, his even more troubled debut for the club: away to Crystal Palace, in April 1982, he was subjected to a torrent of racial abuse - from his own fans. A month later, he made his home debut against Luton Town at Stamford Bridge, a game I was at. His arrival on the pitch was met by monkey chants and bananas thrown from the home stands. It sickens me to this day.
The following year Chelsea signed a diminutive Scottish winger from Clyde, whose mercurial talents would eventually limit Canoville’s appearances. But, at the same time, the newcomer befriended Canoville, even taking on the racist abusers, despite receiving death threats himself for his effort. “I couldn’t not intervene,” Pat Nevin said in 2017. “At the time the black players were being told to shut up about it when a lot of them wanted to talk about it. Me speaking about it may have sounded brave - unusual - maybe I was the only one at the time, but it was my background.”
Nevin is certainly unusual, which is what makes his memoir The Accidental Footballer so eagerly-awaited. The Glaswegian has long been a refreshing counter to footballing culture. In the Chelsea dressing room he was called “Weirdo” - a tag he now laughs at - purely because he read the NME and The Guardian, and listened to Joy Division and the Cocteau Twins, rather than Shalamar and Kool & Gang, or whatever his bubble-permed teammates had on their Walkmen at the time. Most entries in the footballing oeuvre follow a refrain of ‘It’s is all I ever wanted to do’. Nevin had other ideas. As a child he wanted to be a teacher like his brothers, or even a professional writer. While his book’s title suggests an unplanned career path, his reluctance to play professionally came more from his love of the game: “I didn’t want anything spoiling my love of playing.” Speaking on a Zoom webinar to publicise the book, Nevin says that in his career he’s worked with plenty of footballers who’ve fallen madly out of love with the sport. These same issues might have warded him off, but didn’t. Football pulled him in, taking him first, as a professional, to Clyde, then Chelsea, Everton, Tranmere, Kilmarnock and Motherwell.
At the end of the 1987-88 season Chelsea were relegated, and Nevin was sold to the Merseyside club, but he remains today a popular figure at Stamford Bridge. This is partly down to the five years he spent there, including three seasons as part of a formidable trio with Kerry Dixon and David Speedie, producing 200 goals between them. The trio contributed to the club’s promotion out of the old Second Division, but couldn’t prevent it yo-yoing back down again, leading to Nevin’s departure. He didn’t, though, cut his ties completely, and continues to work for Chelsea TV, the club’s website and matchday programmes. Thankfully, things have moved on since the disgraceful days of Canoville and Nevin’s playing days together, and the Bridge is mostly a more socially reconstructed place, with the club doing much in football’s fight against racism.
As the book and, indeed, the Zoom webinar underlines, Nevin is one of football’s rarer coves. Eloquent and clearly intelligent, his BBC radio commentaries demonstrate a view of the game that is thankfully bereft of the monosyllabic cliches of his peers (an apocryphal tale has it that he once accepted a bet - possibly from Danny Baker - to work David Bowie references into his commentary of a Scottish league game some years ago, allegedly with statements such as “He’s a terrific Station To Station player”. Nevin has been asked by this blogger to confirm the story, but would be delightful if true).
Music, however, remains his passion. He still gets a buzz, he says, from discovering new material, especially music you’ll not have heard of. On the wall behind him as he talks on Zoom, Bowie’s Heroes is placed prominently, along with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Each chapter of the book is a song title - The Mighty Wah’s The Story Of The Blues, Elvis Costello’s I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea, London Calling and numerous Bowie titles, and so on - as it covers the first three phases of his playing career, in Glasgow, London and Merseyside. Each is a convenient fit to the narrative, but it does also emphasise Nevin’s encyclopaedic musical knowledge.
Pat Nevin: the Johnny Marr years
The webinar meanders between questions about football and questions about music, with anecdotes about writing for the NME (he even shared a flat with that publication’s Adrian Thrills early in the day) and attending John Peel’s birthday parties (despite having played for arch rivals of Peelie’s beloved Liverpool). In his playing days he bore little resemblance to anyone else in the game, looking more like one of the indie rockers he obsessed over. A picture of Nevin in camel overcoat and black beret bears more than a passing similarity to Johnny Marr. He even appeared in a Fuzzbox video.
So, you could say that in a world of sheep-like social conformity, as football is, Nevin was - and remains to this day - a refreshing alternative. “I loved being called ‘Weirdo’,” he recently told The Times’ Henry Winter. “I remember taking Simple Minds’ album [1982’s New Gold Dream] into the dressing-room, saying, ‘You should listen to this,’ and it was, ‘Get that shit off’. Seven years later they’re all listening to Simple Minds.” Today he will occasionally DJ in clubs, playing Joy Division and the butterfly it produced, New Order, amongst his decidedly well-curated set lists.
After music, one of Nevin's other big differentiators from regular footballing folk is that he’s a deep thinker. Not that all footballers are brain dead, of course, but at the core of The Accidental Footballer is an unease with the sporting world around him. Preferring a night out at the Royal Ballet, rather than Stringfellows, would have marked a player out in the 1980s and, frankly does still. We shouldn’t, here, discount the fact that professional, elite football still doesn’t have an openly gay player, not that Nevin is. But football has never managed difference well. Chelsea’s Graeme Le Saux, who cites Nevin as a role model, was frequently the subject of homophobic innuendo, simply because he, too, read The Guardian, could string a sentence together, and didn’t pursue the same lifestyle as others in the sport. Just the other day my girlfriend remarked that you never see any professional players of an Indian or Pakistani background. How things have come since Paul Canoville made his debut, though after the apparent booing during the taking-the-knee gesture before Chelsea’s game at Aston Villa last Sunday, we may not have come as far as we’d like to think.
Paul Canoville in action
The Accidental Footballer shows a football professional whose view of the game, limited to just the three phases of his career, is one of contrast. Journalistically, it recalls the highs (and lows) of playing and balances them with the cultural upheavals of the period. At 58, Nevin is proud of his roots and the principles he acquired from growing up in an East Glasgow tenement. His dad boxed, and taught him how to do likewise. When he lost a playground fight with five other boys, he joined his brothers in exacting revenge, one by one. For such a relatively small feller, he never shirked. It’s what has empowered Nevin to take up causes, such as the racism Canoville faced, even confronting members of the National Front. The same with tackling the homophobia he and Le Saux faced, simply for being…well, nothing more than different.
“We’ve not fixed racism,” he told the Royal Blue Mersey Everton fan site in an interview about The Accidental Footballer. “We’ve come a decent distance but we’ve not fixed it within society. We’ve certainly not fixed homophobia. But when a footballer comes out, that will normalise it further. There’ll be a hell of a lot of people like me, standing shoulder to shoulder, fighting for the cause. It will be great to see when it happens.”
One of the more uncompromising sections of the book focuses on the historic sexual abuse scandal that emerged in 1996 surrounding Celtic Boys Club. Nevin trained with the club himself as a youngster, but was released for being too small. Revelations by former Scottish international-turned talkSport presenter Alan Brazil, that he’d been abused by a club coach, reverberated around the game, opening up the path to wider allegations of abuse at other clubs, Chelsea included. “I couldn’t not write about what happened at Celtic Boys,” Nevin told Royal Blue Mersey. Ignorance, he says, was the result of a lack of eduction. “That level of ignorance does not exist anymore, which is great, but it’s really sad that it took that to actually happen.” He says that none of the kids involved were to blame: “Certainly not the ones who suffered from it, but neither were the other kids who weren’t abused.” Paedophiles, he says, are good at hiding. “They’re manipulative. So I had to write about it, although there were plenty of other things in the book I enjoyed writing about more than that.”
Indeed there are. Music, largely. His friendship with Peel - even sitting in for him on Radio 1 - his regular DJing sets at The Victoria pub in Dalston, the gigs he worked around his playing schedule (even travelling to Paris midweek to see the Cocteaus), or even being excused the second half of a Chelsea game to get to see New Order. But even in his music life, Nevin’s stance on things could attract trouble - he once had a knife pulled on him at a Clash concert by a thug who took issue with his campaign against racism. He still stands against it, and wholeheartedly embraces the institutional approach football now takes against it. “The great thing now is that I don’t have to stand up there shouting and bawling in front of everyone else,” Nevin told Sky Sports recently. “There are better people doing it now. Raheem Sterling can do it. Marcus Rashford can do it. But I do feel vindicated that I was there saying it all the time.” Nevin remains active with the Paul Canoville Foundation, and he is clearly pleased that things have moved on since his teammate’s horrific 1983 debut. “You won’t see a banner for me at [Stamford Bridge] but you will see one for Canners and that is great. I don’t need a banner. Canners, for what he did, needed a banner. It is so important.”
By focusing on his playing years, which ended in 2000 after returning to his native Scotland to turn out for Kilmarnock and later Motherwell, The Accidental Footballer draws attention to Nevin’s time in the game when things, like the player himself, were different. The Premier League was only eight years old when he retired, and he’d largely missed out on the astonishing wealth that professionals today command. Not that he seems bothered. He’s a proud working class Glaswegian, whose principles are solidly based on a fairer society.
To return to my premise, he remains one of my favourite people in football and, for those five years he graced Chelsea’s numbers, for his history at my club. But, mostly, he’s one of my favourite individuals - erudite, intelligent, principled but not hectoring, and with - without doubt - the finest Zoom background you will ever see a footballer, past or present, putting on show.
The Accidental Tourist is out now, published by Moonray.
So much for the much-anticipated Friends reunion. It had been talked about for over a year, postponed because of The Thing that’s been screwing everything up, and finally went out yesterday, on Sky in the UK. Note the emphasis on “reunion”: this was certainly not a revival. In fact, at one hour and 40 minutes, I wasn’t entirely sure what the hell it was.
Certainly it was a bit of history - albeit confected history - since, as Jennifer Aniston remarked early on, it was only the second time since the show ended in 2004 that the magic sextet of, in no particular order, Aniston, Courtney Cox, Matthew Perry, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc, had been together in the same room. Various combinations had met socially, but as the 100-minute special opened, with the cast members walking emotionally on to the original Warner Brothers set, it was clear that something unique was unfolding. Or, at least, should have been.
This was a celebration of an undoubted television phenomenon: a sitcom that ran for 236 episodes over 10 series; shown in 220 countries and dubbed into 18 languages; watched (apparently) more than 100 billion times across all platforms; the No.1 show for six straight seasons in the US, averaging 22 million viewers a week; and whose finale was watched by a US audience of 52 million (no stats for the rest of the world). And, of course, is still running, somewhere, in syndication. Television’s equivalent of Dark Side Of The Moon.
For those of us of a certain age, Friends was a show that, to a limited sense, reflected life in the 1990s and early 2000s. Not that we were all exclusively white New Yorkers with Cox’s cheekbones, Perry’s wit or the sexual prowess of LeBlanc’s character. But we bought into the Friends lifestyle: we descended upon cosy coffee shops like Central Perk and aspired to the SoHo apartment life. Pre-social media, we argued - in person - over who was our favourite Friend. We all had an opinion as to whether Phoebe was, actually, the star of the show, that Chandler and Joey should have had their own sitcom as TV’s greatest odd couple, that Monica was very annoying, that Ross was worse, and that Rachel was lovably ditzy, but Oh My God.
Now I think of it, there was much to celebrate about Friends, and this reunion should have done that. Instead we got a mish-mash. Bits jumped all over the place, themes were never fully fleshed out, and guest appearances either made no sense, or were squandered. From the Warners set reunion of just the six actors, we went to a bizarre outdoor interview set-up, in front of the famous title sequence fountain, in which the aggravating James Corden asked a couple of questions, before it moved on to the cast doing a read-through of a classic scene, or recorded interviews with creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman. Breathlessly we were then on to a meaningless segment in which Tom Selleck walked into the apartment set for all of a minute, or actor James Michael Tyler (Gunther) appeared via Zoom for a brief hello, or Maggie Wheeler (Janice) stopped by to do her nasal “Oh-my-God!” catchphrase.
It was all a bit of an unsatisfying mess, really. And, strangely, for such an anticipated event, we hardly got to hear from the principle cast members. Yes, the likeable Schwimmer told how he’d fancied Aniston for real during their first season (they chose to channel their unrequited interest into the on-off-on-off Ross/Rachel affair). Cox, as might have been expected, seeing as she was, in the very beginning, the only member of the gang to have a profile (courtesy of Bruce Springsteen’s slightly corny Dancing In The Dark video) came across more guarded. LeBlanc - so much better in real life than as a somewhat stiff Top Gear presenter (let’s forget the entirely forgettable Friends spinoff, Joey…) - came across as the Friend you’d actually want to befriend, and perhaps the least actorly of the group. He also reminds me now of an old schoolfriend (albeit somewhat…erm…‘well upholstered’), which might enhance his familiarity. Kudrow, too, as I’d suspected, seemed just nice and down to earth.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment, the biggest challenge to expectation management, was Perry. As Chandler Bing he had the funniest lines and easily the finest comic timing, famously forcing entire scenes to be rewritten with his own, funnier contributions. Perry had the distinction of uttering the very final line in the finale, with Rachel suggesting to the group that they should get one last coffee, to which Chandler cracks “Sure. Where?”. In the reunion Perry appeared emotionally stunted, not helped by having undergone dental surgery immediately before the recording, which rendered him with a grin that resembled Jack Nicholson’s Joker, prior to putting on the face paint.
There were moments of the Chandler wit: in response to Kudrow pledging that they all stayed in touch (“Maybe not every day, but every time you text or call, someone will be there.”) to which Perry deadpans: “I don’t hear from anyone”. It’s easy to see him as the classic tragic clown, and he has been through the wars in real life (self-inflicted, it must be said), but for all his natural funnies, he also felt anxiety the most, gripped with fear at delivering those pin-sharp lines in front of a live studio audience. “To me, I felt like I was going to die if they didn't laugh,” he said. “It's not healthy, for sure, but I would sometimes say a line and they wouldn't laugh and I would sweat and just go into convulsions if I didn't get the laugh I was supposed to get. I would freak out.” Perry’s admission seemed to shock his castmates in what felt like the one true deviation from the slightly forced party atmosphere.
There’s no doubt that Friends was the product of great writing and astute casting. “We saw a gazillion people,” Kauffman revealed. Bright said that David Schwimmer had even given up television and had returned to doing theatre in Chicago when they came calling. Cox was originally seen as Rachel, until she convinced the producers otherwise. Kudrow’s Phoebe arrived ready-baked, having played the character’s fictional twin sister Ursula first in Mad About You. LeBlanc had been jobbing as a minor teen heartthrob, but when he auditioned he had just $11 to his name. He spent his first pay packet on a hot dinner. He explained how his second audition was almost hampered by a drunken episode the night before, where he’d lamped himself on a friend’s toilet bowl, leaving him a gruesome bruise on his nose. The pratfall may have won him the role. Other characters weren’t so straightforward: once Aniston was identified as Rachel, the producers had the task of freeing her from a contract with another show, Muddling Through. She wanted Friends, but having been in “a graveyard of pilots”, she’d finally found a fixed job and had to plead to be released from it. “That show is not going to make you a star,” she reveals its producer telling her.
Of course, it did. Arguably Aniston became Friends’ biggest breakout star, a point the reunion deftly avoids, although in a compilation of guest stars, there’s an awkward flashback to Brad Pitt’s appearance (they were married for five years). As Kauffman recalls, the Friends actors’ fame was unprecedented, remembering once seeing them on the cover of every single magazine at an airport newsagent as she passed by. “No one was going through what we were going through, except for the other five,” Schwimmer says.
17 years after they went for that final coffee, it’s clear that there is a genuine bond between the six. But ultimately, you can’t help feeling the reunion was squandered. It’s hard to understand why it was entertained in this form to begin with. Yes, some of the clips and anecdotes were fun, but when you’ve probably seen all 236 episodes, multiple times probably, given the amount of global syndication since Friends ended, there was nothing new to say. Ultimately, this was an exercise in HBO Max - the US network - leveraging some of the $425 million it paid to secure exclusive rights to the show. The cast’s appearance fees for the reunion were said to be somewhere between $2.5 and $3 million each. I suppose good for them. Nice work if you can get it.
If there’s one saving grace it was that this reunion wasn’t a precursor to a revival. Sitcoms being reborn, like some bizarre Jurassic Park DNA project, rarely work well. The return of Will & Grace bombed, the various reincarnations of Roseanne haven’t fared any better, and the plan to revive Frasier (see my post Still listening?) has already met with casting headwinds. Perhaps, then HBO Max is actually on to something by buying up every episode of Friends, and hoping that those now in middle age will want to relive their younger, child-free days, or that kids might discover it for the first time. That, though, is unlikely. As comedically perfect as the gang of 1994-2004 were, they probably offer very little to today’s audiences. Six impossibly good looking white twentysomethings? Could they be any less relevant?
When you were a teenager, what were the arguments you participated in over pop bands? Were you Beatles or Stones? U2 or Simple Minds? Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet? Bowie or Bolan? Frankly, it didn’t matter in my day, and it certainly doesn’t matter now, though at 53 years of age, I couldn’t tell you who teenagers are squabbling over today - if they are at all when their attention is consumed by myriad other media.
Last week’s Brit Awards brought out the old fart in me, as I silently harrumphed, dad-like, something about how music isn’t as good as it was in my day, perking up only when I saw Bruce Springsteen’s Letter To You amongst the Best Album nominees. The reality is that, actually, pop is in quite rude health. It’s just that there aren’t many artists these days who can command the attention, adulation or, for that matter, interest, that those who pioneered rock and pop still do (and coming soon to this blog will be an interview with David Hepworth and Mark Ellen, legends of music journalism, who continue to represent an age when this stuff mattered to people like me). However, this sort of stuff does still matter to those who stand at the altar that is Bob Dylan, who turns 80 today. It is possible that, in the pantheon of popular music, there hasn’t been an artist as revered as His Bobness. If my social media timelines today are any measure, he’s an icon who transcends even other icons of popular music, an untouchable.
My question, then, is “why?”. I don’t mean that to sound disparaging, but I’ve never ‘got’ Dylan. His music just hasn’t moved me in the way others’ has. This, folks, is the subjective madness that defines and divides opinion, which polarises and binds in equal measure. And all that is fine. There is no rule that says you must like anyone, which is why I bristle at the playground term “hate”. I don’t care much for hip-hop, and there are plenty of bands I’ve been more than indifferent towards, but I’ve never been so incensed to brand anything or anyone off limits.
So, Dylan. If a cursory search of Amazon’s bookstore is anything to go by, revealing a return of “more than 3,000 results”, the man born Robert Allen Zimmerman this day in 1941 is peerless in admiration. Perhaps more tomes have been produced about The Beatles, but I’d imagine it’s going to be close run. My shelves bulge with books about numerous rock luminaries, and a fair proportion of my disposable income since I became a wage earner is represented by the records and box sets stored elsewhere. Dylan’s contemporaries are well represented in my cultural life, too. Just not Dylan himself. In fact, I could probably cite greater familiarity with covers of his songs, such as The Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man, Jimi Hendrix’s All Along The Watchtower and Eric Clapton’s Knocking On Heaven’s Door, all of which were effectively made their own, with many surprised to learn of their actual originator.
I do see, though, how Dylan is appreciated for his lyricism - more poetic than pop - and, in particular, captured a world in change during the hippie 60s and the freewheeling 70s. Like most people with ears, I’ve heard Like A Rolling Stone, The Times They Are A-Changing, Lay Lady Lay and A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall; I’ve listened to Blood On The Tracks, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde all the way through. But now I think of it, I’ve probably spent more time listening to The Traveling Wilburys, the supergroup Dylan joined with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, than any of Dylan’s own recordings. Somehow, it has just not moved me as other things have. Sorry, Bobophiles, it’s just how it is.
That doesn’t discount him though. It is abundantly clear, amongst those who adulate Dylan, that he represents - and has always represented - a singularity that is rare in popular music. Viewed through the modern prism of homogenised, formulaic pop, Dylan is the arch individualist. He has always been more than just a folk singer or a blues singer or attached to any other label you like. In fact, it’s this sort of value that makes me wonder why I’ve never joined the chorus of acclaim.
I can see that part of Dylan’s appeal is that he is enigmatic. He writes and performs songs of a near-poetic nature and, yet, doesn’t appear to play the rock star game. Even his 2016 receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature was met cooly, with Patti Smith collecting it on his behalf, despite it being the first time a songwriter had received the award. He later delivered the traditional Nobel winners’ lecture, diffidently explaining, matter of factly: “My songs are alive in the land of the living, but songs are unlike literature, they are meant to be sung and not read”. Here, I should mention his voice, which by his own opinion, is not his strongest suit: “I was never a good singer, but if you have a good story, then it doesn’t matter because people want to listen.” There’s probably an entire blog post about crap singers with genius-like writing abilities.
I do get, however, that Dylan’s rise to prominence came with the a-changing times he sang of. Like so many in the 60s, social and culture upheavals were afoot, and with Vietnam and the civil rights movement in America spilling over to Europe, I can see how that great run of music during this time could resonate. Some argue that his words 50-plus years ago are just as relevant today. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, believed to be a reaction to nuclear conflict, would fit the environmental narrative today just as easily. However, as Dylan commences his ninth decade, he doesn’t appear to have lost anything, as his 2020 album Rough And Rowdy Ways serves to demonstrate. Whereas the majority of artists of pensionable age are largely treading predictable water, Dylan is regarded to have produced a masterpiece, of its time and of his age. That takes quite a lot.
Go back to his origins and you perhaps see why the reverence is afforded. His appearance in 1962 came just as rock’n’roll was in its infancy. Elvis Presley had shown teenagers that there was more to life than their parents’ easy listening, and The Beatles were coming along with their chirpy interpretation of it. While they were jangling away at Love Me Do, Dylan was wowing the Newport Folk Festival with his folkie take on contemporary America. Rod Stewart has said that, having been listening to American folk music for a while, Dylan’s debut opened him up to the idea of America being a land he wanted to visit.
Sean Hannam
60 years, 10 Grammies, 1 Oscar and that Nobel prize later, Dylan has presided over 39 albums and 600 songs of his own, a catalogue as impressive as the man himself is almost anonymous. “Like a large amount of his recorded output, he's still shrouded in mystery and intrigue - there’s so much to decipher,” says music writer Sean Hannam, whose own collection of aforementioned Dylan books is now up to almost 70. “I never tire of reading about him, or listening to his music. He’s one of the last remaining original rock stars who’s a true maverick and an enigma. He doesn’t give many interviews anymore or do his own social media,” he adds, pointing out that even David Bowie appeared on chat shows in his later years.
Perhaps, then, the key to getting Dylan is that enigma. Perhaps my fault has been that I’m not quizzical enough. I’d be the first to admit that much of the music I like grabs me emotionally, first, in some way, rather than by curiosity. A classic case of ‘liking what I like’. And here’s where we get into the subjectivity of music fandom. “I especially fell in love with his more amusing and wry songs, rather than the protest material,” says Sean, who got into Dylan as a teenager when a friend gave him a compilation tape. “About two years later, when I was at university, my parents bought me a triple-CD set of some of Dylan's first few albums, and then I discovered his mid-60s ‘electric’ records - Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde - which blew me away. That’s my favourite Dylan period. I still think no one has equalled that run of three great albums - two of which he made in the same year!”
Here Sean gets closer to answering the question that’s been troubling me: why. Dylan’s ‘going electric’ phase transformed the somewhat stereotypical Greenwich Village folkie into someone intrinsically cool which, at risk of suggesting shallow motivation, is still the key element of most preferences in popular music. “I love watching interviews and live footage of him from that time, when he’s confounding journalists and his audiences,” adds Sean. But, he stresses, his fandom is not just a nostalgia trip in retro cool: “In his 79th year, Dylan put out a 16-minute surprise single during lockdown that was a masterclass in songwriting, Murder Most Foul, and followed it up with Rough And Rowdy Ways, his best album since 1997’s classic Time Out Of Mind. There aren’t many - or even any - acts who could do that so late in their career. He’s still an awesome creative force.” He makes a very good point.
Rock musicians passing what would be retirement age for the rest of us is nothing new. Many of my blues heroes - like John Lee Hooker and BB King - played on into their 80s; the Rolling Stones, while no longer in the vibrancy of their pomp, are still capable of putting on a damn good show and, in the case of Blue And Lonesome, an authentic record, even if one of cover versions. Perhaps the late Leonard Cohen, a Dylan contemporary with a similar background and musical outlook might have been considered of the same cadre, along with Paul Simon and Paul McCartney, although the latter’s quality control is sometimes overlooked by his deity. Age is, though, just a number. Look at Tom Jones: he’s just released Surrounded By Time, a couple of months shy of his 81st birthday, and to rave reviews. What, then, Dylan? “Now he's 80,” says Sean, “who knows. But long may he continue to confound and surprise us. To misquote his song, She Belongs To Me, that's why we need to ‘salute him when his birthday comes’.”
I suppose it’s never too late to learn. As I wrote recently, in my post about the Matt Deighton Overshadowed documentary, I’m historically late to many artists, and found great comfort in writer Andrew Collins’ recent confession that he was a late convert to Springsteen, as was I. 60 years of 39 albums sounds like a mountain to climb, but perhaps there’s a Dylan-Damascus moment to come.
What a mess. What an absolute mess. Forget the recriminations over Martin Bashir’s now-rogue Panorama interview with Princess Diana, with the BBC lurching into an existential crisis of its own doing. It’s the royal family I worry about.
Perhaps the mainstream media doesn’t, in its capricious relationship with the monarchy - a press owned by republican barons who feed off the royals’ misfortunes while fuelling them at the same time. With the Bashir scandal, a number of them have found themselves observers of a perfect storm, the opportunity to whip up right-wing frenzy over the BBC itself (the same old tropes about political bias and the licence fee), while more gorging at the never-ending feast that is the psychodrama within the House of Windsor. That began, arguably, when a young Diana Spencer met Prince Charles at a polo match in the summer of 1980. That set in train a sequence of events that, to take a gloomy view, would end with her death at the age of 36 in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris, and continue further as her sons grew up and, in the case of the youngest, became a target himself for media anger, rather than a recipient of sympathy.
The contrast in reporting has become polarised: Prince William and “Kate Middleton” (never the Duchess of Cambridge) are the wholesome, perma-smiling poster children of the monarchy’s future, with three delightful children and the right balance of working life and family life. Prince Harry and “Meghan Markle” (never the Duchess of Sussex) are spoiled and entitled, who’ve escaped royal duty and decamped to California where they carp and moan about how pitiful life in the Royal Family is, and how they’ve had to escape institutional dysfunction and racism to make the life they desire. That, I think, sums up the narrative.
The latest spin in the Sussex vortex is Harry’s revelations about his mental health to Oprah Winfrey, in essence, a continuation of the interview he and Meghan gave in March, but this time going into far more detail. So much more detail that Piers Morgan has compounded his apparent ongoing feud with the couple (which may or may not be rooted in Meghan allegedly spurning his invite for a drink some time back) which led to him calling Harry a “whiny little brat”. You don’t dare look at the comments beneath Morgan’s diatribes in the Mail Online, which amount to a national pile-on against Harry and his wife. There is no compelling evidence that the ire Meghan draws is racial in motivation, but you can’t help have your suspicions. Either way, she is seen as some poisonous gold digger, who stole a hitherto popular prince away from us. And how dare Harry cause so much pain to his grandmother and father, and indeed break up the once solid sibling duo with William? All of a sudden, Harry - who fought for his country and has admitted that he was probably at his happiest in the army - is being demonised…for what?
In the new interviews with Winfrey, Harry - speaking eloquently and without any of the histrionics he’s been painted as applying - opens up about the depths both he and his wife have been through, accusing the royal family of treating Meghan with “total neglect” when she was suicidal, and he has used drink and drugs to mask the pain of his mother’s tragic death. What is clear, and what those who criticise Harry seem to refuse to acknowledge, is just how deep the effect of Diana’s death, when he was just 11, has had on him. Which begs the question - who has the right to question that? Even his revelation that Meghan didn’t go through with suicide while pregnant with Archie was because she thought it unfair on him “after everything that had happened to my mum and to now be put in a position of losing another woman in my life, with a baby inside of her — our baby.” He added that Meghan persuaded him to go into therapy to address his demons - again, further fuel to the anti-Meghan brigade - as he says that he found life a nightmare, especially living in London, before he met his wife, because of the painful memories of his mother at every turn.
You can see his point or, at least, should. And you can see why Morgan, once a tabloid newspaper editor (let’s gloss over the Mirror front page scandal that he was ultimately responsible for...) is going to go for the attention Harry finds so traumatic, recalling how, as a young boy, sat in the back of his mother’s car, he saw how she was in tears while being pursued by press photographers, a darkly prescient event in itself: “The clicking of cameras and the flash of cameras makes my blood boil,” he tells Winfrey. “It makes me angry. It takes me back to what happened to my mum, what I experienced as a kid.”
Harry also reveals that Prince Charles’ own treatment of him hasn’t helped. “My father used to say to me [and William] when I was younger, ‘Well it was like that for me so it’s going to be like that for you’.” Charles, as The Crown appears to depict, was a somewhat morose child as he tried to figure out his place in the world as future king, in a family with cold emotion running through it, and a household of courtiers adding to the atmosphere with their institutional stuffiness. Harry’s revelations about his own father come at little surprise, but at least he’s being honest in talking about them, even if it risks the rift with his brother, who dutifully doesn’t speak about family strife, being prolonged.
I only lost my father, at the age of 90, to Alzheimer’s a couple of years ago, so I couldn’t begin to empathise with how an 11-year-old Harry must have confronted the death of Diana, at the same age he is now. More so, how he would have confronted it within the refined world of the royal family. “I wish she could have met Meghan,” he reflects to Winfrey, “I wish she was around for Archie.” You’d have to have a heart of stone to not find that statement sad. But, I think, you’d also have to have a heart of stone for not having sympathy for where Harry has ended up, and why - to his own admission - he made the decision to leave royal life and chart his own course in California. And, again, here he presents another stick for critics to beat him with. ‘It’s all very well Harry wanting out,’ runs the line, ‘but he’s still trading on his title’. Well, yes, true. But can you really blame him?
The arguments over Harry’s royal status could go on all day, but I keep coming back to the central premise of his appearance in Winfrey’s new series, The Me You Can’t See, which he also co-produced, for Apple+: at its core seems to be the continued inability for people to accept mental health issues to begin with, and secondly, that someone born into privilege, who has benefitted supremely from that privilege, has any right to struggle. “Poor, poor, pitiful me,” to reference the Warren Zevon song. “Whiny little brat” indeed. We stray, here, into the British predilection for indulging the politics of envy. Harry wants his cake and eat it, but does he not - as any bereaved son should - deserve some slack? Or is he just supposed to ‘man up’, the stock response to any weakness?
If, though, we are to take mental health more seriously, as we should, the criticism Harry has faced for opening up has been astonishing. As psychologist Wendy Bristow points out in The Times today, he’s faced accusations of whingeing, even from mental health professionals. And yet, she argues, despite greater public awareness of mental health problems, especially amongst men, Harry’s state is dismissed as weakness or, with another angle on his public image, wokery. I’m squarely with Bristow in her advocacy of therapy, which Harry tells Winfrey has been an essential part of coping. I went through it myself, a few years ago when dealing with combination of challenges. In the way I usually equate things with pop culture, I felt that if Tony Soprano could get therapy, then so could I. How much it materially helped, I couldn’t say, but it was certainly good to talk.
Unfortunately, Harry is clearly not being given the respite his confessional to Winfrey might seek to achieve. A look at the Mail’slanding page sees him plastered across it. Countless stories, countless angles, and all the usual bovver boys steaming in with their why-oh-why think pieces. Helicopter up, and we see Harry featuring in a timeline of royal schism that shows no end. I do sympathise with the Queen at having to deal with all this, especially having only buried her husband a month ago. To some extent, I sympathise with Charles, too, though, as the rogue Bashir interview with Diana revealed, he doesn’t come out of things with much dignity. But I do respect Harry for wanting to do something about the “cycle of pain” of his own upbringing with his own children. “I don't think we should be pointing the finger or blaming anybody,” he told podcaster Dax Shepard recently, “but certainly when it comes to parenting, if I've experienced some form of pain or suffering because of the pain or suffering that perhaps my father or my parents had suffered, I'm going to make sure I break that cycle so that I don't pass it on, basically.” In the interview he lucidly talked through where he was coming from: “It's a lot of genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on,” adding that he’d started to piece it all together from his father’s schooldays (miserably captured in The Crown), to the chain of events that occurred when his parents met, and he came into the world.
I’m no flag-waving, bunting-stringing, street party-attending royalist, but I do like the royal institution. I think that it has a place in British society that is positive, for the most part, makes people smile. That Prince Harry’s commentary about himself and his family may be undermining the institution is open to debate, but perhaps it’s the revolution the royal family finally needed. In the grand scheme of regal schisms, dating back centuries, this is - to some extent - just a rift. Those who passionately take the red-white-and-blue bunting view of it all will still enjoy seeing the Queen on Zoom calls with Scout troops, Charles making his impassioned comments about the environment, and even William doing his earnest work with “Kate”, presenting a softer, more modern, chino-wearing profile for ‘The Firm’. But maybe, just maybe, we should cut Harry some slack. Because, hasn’t he been through enough?
There was hubbub recently, mostly amongst those who care about such things, when a 38-minute film of Genesis playing Le Bataclan in Paris in 1973 surfaced online. Now, it should be stated for the defence that this clip wasn’t of any great cultural significance: this wasn’t a ten-year-old Hendrix writing All Along The Watchtower on a toy guitar (Dylan wrote it, in any case), or hitherto unseen footage of The Beatles in some Hamburg bierkeller. No, this was Genesis, long before their MTV tenure, with then-lead singer Peter Gabriel giving it the full Brian Pern. For those less familiar with this era of the band, and indeed Gabriel (before he left in 1975, promising to “Do a Ferry, or a Bowie, or a Furry Boa and hang myself with it”) the restored, 4K-quality footage featured the band in proto-prog mode, performing grandiose stage epics such as The Musical Box, Supper's Ready and pre-punk stomper The Knife, with Gabriel dressed in a variety of outfits (such as a fox’s head and his wife’s red dress) to act out the songs, as was his want in those days, while Messrs. Banks, Collins, Hackett and Rutherford earnestly played around him.
It’s easy to see, now, how lampoonable it all was (kudos to Simon Day for Pern, and to Gabriel himself for accepting the pisstake in very good humour), but like most of these time capsules that get unearthed from time to time, it served as a reminder of how, in the early 70s, rock music was still relatively new, and anything went. Gabriel’s final turn with Genesis was to take the concept album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway out on tour in 1975, with the singer’s costumes and stage presence taking even more prominence, often to the mild resentment of the other band members. Two years later (and after the near tragedy of his first wife, Jill, almost dying in childbirth), Gabriel launched a solo career with the first of four albums, simply titled Peter Gabriel (a typically obtuse Gabrielism, which frustrated his American record company, Geffen). With the fantasy stories and extended keyboard noodling of the Genesis albums now behind him, Peter Gabriel (rebranded ‘Car’ by his US peeps) was a melange of themes and styles, from the Springsteen-esque rocker Modern Love to the cod-barbershop plaintive Excuse Me, the now perennial favourite Solsbury Hill (an autobiographic reflection on his ‘release’ from the rock band hamster wheel) and the melodramatic Here Comes The Flood, a song Gabriel also recorded as a haunting, stripped down affair, along with a version in German.
With each successive solo album - 1978’s Peter Gabriel (‘Scratch’), 1980’s Peter Gabriel (‘Melt’) and 1982’s Peter Gabriel (‘Security’) - the somewhat dilettante Gabriel took notable twists and turns of artistic style, delivering a more conventional rock album with his second release, experimenting with cymbal-free drums on the third (in the process “inventing” Phil Collins, who played on the album, with producers Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham developing that famous ‘gated reverb’ drum sound), as well as collaborated with Kate Bush and Paul Weller, before throwing away the rock rule book with his fourth, with its extensive use of the Fairlight sampling keyboard, obscure rhythms and a decidedly un-Western musical fabric.
By the time So, Gabriel’s fifth solo album appeared, he’d established a reputation for artistically interesting, if not particularly commercially impactful, records. Between ‘PG4’ and So he’d also recorded the soundtrack to Alan Parker’s Birdy, which effectively and hauntingly remade existing songs to considerable effect (the jungle drums of Rhythm Of The Heat was a common presence underneath early-80s documentaries). While collaborating on Birdy with producer Daniel Lanois, he commenced work on his next solo album-proper. The final track recorded become the first song to be heard from the album, and it blew everyone away, in every dimension. Sledgehammer was an unashamed tribute to the soul music that Gabriel was obsessed with as a 60s schoolboy (he still considers Otis Redding at Brixton’s RamJam club the best gig he’s ever seen), and with its Stax-style brass, ever-so slightly saucy lyrics, and Nick Park’s pre-Wallace & Gromit plasticine video, it turned Gabriel into a bona fide pop star. Ironically, his former band’s Invisible Touch was released at the same time, with Gabriel and Genesis vying for chart positions throughout the world.
Released on 19 May, 1986, So was, still, quintessential Gabriel. Sledgehammer plus the gospel-inspired Don’t Give Up duet with Kate Bush, the US hit In Your Eyes and the satirical Big Time, all may have introduced Gabriel to singles buyers too young to have remembered Solsbury Hill, let alone The Return Of The Giant Hogweed, but the album was no sell-out. The brooding opener Red Rain launched the audience into Gabriel’s environmental concerns, while Don’t Give Up - for all of its goo-goo romanticism (especially that swoonsome video featuring Gabriel and Bush) and its 1930s dustbowl symbolism - was actually a direct swipe at Thatcherism. We Do What We’re Told (Milgrim’s 37) was a dark essay on the obedience experiments carried out by psychologist Stanley Milgram; the offbeat Mercy Street was inspired by the poetry of Anne Sexton; while the hypnotic This Is The Picture matched Gabriel in another duet, this time with avant-garde multimediaist Laurie Anderson.
Picture: 20th Century Fox
Fuelled by the success of its singles, especially Sledgehammer and, in the US, In Your Eyes (used brilliantly in Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut, Say Anything…, in a scene in which John Cusack appears, Romeo-like, before his love interest, blasting out the song from his boombox), So went to No.1 in a number of countries and remained on the US chart for almost two years solidly. Sledgehammer itself became a No.1 single on the Billboard Hot 100, ironically, knocking Genesis and Invisible Touch off the top. “There is always wisdom from hindsight,” Gabriel recently reflected. “And because So was my most successful record, I think that a lot of people, particularly in America, think that it was designed to be that. From the other end of it, you never really know which records are going to do well. You know that some things are going to be so obscure and difficult for a mainstream audience that they’re no-hopers but generally, with what I do, it’s hard to predict which albums are going to do well.”
Gabriel says that, while he sort of knew instinctively which of So’s tracks might do well on radio, he was more excited by how the musicians produced what remains, 35 years later, a truly unique-sounding hit record, for that time or any other. Much of that credit goes to Lanois, then one of the hottest producers on the block, having worked with Brian Eno and on U2’s The Unforgettable Fire. “One of the things I learned with [Lanois] is a total respect for the magic of the moment. When you have some spine-tingling event musically, you’ve got to capture it,” says Gabriel, recalling his musical soulmate, Eno’s work with Talking Heads in which raw energy took effort to extract. “I wanted his emotions to come to the forefront [with So],” Lanois himself has said. “To wear no mask and no veil. To have no mirrored contact lenses, no trickery. Just take everything off and let the songs be heard. A nice sequel into the next chapter for Peter Gabriel. I think these songs are more revealing, they are more naked, they are taking risks, and listeners feel that when a man takes a risk.”
It has become something of a cliche to pick up on Gabriel’s long-standing embrace of world music, even the fact that he somewhat invented the term. His Real World label continues to be one of the strongest outlets for the form, and - after a near-bankrupting experience that required a Genesis reunion to bail it out - Gabriel’s WOMAD festival has become an annual fixture for promoting musical diversity. With a roster of musicians from every continent and ethnicity, Gabriel’s Real World label continues to be a positive outlet for music that challenges the notion that it should be both Western and sung in English, a concept Gabriel has championed since Biko on his third album and, more significantly, In Your Eyes, which features Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour.
“In Your Eyes was the first thing that I’d recorded, I think, with Youssou and it was very important for that reason,” says Gabriel. “It was around the time I was going to Africa and really getting inspired by a lot of the music I was hearing there, particularly rhythmically and vocally. I’ve described Youssou’s voice as ‘liquid gold’ and I think when he comes in singing on that track it’s just a fantastic moment. We’ve since gone on to do a lot of other things, but that was one of the most exciting.” As an aside, In Your Eyes played a tiny part in music technology’s evolution: on So’s original vinyl release, the sonic limitations of the format meant that, due to Tony Levin’s bass, the track had to be listed earlier on the album (something to do with the width of grooves, so I’m told). For So’s CD release, the uplifting song closes it out.
35 years on, So retains a freshness that most of its mid-80s contemporaries would struggle to provide. Many compilations from that time and re-runs of Top Of The Pops expose how production techniques were still transitioning from analogue to digital, with associated aural limitations. With So, Gabriel produced something that spanned so many influences while still sounding unlike anything else. It’s worth mentioning here the record Gabriel released ‘immediately’ afterwards (in 1989, which is quite “immediate” for Gabriel): Passion, his stunning soundtrack for Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, was another career high point, but for very different reasons, drawing inspirations, musicians and instrumentation from a multitude of cultures, including the Middle East. On balance it remains, perhaps, my favourite Gabriel album - not for its hit songs (there aren’t any) but for the incredible landscapes it paints, inspired by the Holy Land. I played it endlessly a few years ago while driving in that very part of the world, and it was incredibly evocative, even in the very place it was inspired by.
Steven Wilson
No surprise, then, that Steven Wilson - a musician very much in the Gabriel tradition of never standing still, musically or thematically - is a committed fan of So, comparing it to Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love, which had come out the previous September: “With this album Gabriel managed to make his sound more accessible, giving him a much broader mainstream appeal.” That is normally quite a tricky feat, especially for an artist hitherto known for his broad experimentation with conventional rock as well as non-Western traditions. But, says Steven, it was without compromise. “This was achieved without sacrificing any of his personality and ambition, or his will to experiment and push the envelope. So has pop immediacy but also artistic depth that bears repeated listening. It’s an extremely difficult trick to pull off.”
So's shift in form for Gabriel was even captured in the record’s graphic design, overseen by Peter Saville, who’d been responsible for artwork at Factory Records, New Order and Joy Division to his credits. To begin with, he wasn’t a fan: “I didn’t actively dislike him,” Saville revealed to the Real World Notes blog of Gabriel’s record label. “He was just not somebody I knew that much about.” Saville, who was brought on board when the album had the working title ‘Good’, was won over to working with the singer after a first meeting at his house near Bath. As Saville and his creative partner Brett Wickens drove back up to London, they listened to a cassette copy of the album for the first time.
“The first track was Red Rain,” reveals Saville. “If you’re in a sensitive mood and you’ve just seen a car crash [as they had witnessed while approaching the M4] and you hear Red Rain for the first time… it’s quite like, ‘Woooaaah!’. There was a real passion in Peter’s voice and it was very listenable. I didn’t mind it. As we approached the motorway Sledgehammer came on. We stopped the fucking car on the slip road! You know when you’re hearing something important. It was like hearing Blue Monday for the first time. Brett and I just looked at each other and then looked at the cassette player and almost simultaneously we said, ‘That’s a number one single!’ It was fucking brilliant. By the time Don’t Give Up came on I cried a little bit. I hadn’t got far away enough from Bath and that just completely did me in, actually.”
Gabriel’s first four solo albums had all featured covers that had partly obscured his face, rendering the singer somewhat oblique. Even having released singles like Shock The Monkey and Games Without Frontiers in the video age, it would have been hard, in 1986, for mainstream pop fans to identify him. So changed all that, and its black and white cover image played a massive role in that. “Gail Coulson [Gabriel’s manager] had briefed me privately that Peter had to come out of himself for this record,” Saville recalled. “She knew that he had made an emotional album and that he’d written songs and made music which crossed over to other people who were not Peter Gabriel fans. We had to give a face to that. Of course Peter’s natural inclination was towards shyness and not showing himself. But that wasn’t going to do the job because this was 1986, you know.” With two weeks to deliver So’s cover, Saville brought in photographer Trevor Key, who’d produced the art for New Order’s Low Life, another band “disinterested in presenting their own identity” he says. The other graphic standout was the album’s name, presented simply over the singer’s name. It remains to this day one of the most basic but impactful album covers of all time. More importantly, it propelled Gabriel into another strata of fame.
A question remains, however, as to So’s place in the Gabriel canon: without doubt, it transformed him from legacy prog rock star into a genuine pop act, perhaps in a more artistically acceptable manner than his former bandmates in Genesis had done as they consciously moved into the pop-rock realm as a three-piece. But, the original albums that followed So took their time: Us came out in 1992, Up a full ten years after that. The former leant heavily on the break-up of Gabriel’s first marriage, and while it didn’t take the heart-on-sleeve approach his mucker Phil Collins had famously taken with his ‘divorce album’, Face Value, beneath the deep and introspective lines of Digging In The Dirt lay an album forced into the open through the cauterising of emotional wounds rather than So’s at times carefree approach. Up, Gabriel’s last album of original songs, had an even longer gestation, having been conceived originally in 1985. It remains a good addition to the library, with all the sonic layers and ambitious conceptual excursions Gabriel has always been known for, but it, and its predecessor, lacked the immediacy that So had through its hit singles.
It’s been a long time, then, since we heard anything really new from Peter Gabriel. His last new album-proper was ten years ago - the orchestral retreads of New Blood in 2011, preceded by the covers album Scratch My Back in 2010. There has long been talk of an album in the works, but as with everything Gabriel does, he picks and chooses what he devotes his energies to, with music taking a back seat (he owns the record company, so no pressure there). He’s not invisible, he’s not a recluse, and he’s certainly not a one-hit wonder. But with 35 years separating today’s anniversary and So first being released, it’s tempting to look at it through the prism of pop stardom.
Gabriel has never sat easily with fame. His somewhat diffident personality fits well with his status as an arch auteur, owning a fine body of work but happy to tinker at the edges while being distracted by his myriad worthy causes, such as his long-standing commitment to human rights and The Elders group he co-founded with Nelson Mandela and Richard Branson. At 71, it’s unlikely that Gabriel will grace the charts with another Sledgehammer, but it would be nice if he produced another album with the accessibility of So that Steven Wilson talks of - but without selling out on the musical principles he’s held dear since those very early days with Genesis.
It wasn’t, let’s face it, a particularly successful debut weekend for Chelsea's new home kit. Defeat on Saturday for Thomas Tuchel's side in the FA Cup Final and then a thumping 4-0 win, yesterday, by Barcelona over Chelsea in the women’s Champions League Final. It would have made for uncomfortable reading this morning in SW6 and in Surrey. Unsurprisingly, however, most of the media chin-scratching is over the challenge Tuchel now faces to keep his team in contention for Europe next season, rather than recognition of just how far Emma Hayes has brought Chelsea, and women’s professional football in England.
The women’s game has transformed out of all recognition in recent years, with most of the big clubs ploughing money into their women’s squads, making competitions like the Women’s Super League in England far more exciting as a result. Rather than treating them as ancillary operations, owners like Roman Abramovich have matched ambition with resources. Chelsea coach Hayes has been the beneficiary of a recruitment programme which, proportionately, has kept pace with - and even exceeded - that of the men’s squad, complementing the dedicated training facilities at the club's all-squad Cobham training complex.
Picture: Chelsea FC
It was no coincidence, either, that Abramovich himself was in Gothenburg last night to cheer - and console - Hayes’ players. And, yet, I wonder how much newspaper attention will be afforded Hayes in taking an English women's team to the pinnacle fixture in European professional football? The sports pages may have covered the final, but the women’s game is still painfully lacking respect from many sports editors, with coverage often buried. Even worse, from male football fans, of which a cursory gaze through the comments of any attempt by the Mail Online to cover games reveals a depressing litany of misogyny (I’m not even talking about casual sexism, either) and homophobia.
Picture: Twitter/Alex Scott
I’m not trying to be woke in raising this. I just find it hard to understand, genuinely, how in the 21st century it should even be a ‘thing’ that women play football professionally. But here we are, in a world where former Arsenal and England defender Alex Scott, who has already built up substantial experience as a TV presenter and football pundit, is chosen to replace Dan Walker (who has never played football professionally) as anchor of BBC1’s Football Focus, and all of a sudden online forums are full of “box-ticking” comments about the BBC appointing a black women to present the Saturday lunchtime institution.
At risk of stating the bleeding obvious, there are clearly a lot of people with a problem at the idea of women doing something that men can also do. It manifests itself in even darker ways, too: former England international and Chelsea winger Karen Carney contemplated taking her own life after being abused on Twitter following comments she made during Amazon Prime coverage in December about Leeds beating West Brom 5-0. Even now, Carney is a lightning rod for online abuse, often for her Midlands accent, something that rarely afflicts male commentators from the same region (with, perhaps, the exception of Alan Smith).
Chelsea’s defeat in Gothenburg last night will be of little consequence to those categorically opposed to the idea of professional women’s football, but to those of us who do take an interest (mine, admittedly, through Chelsea’s ever-increasing success), there was much to celebrate, even if the four goals Hayes’ side shipped in a devastating first 35 minutes of the fixture will sting for some time. Objectively, Barcelona exposed a gulf in quality, shockingly so, considering just how talented Chelsea are, with their usually on-point ‘Kerr-by’ forward partnership of the symbiotic Samantha Kerr and Fran Kirby, along with appearances from other dependable such as central defender Millie Bright and goalkeeper Ann-Katrin Berger.
This was still the same squad that recently won the WSL, the women’s League Cup and next weekend will contest the FA Cup. Chelsea’s appearance last night also marked the first time an English team had appeared in the pinnacle European finale since Arsenal won it in 2007 (Hayes was assistant to Vic Akers that night, in a season where Arsenal won a historic quadruple). They were also playing a Barcelona that had won all 26 of their domestic league matches, scoring 128 goals and conceding only five in the process. And that, for contrast, is on a budget of just Eur 4 million, a fraction of the salaries and transfer fees the men’s game commands.
Picture: Twitter/ChelseaFCW
Hayes, though, is a breath of fresh air, in football as a whole. “I am not going to give you crappy platitudes,” she said, live on BT Sport after her side had beaten Munich to reach the Champions League Final. “I have worked my whole life for this day and I am so fucking proud of them players. They have delivered.” Yep, the F-bomb on a Sunday lunchtime (Ofcom sanction, no doubt, in the post). But it was unlike any of the pro-forma cliches you normally get from professional football managers, the Keegan meltdown notwithstanding.
“This is thousands of hours, thousands of setbacks," Hayes continued. “I got to this level through my hard work and determination, and I am fortunate enough to be working for a football club that I adore, that give me licence to do this.” She then reflected on how her love of football began on the Islington streets of her childhood: “I entered that pitch every day as a nine-year-old, about to ‘play’ in the Champions League final. Oh my God, my dreams came true today.” While, ultimately, those dreams may have taken a dent last night, Hayes’ ambition to drive women’s football ever onwards won’t be dented. She wants to win over the naysayers and give nine-year-old girls everywhere the idea that they, too, could play in a European final one day.
It’s this self belief that has made her one of the best coaches in the game, regardless of gender, even raising the idea of how she’d make a better manager than many of those running men’s teams. Earlier this year Hayes was linked with the vacant job at AFC Wimbledon, one she instantly rejected, partly because she was extremely happy at Chelsea (jokingly, because Wimbledon wouldn’t have been able to afford her, anyway), and partly on principle.
"The football world needs to recognise that while the game is played by a different gender, it’s the same sport,” she railed. The qualities involved in team management were exactly the same as for a men’s team. “We are talking about human beings,” she stressed. “We spend too much time talking about gender and ethnicity instead of the quality of candidates.”
Hayes then got to the nub of the issue: “Women's football is something to celebrate, and the quality and the achievements of all the females I represent. It’s an insult to them that we talk about women’s football being a ‘step down’, with the dedication and the commitment and the quality they have. That's what I’m disappointed with, not being linked to a football job.”
Picture: Peckham Town FC
Things have come a long way, however. A couple of weeks ago BBC London reporter Chris Slegg fronted a compelling film featuring Mary Phillip, England’s first black international captain and a six-time FA Cup winner, who is now the manager of men’s side Peckham Town. She’s now used to the “she ain’t got a clue what she’s doing” barbs - even from rival managers. “It is still perceived as a men’s game and I am in men’s football. But when you learn to play you are coached the exact same way a man is. The drills and tactics are the same.”
“I was born in the 70s, fell in love with the game in the 80s, played at elite level in the 90s, became a professional in the early 2000s and a manager in the 2010s,” Phillip told the BBC. However, her journey and the journey of millions of female players has been long.
Women’s football first became popular during World War One, but faced cultural male hostility. In 1921 it was banned by the Football Association. In 1967 Tottenham met (and beat…) Chelsea in the men’s FA Cup Final, a game that had a profound effect on the-then 19-year-old Patricia Gregory, who wrote to a local newspaper to query why women didn’t play football, and then set up a team of her own. Within a couple of years, a league of 47 teams had been set up, and the Women's Football Association was born. The same year, finally, the FA overturned their 1921 ban.
More than half a century on, the women’s game gets TV coverage and attention, but the sense is that it’s still not regarded with any of the same blanket national obsession as the men’s game. There’s no doubt that things are moving in the right direction - Sky Sports and the BBC jointly signed a £24 million deal with the Women’s Super League that will make it the world’s most-watched women’s sports league. Coming on top of £20 million in sponsorship, the TV deal has been described as “a game changer”. UEFA also recently announced a Eur 24 million package for women’s Champions League teams, pledging that clubs in the group stage will receive a minimum payment of Eur 400,000.
Further visibility and further investment - even if paltry by comparison to the eye-watering sums swilling about the men’s game - but momentum that brings Emma Hayes’ dream just that little bit closer to reality.
Another year, another Paul Weller album. That might sound wan-with-care but is anything but. For today sees the arrival of Fat Pop (Volume 1), the Woking Wonder’s fourth album in as many years (and 16th solo release in 29 years) and you have to wonder how he does it.
I could, easily, just rewrite my intro from just last July, when On Sunset, Album 15, came out: “It's actually become boring to talk about Paul Weller’s rich vein of form. Because, for a purple patch, it's been going on a mighty long time.” But I won’t. We can all cite musicians into their fifth decade of productivity churning out poor quality albums featuring lazy retreads, standards, ropey covers or half-baked collaborations with their chums, which they end up hawking on The One Show. Even so-called legends. Weller, on the other hand, continues to churn out records with the same rapidity as Nissan produces Qashqais in Sunderland, but without any breach whatsoever in standards. In fact, I can’t think of any one of his 16 studio albums as a solo artist that you could ask, timidly, “Was that wise, Paul?”
That Fat Pop (Volume 1) is an album of 12 songs is also testament to the restless creative soul that Paul Weller is. No sooner had he got On Sunset saved on the hard drive, he already had the basis of “four or five” new songs stored on his phone. With lockdown enforced, and his beloved touring off the cards for the foreseeable future, he took himself off to his Black Barn studio in Surrey to work on the basics of the new album on his own, gradually bringing in regular cohorts like guitarist Steve Cradock and bass player Andy Crofts to overlay their parts, effectively by e-mail.
“It was a bit weird not being together,” says Weller, “but at least it kept the wheels rolling. I’d have gone potty otherwise.” By the time lockdown restrictions were easing last summer he was able to get everyone together at Black Barn to finish recording. This wasn’t, however, an exercise in T-crossing and I-dotting, but an opportunity to truly coalesce the concept that had emerged of a dozen “fat” pop songs. Such was their “strength and immediacy” that, at one point, there was the idea of progressively releasing each track as individual singles before putting out the album. The idea was eventually dropped due to practicalities but, says Weller, “I quite liked the idea and every song does stand up as a single, I think.”
Picture: Sandra Vijandi
On paper, it’s hard to know what to expect from that premise, but as you listen you quickly become accustomed to the abruptness of each track. Fat Pop? Fat-free more like: there’s no filler here. Each three-minute entry has a vibrancy, every one delivering a statement of Weller’s restless creativity, of his disparate tastes and application of it. It’s a veritable compendium of pop music, whatever that is (frankly, whatever you want it to be). It fizzes and scampers over stabs of pop, nu-funk and old soul, flitting from the Ian Dury-like synth punk of Cosmic Fringes to the summery, hand-clapping ease of the title track - Weller’s personal favourite on the album - which is reminiscent of Long Hot Summer, but refreshed with a Westway-flavoured dub beat.
On Shades Of Blue - the single Weller premiered on The Jonathan Ross Show (with daughter Leah on backing vocals, spookily recreating the beauty of her mother, Dee C. Lee’s voice) - he mines his gift for concise, English soul. Its choppy piano and joyous chorus harks back to The Kinks and Small Faces - even the press release describes it as: “A classic three-minute English pop kitchen sink drama”, co-written with his daughter. It is probably one of my favourite of all the tracks he's produced during this run of albums.
Another gem is Testify, one of the tracks recorded in full and live at Black Barn and featuring the legendary Andy Fairweather Low. It’s a bright, boppy beat of a tune, possessing just the right amount of power to fit the album’s pop remit without straying into classic rock. “We had actually done it live two or three years ago,” says Weller, “but while I loved the groove I never really got a grip on the song.” Then, just before lockdown, he played a charity gig in Guildford, performing some Stax songs with Fairweather Low and they just gelled. “Our voices sound so good together and he’s such a lovely fellow, so I sent him the backing track. As soon as lockdown was lifted he came down to the studio for the afternoon. We cut it live and that was it.”
On Moving Canvas, a song about Iggy Pop, Weller gets choppy with a riffy stomper that he predicts will be a great track live, especially with the middle eight offering all sorts of potential for extended guitar and Hammond organ wigouts that would extend the song way beyond the album version’s run time of just under 180 seconds. The album’s final two tracks, which perfectly underscore the importance of good programming when doing a track listing, also bring out the gift Weller has for understated emotion. For a man so often depicted - still - as the stony-faced angry young mod of his Jam days, he has always been able to apply layers of texture to his songs.
Picture: Universal Music
In Better Times is the perfect example. With its dreamscape chorus, it is Weller addressing anyone going through personal trauma: “It’s me talking to a young person who is going through something, addiction or mental health pressure, or whatever, and just saying ‘it’ll be alright’. Just get through this bit and there’ll be better times to come, you’ll look back and you’ll see it differently”. It is beautifully weighted.
As is the track that ends the album, Still Glides The Stream, a collaboration between Weller and Steve Cradock with a soaring chorus, orchestral strings and brass and a vague resemblance in the verse to the Stones’ Ruby Tuesday. Evolving initially via an e-mail back-and-forth between the two musicians, it evolved into an unintended, but still-heartfelt tribute to the unsung heroes of the last year. “In my mind, I was thinking about our road sweeper who’s a lovely fellow,” says Weller. “I started thinking that there’s so many people in this country who form the infrastructure of it and without whom we’d be fucked. But they’re looked down upon, not really noticed. So I was imagining their story.” It concludes an album conceived in lockdown, partially recorded out of it, and then released as we emerge from another, blinking into the daylight, slowly and gradually.
There have been so many new releases recently made in much the same way, and perhaps with the same effect of providing the bright, sunny hope of normality and life returning. Paul Weller, canny lad that he has, has brilliantly tapped into that need, producing an album not of lengthy, chin-scratching complex noodling, but brisk, direct songs that put a smile on your face. Isn’t that what pop music should be about?
