We’re not out of the woods yet. In fact, we’ve barely left the forest

If there’s one piece of football commentary, other than Kenneth Wolstenholme’s “They think it’s all over…” line from 1966, that I’d rather never hear again it’s the pained “Ohhhhhhh!!!!!!!!” expelled by Barry Davies as Gareth Southgate’s penalty kick was saved in that Euro ’96 semi-final. There’s something about England playing Germany that gets under everyone’s skin in this country because, on balance, it’s been a litany of disappointments following that moment of Geoff Hurst brilliance, 55 years ago. 

Since 1966 the two sides have met six times in tournaments, famously without an England victory in any knockout-stage game, and two semi-finals - the 1990 World Cup and the 1996 Euros - decided on the aforementioned dreaded penalties. Thus, in the run-up to yesterday’s Round-of-16 encounter between the team Southgate now manages and the old nemesis, we had to endure that Davies exclamation yet again, along with the pizza ad-generating penalty flops by Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle in Turin, 21 years ago. We also had to endure the Lampard ‘ghost goal’ against Germany in Bloemfontein in 2010, which played a part in a 4-1 departure from the same stage of competition as last night’s match. That defeat led to my debut as a blogger, with me, in a foul mood the next morning, bashing out 1000 angry words on the commute from Amsterdam to Eindhoven (my first blog, What Would David Bowie Do? was created and online within an hour of me sitting down at my desk).

That first post was undoubtedly a cathartic expungement of the mental toxins that had built up throughout my lifetime when it comes to England-Germany (I was born a year after the ’66 World Cup triumph - to date, the last time England won anything of note). We’ve allowed it to stick in our collective craw, fuelled by tabloid xenophobia that just loves to make reference to events in the first half of the last century. So, to meet Germany so soon in the knockout stage of Euro 2020 laid down a psychological hurdle to Southgate’s squad, a group young enough not to have been born when their head coach committed that infamous kick. The rational and non-partisan amongst you might be tempted to say that England have only beaten a team in the first round of the knockout stage of the tournament, and that greater challenges lay ahead on Saturday with Andriy Schevchenko’s tournament dark horses, Ukraine. But that doesn’t diminish the sheer relief around the stadium at the final whistle, and in pub beer gardens, fan parks, town squares and elsewhere yesterday evening, and the sense of elation that came from a rare victory over an apparent bogey. 

Picture: Twitter/England

That euphoria masked what was, actually, quite a cagey game. Southgate, as his somewhat nervous disposition does project, is not the most bullish of tacticians, and for much of the game at Wembley, England seemed to soak up German pressure. The margins between Joachim Löw's eurocrats and England were thin, thin enough that Raheem Stirling and Harry Kane were able to make use of the relatively meagre scraps thrown their way to produce a memorable victory, while Jordan Pickford pulled off a couple of brilliant saves (though one was against Timo Werner at point-blank range, which means that the shot could have gone anywhere in north-west London…).

Picture: Twitter/England

Better minds than mine have described the game as a “tactical masterstroke” on Southgate’s part, but I’m not so sure. Raheem Sterling’s 75th-minute goal came against expectation, especially given the lengthy scrutiny of his season at Manchester City, but his record at these Euros, scoring against Croatia and the Czech Republic, gave him the edge over Harry Kane in terms of goalmouth hope. When he eventually scored last night, notably after Jack Grealish had come on to liven up England’s otherwise cagey acceptance of the German press, it was a proper No.9’s goal. It gave me little pleasure to see Chelsea’s Antonio Rüdiger beaten in the build-up, but it seemed to be the goal that kicked everything else into life, with Kane - finally - doing his job ten minutes later, after a neat pass from Luke Shaw to Grealish and then onto the Spurs striker’s head. 

Did we dare, then, to believe? After the eye-straining events on Monday in the Croatia-Spain and France-Switzerland fixtures, the nervous and the cynical alike wouldn’t take anything for granted. Then again, this probably hasn’t been Germany’s best tournament, not that such an observation should have made any difference. Years of disappointment have informed us that tournament football rarely follows form. Germany weren’t poor - and Chelsea’s Kai Havertz appears to have come good for his club just at the wrong time for England - but when it counted, England had just the right combination of skill and luck, the two magic, if hard to quantify, ingredients that make for progress in these competitions.

Victory over Germany, which didn’t involve extra time or, worse, penalties, feels sweet. I hope that it has genuinely banished whatever it was that commentators felt compelled to refer to, as if England's failure in the past was down to bad luck, bad karma, or some UEFA conspiracy (the same that stops the UK from ever winning the Eurovision Song Contest). The reality, however, is that - spoiler alert! - someone has to win. In 1990 and 1996, Germany's victorIes on penalties both came after 1-1 draws in extra time, which means it is reasonable to assume that both sides were as good as each other, and it was just bad luck/boot laces/rogue blades of grass that meant that Waddle, Pearce and Southgate’s spot kicks didn’t cross the line.

England do, however, bumble along with traditions of history and fairness underpinning their game. How often is their lack of guile at fault for other sides getting beneath their skin. In modern parlance, it’s “game management”. For all the ultra-competitive Premier League blood that has run through England squads passim, we’ve grown used to disappointment by the thinnest of margins. Perhaps, then - and without loading the gun - we should have hope about what happens next? Perhaps, then, the disappointments of the past have been the result of England just not having as much belief as their Teutonic opponent, or as much guile and cunning as other opponents? Perhaps they’ve been, well, too English…?

Picture: Twitter/England

The key, now, is for England to play without fear, but also to play with the right psychology. Gareth Southgate is a bright, intelligent football man who has experienced the ignominy of a saved penalty on the game’s biggest stage. He, more than anyone at Wembley Stadium last night, would have savoured the moment and enjoyed the catharsis. He, though, will know that the job is far from done. In fact, it’s only just beginning.

“This [was] an immense performance but at a cost emotionally and physically,” he said afterwards. “We have to recover well and show that mentally we are in the right space. It is a dangerous moment for us: we will have that warmth of success and the feeling around the country that we only have to turn up to win the thing, but we know it is going to be an immense challenge from here on in.”

Age is on his players’ side, not having been to the knockout stages of a tournament before. And with all the talk of an “easy” path back to Wembley for a possible semi-final and even the final, it’s too easy for confidence to get in the way of focus. Defender Harry Maguire qualified this with his comments last night: “We have won one knockout game, and not to concede in four games is impressive, but we need to win three more games. There are a lot of good teams left in the competition and we have to play at the level we are capable of.” That test is still to come. England have entered uncharted waters in so many ways.

Picture: Twitter/England

Queasy like Sunday morning

Not being equipped with the brain cells for it, I rarely stray into politics on either this blog or social media. Actually, my intellectual heft - or lack of it - doesn’t really come into it: such is the No Man’s Land of embittered trench warfare these days that it’s rarely worth the blood pressure spikes expressing an opinion on anything. But the matter of Matt Hancock’s office indiscretion has left me properly batey, and on many levels.

Firstly, I get it that someone’s private life should be just that, private, and it doesn’t matter what moralistic view you take on the now-former Health Secretary’s affair with Gina Coladangelo, essentially wrecking two families and destroying two marriages in the process. But, as has been frequently stated over the last 48 hours, in times of crisis, we look to leadership, especially when that leadership is setting the rules about what we can and cannot do. So when that same leadership breaks those rules - and flagrantly so - we’ve got a perfect right as villagers to come out shouting, brandishing our pitchforks in a bloodthirsty manner.

I’ve not lost a close relative to Covid-19, but my girlfriend has - her stepfather, who lived with her mother in Spain, enjoying their retirement in a warmer clime. When his death came, only two members of the extended family could fly out to the funeral (which we attended via Zoom). To date, my partner hasn’t been able to hug or even be in the same country as her widowed mother. These are the sacrifices we’ve all been forced to endure over the last 15 months. The same sacrifices that meant I had to stand on my own 91-year-old mother’s doorstep for months on end, waving at her from two metres like friends separated by the Berlin Wall. 

So forgive me for getting all preachy about it, but Hancock, in snogging his mistress in the office as if sneaking off from the Christmas party for hanky-panky over the photocopier, deserves no sympathy or given a bye on the basis that ‘humans are humans’. I get it. Times of crisis, and the proximity that comes from spending long working days together, followed by the “who fancies a quick drink over the road” will lead to office romances. It has happened to me and it may well have happened to you. The difference is that in my case, we were both single at the time and, secondly, not responsible for imposing the most stringent restrictions on social engagement since The Blitz. And therein lies the crux of our ire over Hancock, who was unable to keep it in his pants while telling every else to.

I’ve always found Hancock a politician - amongst many - who seemed rather too pleased with himself. When Theresa May appointed him Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport in 2018, he took it upon himself to demonstrate tech savviness by launching his own smartphone app. “Hi - I’m Matt Hancock and welcome to my app,” he trilled on the opening screen, before inviting users to enter an apparently un-needed tool to showcase what the politician was getting up to, in his professional life, of course. “A chance to find out what's going on, both in my role as MP for West Suffolk and as culture secretary, and most importantly it’s a chance for you to tell me what you think, and to engage with others on issues that matter to you.” Perhaps, now, we know too much.

Just a few months after being appointed to the culture brief, the 39-year-old Hancock was made health secretary, a role which, when May herself resigned, gave him the ambition for even higher office, unsuccessfully contending the Tory leadership that put in power Boris Johnson who, as we all know, has had a problem with marital fidelity all of his own. It could, then, be said that Hancock was in the right place at the wrong time when the pandemic erupted. And, as the many wartime analogies have compared, there are few rulebooks that can be followed in times of real national crisis. But if there’s one thing that has run through Hancock’s political career - and the app episode exemplified - it’s breathtaking hubris. 

On Friday, after The Sun had broken its front page story of Hancock’s “steamy clinch” with Ms. Coladangelo, the line being put out was that his priority was driving the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine and getting the country back to normality. This was the same line that Hancock brazenly used to deflect attention when Dominic Cummings’ explosive spleen-venting during the Commons Health Select Committee revealed accusations of “15 or 20 occasions” when “Hancock” (always just that) should have been sacked for failures in the early weeks of the crisis. When Cummings published the infamous WhatsApp screenshot of Johnson apparently calling his health secretary “fucking hopeless”, Hancock continued to style it out with his insistence that he has the country to save.

Even yesterday, in his resignation video, Hancock chose to spend more time alluding to the great work of the department he ran, than apologising to his wife for the humiliation he had caused her. Body language experts have noted how his lengthy tribute to the NHS seemed more to do with reinforcing his political credentials for a future comeback than acknowledgement of what he’d done. “There is still an air of arrogance in his words, though, as he tells us ‘This is why I’ve got to resign’,” said social behaviourist Judi James, pointing out that he appeared to be “steering us to what he sees as the sole problem in his behaviour, rather than addressing what the public might see as a matter of disapproval.”

There was something somewhat crooked about the way Hancock had, last year, set a seemingly impossible target of achieving 100,000 daily Covid-19 tests by the end of April, which he apparently did before the number plunged dramatically again soon after. It was one of the charges laid at Hancock during Cummings’ explosive testimony. “In my opinion he should’ve been fired for that thing alone, and that itself meant the whole of April was hugely disrupted by different parts of Whitehall fundamentally trying to operate in different ways completely, because Hancock wanted to be able to go on TV and say ‘look at me and my 100k target’.” The veracity of all of Cummings’ claims remain to be fully verified, but the accusations over PPE procurement, care homes and even, today in the Sunday Times, allegations that Hancock used his private e-mail account for official government business in breach of strict transparency rules, all start pointing to a “narcissistic and slippery health secretary”, as one source described him to the same newspaper’s Tim Shipman.

No doubt, as with all the political turbulence surrounding Boris Johnson’s government in recent weeks - notably his own travails involving wallpaper and his now-wife’s influence - much of this chatter about Hancock’s conduct will get brushed off by the spin machine as Westminster “rough-and-tumble”. It has, though, become far too easy to just dismiss sleaze as of interest only to the wonks who report on such stuff from within the SW1 bubble. Johnson himself was said to be reluctant to sack Hancock on Friday, and even in accepting his health secretary’s resignation yesterday he gave a glowing endorsement of the minister’s achievements, concluding: “Your contribution to public service is far from over,” depressingly hinting at some sort of return - the equivalent of saying “lay low for 12 months, son, we’ll come and get you when this is all over”. 

Johnson doesn’t do sackings, largely because he abhors being told what to do by the very press he, as a former journalist, was once a part of. Another theory is that Boris has assembled such a lightweight Cabinet that any changes are an admission of his own failure of leadership. With such anaemic opposition at the moment, Johnson can probably afford to let Hancock’s departure go without too much exposure, especially while he still has inadequates like Gavin Williamson, Priti Patel and Grant Shapps on his front bench to act as lightning conductors. The problem for Johnson is that each episode that he manages to brush off - as Hancock had done - as Westminster life erodes from within. The wisdom is that Johnson’s premiership is somewhat Teflon-coated because of the vaccine rollout, but there are signs of exasperation within his own party that the gaffes and own goals are, like coastal erosion, gradual and mostly invisible, but could prove problematic down the line. On Friday, Johnson was backing Hancock, saying that his health secretary had apologised and that the matter was then “closed”. Yesterday, however, that support started to disappear from within the cabinet and the parliamentary Conservative party, in a manner that didn’t even occur when Cummings himself scored an enormous reputational own goal for the coronavirus response by driving his family to Barnard Castle to ‘test his eyesight’.

Friday’s front-page splash by The Sun detailing Hancock’s extra-marital relationship with the now famous “Hands. Face. Arse.” CCTV image couldn’t have had worse - or better - timing, depending on your point of view. A story breaking like that on a Friday leaves the weekend open for it to deepen, and thus it did, with the Sunday papers today diving queasily into forensic detail of Hancock’s relationship with Coladangelo, not only examining the legalities of their encounters during lockdown, but even on just how long the relationship had been going no for, how she became a director on the Department of Health & Social Care’s board, how she was sponsored for a House of Commons security pass, and even the fact her brother’s company enjoys a lucrative contract as a supplier of services to the NHS. Coming on top of other allegations about Hancock’s matey network - fellow horse racing enthusiast Dido Harding being put in charge of the patchy £37 million Test & Trace programme, for example - it all points to a ministerial culture lacking rigour and due process. In his blog testimonies, Cummings has accused government departments of using such oversight to thwart efforts to secure things like PPE at speed. He hasn’t held back in his disdain for Hancock, either. This all might seem like more of that rough and tumble, but somewhere in the midst of the syrupy mire is a country starting to lose patience. Matt Hancock would do himself, and the country, a massive favour by disappearing from public view for a very long time. Perhaps apologising to his wife would be a start…

The truth is still out there…probably

In December 1992 I blew half of a redundancy package on fulfilling a long-held dream of visiting the United States for the first time and, specifically, the West Coast. Los Angeles had been an aspirational part of my childhood, having grown up watching TV shows like The Rockford Files, The Six Million Dollar Man, CHiPs and even The Dukes Of Hazzard - all filmed in and around Los Angeles - and I wanted to see the same blue skies that had clearly been absent from Britain during my youth. 

After arriving in LA, I embarked on the customary trip up Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco, via Big Sur, Monterey and Carmel, before venturing north-east to the magnificent Lake Tahoe. Heading south again, with the Sierra Nevada mountains - California’s snow-capped spine - to my right, I followed the course of the Owens River down “scenic” Hwy 395 until the small town of Lone Pine (frequently used by Hollywood as a filming location for Westerns), where I turned off and headed towards Death Valley, the permanently in-drought, sub-sea level desert basin that regularly records insane temperatures (last week it was 54C). As a stopover for Las Vegas (more direct, less scenic routes are available), I stayed the night in the sparse town of Stovepipe Wells, near the border with Nevada. 

Picture: US DoD

With nothing much else to do for the evening, I switched on the somewhat rickety TV set in my motel room to see the proprietor of a regional station berating his viewers in the independent American local television convention of an “editorial”, lecturing on why, to his annoyance, so many people in the south-western desertlands claimed to have seen UFOs (as opposed to anywhere else in the United States). His blunt argument was that the region is home to a lot of military activity: Lockheed’s so-called ‘Skunk Works’ facility at Palmdale, on the edge of the Mojave Desert, had for decades been turning out secretive experimental aircraft designs, like the F-117 stealth fighter and more recently, the F-35 Lightning II, while another US Air Force facility in Palmdale produced the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, arguably the nearest shape in the sky to something resembling a UFO. 

A relative stone’s throw, as the crow flies, from Stovepipe Wells and into Nevada in a significantly more inaccessible desert basin is Area 51. This, it should be remembered, is the hub of more or less every conspiracy theory to have ever existed about UFOs, including the widely-held belief that it is home to crashed extra-terrestrial craft being reverse engineered by boffins. Officially, Area 51 doesn’t exist, but it isn’t denied, either. The US military runs daily flights from and to Las Vegas, 80 miles to its south, for workers to commute there. The point of all this, is that Mr. TV Proprietor is probably right: the vast desert region of the American south-west is an ideal environment for the military to play with new technologies, so it’s quite likely that people living in its sparse communities - many, intentionally ‘off-grid’ - are going to see things the authorities would rather were not viewed too widely.

This, then, brings me to the long-awaited US government report, published yesterday, which has taken a serious look at what it calls “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”. The report, by the Pentagon’s ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’, has investigated sightings dating back to 2004 and made by the US military (as opposed to whacked-out cranks living in the deserts), which have evaded rational identification. These sightings have included flying objects, often captured on camera by military aircraft scrambled to investigate them, which have displayed no obvious means of propulsion or flight surfaces, and have appeared to use technology unknown to US science or any scientific community for that matter. One such sighting occurred aboard the US Navy cruiser USS Princeton in 2004 when several crew witnessed a white oblong-shaped aircraft - which they dubbed “Tic-Tac” for its resemblance to the mint - darting around at high speed. “This was not just another flock of birds or a balloon or swamp gases,” Sean Cahill, a Princeton crew member at the time, told Greg Millam of Sky News this week. “We knew that this was a craft that was outstripping our arsenal, and that was in 2004.” Cahill felt he was witnessing history. “But I think that there's even more out there that we need to see and understand,” he said, adding that the US military’s apparent nonchalance at the time was proof that these things existed as part of secret official projects. But with no explanation then or since, he now believes that the phenomena present very real national security concerns.

What is significant about the US intelligence report is that, while the sightings aren’t claimed to be evidence of little green men joyriding about our planet, it doesn’t categorically rule it out, either. The nine-page report, which is a public extract of more comprehensive, classified information provided to Congress, describes 144 military UFO sightings of which only one could be fully explained. Critics have already been quick to claim that the 144 might be the tip of the iceberg, and that observations by members of the military often go officially unreported for fear of being branded crazy or unfit for duty. This reminds me of the air traffic control scene in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind:

Air Traffic Controller: TWA 517 do you want to report a UFO, over?

TWA517: Negative, we don’t want to report.

ATC: Air East 31, do you wish to report a UFO, over?

Air East 31: Negative, we don’t want to report one of those either.

ATC: Air East 31, do you wish to file a report of any kind to us?

Air East 31: I wouldn’t know what kind of report to file, Center.

ATC: Uh...Air East 31...uh...me neither.

The problem is, the experts still do not know what’s being reported, because the technology they believe they’ve been looking at is beyond current understanding. “It’s clear that we need to improve our capacity to further analyse remaining observations,” one official is reported by the Wall Street Journal as saying. In the report, there were 18 cases of objects with ‘unusual” movement or flight characteristics, with objects apparently defying physics and current parameters of aircraft mobility. Some have offered the more logical explanation that  these objects might be experimental Chinese or Russian vehicles, especially given the two countries’ military interest in hypersonic propulsion, but the UAP report doesn’t appear to conclude that either nation is involved in the unexplained sightings. Instead, it continues to categorise sightings with more rational explanations, such as birds and balloons, or even atmospheric phenomena, although it does also include categorisations for “foreign-adversary systems” and “other” encounters.

© Simon Poulter 2013

That won’t dissuade tin foil-hatted types convinced that the events in Roswell weren’t more real and more sinister than explained at the time, or since. The crash, in July 1947, of an object on a ranch near the New Mexico town, has prompted years of debate. The US military at the time claimed that the object was a weather balloon. Others claim it was a “flying disc”, with even more extreme claims saying that it contained an extra-terrestrial lifeform. Whatever happened, it has certainly proven to be a tourist bonanza for Roswell, as I discovered on another US road trip, while taking a major detour off Route 66 in 2014. The grandly-titled International UFO Museum & Research Center, in a former cinema on Main Street in Roswell, is as much tongue-in-cheek as a serious attempt to document and even explain the 1947 incident. But while the museum’s somewhat comical exhibits don’t exactly give the conspiracy theories all that much credence, there remains plenty of people who are convinced that something sinister lies behind it all. Chris Jones of the Mutual UFO Network, a collective of a civilians who study reported sightings, told Sky News that the US government report only emboldens their belief. “The phenomenon has just been validated by the papers coming out that, yes, there's something out there,” he said. “No, we don't know what it is, but it's worth looking into. And that's what we've been doing for decades.”

The trouble with all this is that we partly want to believe that we’re not alone, and are partly afraid that other forms of intelligent, industrialised life, from somewhere other than Earth, exist, and with nefarious intent, too. Since biblical times, there have been notions of objects in the sky, but the history of UFOs and the possibility of aliens visiting us has always been little more than a mixture of over-active imagination and cultural paranoia. There’s no doubting that people - sane people, rational people - have seen things that can’t be explained, but the conspiratorial X-Files notion that governments know more than they’re letting on has always seemed too fanciful, at least to this cynic’s view. 

Of course, given the infinite enormity of the universe, there’s always a chance that life on Earth wasn’t just an incalculable random event, and that, somewhere else in the cosmos, organic creatures have developed the means and the curiosity to go travelling. But if they did, I’m pretty certain that they’d spend more time doing the Universal Studios tour and Disneyland than hovering over the Mojave Desert, spooking people in trailer parks.

Stay classy, TV newsland

I remember, distinctly, the scene, 32 years ago, in the Sky TV press office in Osterley. It was late afternoon and Sky’s five channels were due to go on air at 6pm. We kept reminding ourselves that no-one had ever launched as many TV channels at the same time (this was February 1989 - until Channel 4’s arrival in 1982 the UK only had had only three terrestrial offerings). Sky News would be the first “live” channel on Sky with in-vision presenters. Everyone was nervous. Sky’s HQ - three converted industrial units on what was still a muddy site, underneath the Heathrow flight path - was still being constructed around us, which meant that the inaugural news bulletin, presented by Penny Smith and Alastair Yates, had to be fed through an outside broadcast link in the car park connected to a facility in central London. Anything could have gone wrong. Thankfully, it didn’t.

The parallels were there this last Sunday when upstart GB News launched at 8pm with a monologue from Andrew Neil (who was Sky’s executive chairman in 1989), promising “to do news differently”. As the newcomer’s chairman, Neil - who still has the huge-shouldered, hunched gate he had when I encountered him in the Osterley boardroom - promised: “We are committed to covering the people’s agenda, not the media’s agenda.” This, as has been well documented, is GB News’s PR schtick: to draw in the anti-woke brigade and satiate their belief that the BBC and, indeed, Sky News, are now portals for left-wing liberal thinking, and give them a voice (the fact that we’ve had a right-of-centre Conservative government for over ten years, which has delivered Brexit, doesn’t seem to have sunk in amongst those breathlessly endorsing GB News in comments beneath the Mail’s various puff pieces on the channel).

Like Sky, though, the build-up to GB News launching was coloured by a media narrative similar to that we endured in the latter half of 1988 as we worked towards launch day. Being a then-Rupert Murdoch-owned channel, the tone had been somewhere between cynical and hostile, such was the proprietorial tribalism amongst the UK’s various media corporations. As a cousin of News International - home, then, to The Sun, News Of The World, Today, The Times and Sunday Times - Sky News was envisaged as “The Sun on TV”, somewhere between the tabloid’s cor-blimey popularism and a Thatcherist political bent. We were even known as “Tits at Teatime” in rival newsrooms (when Channel 4’s Drop The Dead Donkey appeared, there were eerie similarities - even the desk phones and vending machine in the fictional GlobeLink newsroom were identical, which suggested some well-placed research).

So, despite the political colour that was part of the chatter before GB News’a launch on Sunday, we should, I suppose, give it a chance. It’s opening night technical hitches (Neil’s monologue looking like it had been lit by candle, Scottish academic Neil Oliver’s microphone not working, and so on), may have given it the air of satirical pisstakes, but these were teething problems that could have happened to anyone. As Hugo Rifkind writes in The Times today, the media should give their new competitor some slack, given the rate of attrition that the journalism profession has experienced in the online age: “Any journalists resenting the expansion of their own industry probably ought to be in a different one,” he commented. 

There is a notion, in the old days of printed newspapers, that when you launch a new product - be it a brand new paper or a redesigned one - you do so with a scoop. To some extent, it’s a marketing hook to put you on the map. After a while, everyone - broadsheet or tabloid - soon levels out, covering more or less the same stories in their own particular style. It is, actually, quite a skill to write for a tabloid: trying to cram into 250 words for The Sun what you’d have more than a thousand to make use of in a broadsheet. I can speak from experience, it’s more challenging than you’d think. I’ve also worked with journalists of all creeds, and regardless of their publications’ political orientation, all work to the same objectives. It would, though be horrendously naive to think that all journalism is objective and without nuance. Which is why GB News is, to me at least, a curious experiment. Its debut-edition scoop is to declare a culture war and somewhat cynically tap into the same opposition to political correctness that has Piers Morgan railing about Harry and Meghan’s apparent snowflakery, and ends with footballers being booed for taking the knee at Wembley. There was just a little dog whistle about Neil’s opening: “We are proud to be British. The clue is in the name,” he intoned (and from someone who spends much of his time living on the Côte d'Azur…).

GB News knows full well what it’s doing (and the number of endorsements from people with “defund the BBC” in their social media profiles speaks volumes). Certainly, opening night excitement - even with the Euros on - buoyed the channel’s numbers, with 336,000 viewers tuning in to watch Neil’s opening statement, according to TV industry magazine Broadcast. Sky, by comparison, had just 46,000 viewers, but 8pm on a Sunday night was never going to be a big battleground for eyeballs amongst channels not predisposed for mass viewing. Time will tell whether GB News will genuinely prove the challenger it pretends to be. There’s no doubt that it has attracted a strong calibre of presenters to its line-up, poaching the likes of Simon McCoy from the BBC News channel and former ITN anchor Alastair Stewart to a roster of experienced journalists, including several from Sky News itself. What this says about them, politically, is a matter for debate, and the channel’s editorial content so far hasn’t shown any great surprises, with Nigel Farage and Priti Patel amongst its early interviewees.

It certainly is trying to do things differently. Television news in America, for example, is a largely homogeneous experience: drop into any TV ‘market’ (i.e. a city or large town), and you will see an identical format: a male and female anchoring partnership, a chipper sports presenter and a mildly amusing weather presenter. Yes, Anchorman. Unlike America, however, television news here does vary, thankfully, and GB News takes its place in a landscape where, say, the BBC’s 10 O’Clock News and ITV’s News At Ten do have distinct stylistic differences. Whether they have any editorial differences is a matter of personal opinion. One thing, though, is that I’ve never had any quarrel with the political orientation of any of the mainstream channels’s news output. That, I know, might inflame those who cast the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, ITV’s Robert Peston or Sky’s Beth Rigby as lefty activists - all three regularly get pelted from both sides, leading to the maxim that they must be doing something right if that is the case.

GB News has opted for something else, editorially, and subtly alternative with its look and feel. It’s breakfast show looks like ITV’s GMB but in a studio painted on a limited budget; it’s mid-morning show could be coming from the comfy sofas in the office canteen. And, two full days in, it was still suffering from sound problems - this morning, I had to have the TV volume turned up to 70 just hear anything Colin Brazier, as he sat on the couch wearing an open-necked blue shirt as if we’d caught him during his coffee break, rather than a news bulletin. I’d ask whether this consciously casual approach is what the occasional viewer actually wants, given that rolling news channels are mostly watched by people dipping in to see what’s going on in the world. 

GB News believes that it is resetting the way news is presented, arguing - not too discreetly - that existing platforms talk down to viewers. I’m not so sure that’s the case, but again, GB has found its schtick. If you believe that the BBC, ITV and Sky talk down to you, then you’ll find news presented by someone hanging out in the canteen works for you, although no one ever complained about John Craven’s jumpers on Newsround lacking gravitas (though in fairness, his demographic was somewhat different to Kenneth Kendall’s on the Nine O’Clock News).

Anchorman: staying classy in San Diego

Rolling news channels have always found their strength during times of crisis. Only saddos like me have them on constantly in the background while they work during normal times. For the most part, as the description provides, they are repetitive, especially on mundane news days. But it’s when the news hots up, and situations become dynamic, that a news operation is fully tested. Before Sky had even launched, it covered the Lockerbie disaster as part of its trial operation, making the industry sit up and notice as word got around the media village that the channel wasn’t, after all, going to be a televisual version of its print cousin. Live reporting from ‘hot’ news stories - be they wars, disasters or political eruptions - are the mark of a news broadcaster, and its reporting (and production) talent. It’s why the publicity biographies of many news anchors are such colourful affairs, proudly claiming to have been on air during moments of global notoriety. I once had to deal with the fallout of two Sky presenters having a punch-up in the Osterley corridor following an ego spat that began with both claiming to be on air at the moment Nelson Mandela walked free from Robben Island Prison. I swear to this day that someone involved in Anchorman must have heard about it, given that it escalated into a war of attrition that ended with the pair “rolling” down a corridor, not unlike Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Women In Love (though, thankfully, fully clothed). 

GB News will want to avoid any such chicanery, as it seriously dents a channel’s reputation and detracts from the core mission of delivering news as authoritatively as possible. That is when it will truly be worth considering. For now, we can chatter about the gimmicks, the Wokewatch on-air clickbait, and controversialists like Dan Wootton or Michele Dewberry mixing it up for kicks (Sky’s early days had a confrontational debate show featuring Norman Tebbit and Labour MP Austin Mitchell), However, it is when sharp, analytic journalism is required that any news organisation comes into its own. Anyone can read wire copy of what has happened, but it’s a whole different matter being able to objectively explain why it has happened.

In its charter (no doubt, an Ofcom-mandated requirement), there is no mention of GB News’s headline-grabbing intentions. Actually, it’s a pretty standard declaration, pledging to stand for journalistic independence, a fact-based approach but also respect for opinions and freedom of expression. It’s focus is, notably, the UK (the clue is in the name, as Neil stated) and what is “good and bad – it’s about covering what is going on, not just what is going wrong.” That might be a pointed statement about pepping up our lives with feel goodery, but sadly, news doesn’t arbitrate that way. It’ll be interesting how long GB News can remain so differentiated.

Vinyl demand - again

It’s hard to comprehend that, over the last year or so, I’ve only been inside a record shop twice. I say “in” as I’ve done plenty of record shopping, it’s just that it’s been mostly via a browser. The two occasions in which I have crossed a physical threshold have been, respectively, for a private, rule-of-six-compliant gathering (when it was legal to do so), the other for a proper splurge, during last September’s Record Store Day ‘drop’, at the splendid Creekside Vinyl in Faversham. On that occasion, it was a blessed reminder of the pleasure of rummaging through the racks of a well-curated music shop. 

Nothing wrong with Amazon, of course (and without mail order, life would have been extremely dull over the last 15 months), but there is, really, nothing to beat the admittedly fetishistic tactility of bringing home fresh vinyl. Traditionally it’s been depicted as the preserve of punters of a certain gender and, indeed, age group: when I lived in Paris I regularly spent Saturday afternoons in Gibert Joseph on Boulevard Saint-Michel, gorging on new vinyl releases amid a predominantly male, middle-aged clientele. But according to figures released this week, ahead of the first of two Record Store Day drops this summer, record buyers - and I mean of the mostly black, 12-inch variety - are getting significantly younger. 

A Record Store Day survey of more than 140 participating independent record shops recently revealed a “considerable rise” in the number of younger people buying vinyl. This doesn’t come as a great surprise: for the last two Christmases, both my step-daughters - 20 and 16 respectively - have asked for vinyl - a right old mix including The Vaccines, The Smiths, Rex Orange County, The 1975, Royal Blood, Arctic Monkeys and Lana Del Rey. Their age is one thing, their gender is another - 60% of record store owners reported in the survey a growing number of women coming in to buy vinyl. 

“Record shops have had a history of being fairly male dominated spaces,” said Ashlie Green from David’s Music in Letchworth. “But the High Fidelity-esque days are definitely over as more and more women are enjoying vinyl. Not only are there more women behind the counter but the spaces themselves are much more welcoming to all people of all ages.” Green sees Record Store Day is a great way to open up shops to a more diverse clientele. “That list of releases is so eclectic and brings in music lovers from every background for what is normally a big party!”.

Jack LeFeuvre of Dundee’s Le Freak Records has also noted the trend towards younger vinyl buyers. “Nearly every artist will release a special vinyl edition as part of their album campaign and that is something that many music fans don’t want to miss out on.” LeFeuvre even thinks that younger consumers are driving a digital backlash: “If you love an artist there’s nothing more exciting than being able to hold the artwork, read the liner notes and enjoy the experience of listening to an album from start to finish. When we first opened we were always asked if it was a fad but it’s popularity has only continued to rise and proved the naysayers wrong”.

There’s no escaping the fact that streaming and digital music formats are here to stay, but the figures show that vinyl continues to grow, year on year. When then first Record Store Day took place in 2007, the UK was selling only 75,000 vinyl albums. Last year that number stood at more than five million, representing over £110 million in value. It’s something this year’s Record Store Day ‘ambassador’ Noel Gallager wants to see continue, and not just for his own sales (well, a bit): “I think if we can keep record shops open for as long as possible, we owe it to the young people of this country,” he says, plugging a compilation (Back The Way We Came: Vol 1) of his solo career so far, which is amongst today’s releases. “I’ll be getting involved,” Gallager says. “I’ve got something unique coming out. Hopefully the fans will like it and they’ll keep the flame burning for your local record shop.”

Record Store Day may be a momentary occasion - even if spread over the first drop today and a second on 17 July - but there’s no doubt that they stimulate interest in shopping for music in a traditional record shop (and, in these COVID-impacted times, locally, too). The challenge will be, as last year, getting the footfall amid continuing social distancing requirements. In pre-pandemic times, Record Store Day would be marked by packed shops and queues snaking around the block from dawn. 

Picture: Twitter/Banquet Records

This year’s drops will require shops to be somewhat limited, despite ‘general’ retailing being allowed to open up, but not everyone will be able to even do that. My local shop, Banquet Records in Kingston-upon-Thames, has reluctantly reverted to last year’s online model due to our borough having a surge of coronavirus infections (and, indeed, the highest infection rate in London). It’s not ideal, and last year’s online experience was fraught by technical issues caused by high demand for releases - great for business, but like trying to book an Ocado slot during the first weeks of lockdown last year. 

Once inside a shop - whether physically or virtually - this year’s drops offer something for everyone, with 340 special editions in the first one, including releases from Fontaines D.C., the Beastie Boys, Lady Gaga and Wolf Alice, and a further 200 in July, including the likes of Small Faces, The Clash and St. Vincent. The full list of releases for both drops can be found here. As for me, I’ve got my eye on a green vinyl 12-inch single of Ian Dury & The Blockheads’ Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, Steven Wilson’s 40th anniversary remix of Ultravox’s Vienna, new coloured pressings of Marc Bolan & T. Rex’s Star King and Mark Lanegan’s Here Comes That Weird Chill, and a couple of live albums by The Police. 

If, however, push comes to shove, and I can have only one album from this first round, it’ll be The Truth by Prince. Originally only available as part of the Crystal Ball CD box-set, Record Store Day sees the first ever vinyl release of what has generally been described as one of the Purple One’s lost gems. Much of his work has been defined by relentless funk with a rock and pop edge, but on this recording Prince applied his bluesier instincts, with a more organic, acoustic sound that many felt, when it originally appeared in 1998, provided a fascinating insight into the late genius’s songwriting skills. 

The Truth also whets the appetite for the release, at the end of July, of Welcome 2 America, an apparently “lost” studio album recorded in 2010 and then shelved. Five years after Prince’s death, it will be a point of curiosity, especially amongst fans, but also from sceptics who feel that such posthumous releases were held back to begin with for a good reason. We shall see. Certainly won’t stop me buying it, however. Because that’s how we record buyers roll.

Return of the secret singer-songwriter

I don’t know when Peter Bruntnell decided upon Journey To The Sun as the title of his latest album, but it was with some irony, given that none of us are going anywhere right now, in search of sunshine or anything else. Then again, the Kingston-upon-Thames-raised “secret singer-songwriter” now lives in Devon, which I associate with glorious childhood journeys down the A303 for Whitsun half term, dodging torrents of rain on Dartmoor, of course, but also enjoying the splendours of the South Hams and the West Country sunsets streaming in through my aunt and uncle’s Plymouth living room window. 

Bruntnell is, it would appear, something of an intentional enigma. Read any review of his 11 albums to date (including his last, King Of Madrid - my album of 2019) and you’ll see the same phrases repeated: that he is lauded by the music press (Rolling Stone branded him the best-kept secret in “England”), has been endorsed by R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Richmond Fontaine’s Willy Vlautin (“my favourite singer in the world”), is criminally underappreciated, and so on. It truly is baffling. But, as I noted in my recent review of the Matt Deighton Overshadowed documentary, there is an echelon of, mainly, singer-songwriters who just seem unable to edge - or be led - over the threshold of mainstream recognition, and the widespread success that comes with it.

So, materially, what makes Bruntnell so compelling, and why should you pay him attention? There are plenty of singer-songwriters, of course, and no shortage of guitar strummers - from Ed Sheeran-wannabes earnestly busking outside the local shopping precinct, to those with Neil Young/Nick Drake/John Martyn aspirations in every kind of venue (normally), from pubs up to arenas. Plus, if you dive down the myriad rabbit holes of sub-genres, the label ‘Americana’ will dish up no end of alt-country variants. Given the apparent need to slap a label on everything, it’s here that Bruntnell will probably get filed, but just because his songs might be acoustic guitar-based, with the occasional slither of pedal steel, it shouldn’t automatically mark him out for one genre or another. Indeed, Journey To The Sun, he says, draws on wider influences, including Brian Wilson’s arrangements and even Brian Eno’s ambient work. Other musicians called Brian may have played a part.

That, though, only outlines the form. What about the music itself? Like Deighton, Bruntnell’s is a mix of acoustic-tinged balladry and wry rock songs. To quote, unfortunately, Donny and Marie Osmond, a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. I don’t mean to be flippant. But this brings us to “Pete’s Basement Studio” at Bruntnell’s Devon bolthole, where Journey To The Sun was recorded. Like so many new albums Where Are We Now? has listened to in recent months, it was produced in lockdown, but while the enforced work-from-home that every musician has been required to adopt has often been influenced by the pandemic, it was always Bruntnell’s intention to work on a solo album during this period. It just happened to coincide with a pandemic. “That meant more acoustic guitar, and I bought a bouzouki in March last year, which really was a catalyst for quite a few songs being written in a very short timeframe,” he recently told Sean Hannam’s Say It With Garage Flowers blog. “Oh, and I got a drum machine and a new synthesiser, too.”

A synth? A bouzouki? On an album by a noted exponent of Americana? Well, yes. Because while the music business does love a label, Journey To The Sun lends itself to a more experimental direction. There is still the luscious, acoustic guitar balladeering that Bruntnell found such strength in on King Of Madrid, but there are also eccentric stabs of electronica, a drum machine and even that staple of prog rock, the Mellotron. While the overall tone might still be plaid-shirted, there is - for all the additional layers - a stripped-back feel, something he does admit was influenced by the vibe of the times without being directly informed by it.

Like so many of these WFH productions, digital technology meant Bruntnell wasn’t working entirely on his own, with several of the tracks featuring New England-based keyboardist Peter Linnane, while Bruntnell’s longtime lyricist collaborator Bill Ritchie contributes words to five of the songs. But, for the most part, this is a largely Bruntnell effort, with the vast majority of instruments played by himself. This is apparent from the outset with the mournful Dandelion, written on the aforementioned Greek mandolin, with the addition of rudimentary piano skills, giving the song a sparse and haunting folkiness. Lucifer Morning Star - performed entirely by Bruntnell - is brighter, made so by a combination of 12-string guitar and subtle synths giving it a sunny dimension. Runaway Car rocks along with the kind of energy that will make it an instant live highlight. It is precisely the sort of expressive, guitar-driven song American television shows love (as we’re still working our way through 15 years’ worth of Greys Anatomy, with its dizzying panoply of singer-songwriters on the soundtrack, I’m amazed its producers haven’t come knocking on Bruntnell’s door…).

Picture: Simon Poulter

The jangliness of Journey To The Sun is occasionally broken up by clear references to Eno, specifically his album Another Green World, finding itself in the intro of You’d Make A Great Widow (a typical piece of macabre Bruntnell humour, resulting from a chance remark by Mrs. B), as well as the instrumentals The Antwerp Effect and Moon Committee. They provide undistracting interludes between the folkier songs, such as Heart Of Straw and a beautiful interpretation of the much-covered Scottish traditional Wild Mountain Thyme - here blessed with a wonderful arrangement, featuring an electric 12-string superbly channelling Jerry Cole’s lead on The Beach Boys’ Sloop John B (fun fact: I have it on good authority that Bruntnell performed this very song at a junior school concert when he was a lad). That same shimmering guitar finds its way, with uplifting effect, onto the reflective closing piece, Mutha, which examines time’s passing with a sense of hope. The hope we probably all want right now.

Mine, amongst many other things, is that Journey To The Sun earns Peter Bruntnell greater recognition. It’s not, to be fair, an album of anthems, or chart hits, or daytime radio blockbusters. Not that everything in popular music should be. It is, though, delightful, earnest and wonderful listening, particularly repeatedly, drawing out Bruntnell’s intimate vocal style and drawing on his exquisite arrangements and self production. Will it be the album that breaks him to a wider audience? Will it end his status as the “secret singer-songwriter”? As I wrote about its predecessor, I wish it would. Because some secrets really are best out in the open for everyone to enjoy.

Journey To The Sun is out now on Domestico Records and can be ordered from here.

The dream was never over

It can be hard to imagine - and even accept - iconic band line-ups with apparent interlopers. Think of the unfortunate Adam Lambert, depping for Freddie Mercury in Queen, or Ray Wilson replacing Phil Collins in Genesis, for just the one album. But while not as left-field an appointment as, say, Liam Gallagher joining a reformed Boyzone, Neil Finn’s 2018 replacement of Lindsey Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac was one I wouldn’t have imagined in a hundred years. 

When they joined the mighty Mac in 1975 Buckingham and then-partner Stevie Nicks heralded the band’s metamorphosis from worthy British blues legends to the all-conquering behemoth that made Rumours, took drugs and did a lot of bed hopping, largely with each other. So when Buckingham was apparently unceremoniously fired in January 2018, following an artistic bust-up, Finn being parachuted in to do Buckingham’s voice and lead guitar parts seemed a little outré. Not that Fleetwood Mac and Finn aren’t suited to each other, or that Finn wasn’t a credible replacement. 

Perhaps it was the notion of Finn, lead singer and main creative force of one significant band, joining an outfit firmly established in the firmament of classic bands, as, essentially, a session player, that felt somewhat odd. Even Finn himself was surprised to be invited to tour with the Mac. “It was just crazy really – although it’s amazing how things become normal,” Finn told The Guardian this week. “[You’re] standing in rehearsal and singing with Stevie [Nicks] and Christine [McVie], with John McVeigh and Mick Fleetwood, one of the greatest rhythm sections of all time. But within a week or two, you’re just making music with people. It was an unfamiliar role for me…being a part of the machine.”

That machine, however, led to an unexpected - and, from my point of view, very welcome - bi-product: it inspired Finn to bring Crowded House out of cold storage. The result is Dreamers Are Waiting, the band’s first album in a decade and 35 years after their eponymous debut introduced Finn’s McCartney-esque knack for sweet melodies, via songs like Don’t Dream It’s Over, Something So Strong and World Where You Live. It’s also, incredibly, 25 years since they said goodbye to 100,000 fans in front of the Sydney Opera House. The Farewell To The World live album resulting from it remains one of my go-to listens to this day, though there’s a residual sadness to it, being the last time Finn’s “best friend”, drummer Paul Hester was in the band. He succumbed to depression in 2005. 

Since 2010’s band release Intriguer, Finn has released two solo albums, Dizzy Heights and Out Of Silence, both of which saw him collaborate increasingly with his sons Liam and Elroy, as well as brother (and fellow former Split Enz member) Tim. Critics will have it that neither Finn’s solo work or post-Millennium releases from Crowded House have lived up to the band’s opening run of albums, but I would staunchly disagree. Because uniform to them all is that remarkable Finn talent for perfect song structure.

Picture: Kerry Brown

Despite the absence of Finn, co-founding bassist Nick Seymour and their longtime producer Mitchell Froom for a decade, Dreamers Are Waiting is infused with a freshness that Finn himself admits came out of his Fleetwood Mac stint. “I was going into this record thinking, ‘I would like to gravitate the band toward songs that would be great to play onstage and where I’m stretching my voice and that are upbeat,’” he said in The Guardian interview. “It made the album a little less melancholy and ballad-oriented, as some of my records have sometimes tended to be.”

It certainly zips along. Like Paul Weller’s recent Fat Pop, Dreamers Are Waiting’s 12 tracks are neat and concise, all coming in under four minutes, framing those Finn melodies and vocal harmonies with absolute perfection. While there isn’t a standout hit of the distinction of Don’t Dream It’s Over or Weather With You, there’s no lack of immediacy, due in part to Froom’s pristine production work which draws out the many layers of the writing and musicianship. It might mean a couple of listens to fully appreciate, but even if, as Finn says, it’s a little different, it’s all the better for it, as you soak in all the classic Crowded House textures while absorbing the new sonic influences that takes it all beyond the Beatley expectation fans might be still want.

An example of this comes late on with Love Isn’t Hard At All, a song that lends itself more to New Order than anything I’ve heard from Crowded House before, with its syncopation of Seymour’s bass, a fibrous guitar riff and layers of synths making it infectiously anthemic without being overstated. This, then, is the hallmark of the album. From start to finish, it soothes in places, lifts in others, but all within a range that manages to encompass plenty of variety. 

This isn’t, however, just a collection of pleasant tunes - there’s something else going on in Finn’s writing. Though written before the word “coronavirus” entered public consciousness, Dreamers Are Waiting finds him reflecting on the importance of family, though some of its songs provide a view on Trump’s America, where Finn moved in 2018 for his sojourn with Fleetwood Mac, setting up home in LA’s swanky Los Feliz neighbourhood. Having a ringside seat shaped Finn’s view of the future, which explains Playing With Fire’s somewhat vituperative lyrics. Likewise, Whatever You Want, which nods back to the 80s vibe of Split Enz and thrusts in the lyric: “This man is a fake/But they will follow him down to the edge of the cliff.” It is something of a departure. “I don’t normally venture into those areas [lyrically], because far better minds than me are able to express it,” Finn told The Guardian. But, he says, the words came out, and he found himself giving subtle commentary on a land divided.

There’s more on the dark, vaudevillian To The Island, which examines the “bigger picture items”, Finn says, shaped by the priorities of his native New Zealand, but framed with a world view of a society strained by the you-know-what. This album is far from maudlin, however, even if the gentle shuffle of Too Good For This World hints at a sense of frustration, while the gorgeous harmony-drenched Start Of Something balances this with an open conversation of hope amid a world in turmoil. Show Me The Way, written by Liam Finn, broods delectably, while Sweet Tooth dips into his father’s quirky sense, delivering a searingly good guitar solo in the process. It is probably the closest Dreamers Are Waiting gets to Crowded House’s more jaunty excursions of old, like Pineapple Head or It’s Only Natural.

Taken as a whole, Crowded House have always managed to deliver engaging rock music without rock excess. That’s not a polite alternative, by the way, to likening them to Coldplay. Dreamers Are Waiting is, without doubt, an eminently soothing record without being somnolent. It is, without doubt, a glorious return for a band which, over the last 35 years, have produced some of the most listenable records in my collection. That’s a semi-vacuous statement, I know,  but I ran out of superlatives when talking about this band a long time ago.

Have a Word

Thanks to Zoom and its ilk, we have, over these last 14 lurgy-infected months, been given greater insight into people’s home decor than the combination of reading every interiors magazine ever produced, along with a channel showing Through The Keyhole 24 hours a day. Not a news bulletin or daytime TV show goes to air without guests coming “down the line” from home offices, kitchens, spare rooms, garden sheds and so on. Which is why there’s an uncanny familiarity to the screen in front of me: David Hepworth sat before his enviously assembled vinyl collection, Mark Ellen in his study - as they have been, seemingly constantly, over this mostly locked-down year or so, industrially pumping out their highly infectious music and culture conversations under the umbrella of their Word ‘brand’.

David and Mark have, of course, been something of a double act for the better part of 40 years, not only as mid-80s custodians of TV’s Whistle Test, but more significantly, as two of British music journalism’s most influential figures (even if they modestly don’t recognise it). While legendary scribes like Charles Shaar Murray, Nick Kent, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons still command notoriety for the ‘golden age’ of music writing, it was Hepworth and Ellen who took the pop poster magazine format and made Smash Hits a publication that, at one point, sold more than half a million copies every fortnight, largely because it didn’t take itself too seriously, or the people it wrote about. More about that, and this writer’s brief stint writing for it, later.

We are here on Zoom to talk about how they’ve kept alive the flame of The Word, the monthly magazine they launched in 2003, having previously been responsible for Q, Empire, Mojo and Heat, as well as the Hits’ sister title, Just Seventeen. The Word ran for 114 issues, closing in 2012, but before it fell victim to the creeping erosion of quality periodical-based music journalism, they had enterprisingly branched out into the podosphere. Post-print, the Word ‘brand’ continues as Word In Your Ear and Word In Your Attic (and the forthcoming outdoor fest Word In The Park) - essential listening and viewing online, if nothing else, for the steamingly good time the duo serve up with their symbiotic pub chatter (sample: challenging each other to identify obscure members of hoary old bands based on their names, and distinguish them from other walks of life, such as driving for the Krays).

Anyone who has ever spent time in editorial offices such as those David and Mark have populated (and before Smash Hits, they were at the NME and Sounds in Hepworth’s case, the NME and Record Mirror in Ellen’s) will know that such banter is par for the highly amusing course. “Conversation unites!” declares David. “Word In Your Ear started as a music thing: we’d have live music and then we might have the occasional author, some of the spoken word. And what you found was that spoken words are more popular than music. Music divides people, whereas speech brings people together.” 

More importantly, though, it’s the light-hearted nature of pop that drives their podcasts. “A lot of what we do is just listening to chat, and people talking about their lives, and funny jokes and games,” David says. “If you suddenly came to it and there was somebody sitting down with an acoustic guitar, playing four songs off their new album, people would turn off very quickly. It wouldn't matter how good or bad or indifferent that act was because music divides. Conversation unites. And that's what we deliver.”

Since The Word as a print enterprise folded, and the online products have proliferated, both Ellen and Hepworth have applied their encyclopaedic histories as music journalists authoring various books: Mark produced the hugely entertaining memoir Rock Stars Stole My Life!, while David has been busy with an equally engaging series of tomes examining different aspects of rock music. These include 1971: Never A Dull Moment, an extended thesis on what made that year (as opposed to others, such as my own birth year, 1967) pivotal in rock’s evolution. It has just been adapted into an eight-episode documentary series for Apple TV+. Between them, their books apply the same wry brand of conversation that has made the podcasts such essential listening, diversifying into different flavours, and monetised over the Patreon platform (subscribers of one level of patronage can even receive a dedicated Word-branded Zoom intervention on their birthday). To date, they have produced 392 editions of Word In Your Ear, 115 Word In Your Attic sessions for YouTube (in which guests trawl through their lofts to discuss the records and ephemera collected therein), and have also staged some 60 Friday night Zoom quizzes.

“Good Lord,” exclaims Mark, bashfully, “Is there really a Word ‘brand’? It probably is, oddly enough, stronger now than at any stage. It’s a bit of everything really. When the magazine closed there was no particular thought of continuing to do this kind of thing, but it was Alex [Gold, their erstwhile producer] who said, ‘No, you should keep doing it.” 

I attended my first Word In Your Ear recording on a whim in 2016 whilst visiting London from Paris at the start of my process to move back to the UK. It was a double-bill featuring books about Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman, and I became hooked, to the extent that getting WIYE tickets became an obsession once I was permanently in London. Tickets sold out the minute they were announced on Twitter (and, I’ve noticed, snapped up by largely the same suspects each time). Punters crammed into the function room of an Islington pub to hear authors ranging from hard-core music writers to obscure record collectors discussing their interests. They’ve even had the odd musician, such as Kenney Jones of the Small Faces and The Who, Level 42’s Mark King, and the late Neil Innes.

“Because we love doing it,” says David, “it made sense because we wanted to talk to people. We were interested in their books. And actually, if you were given a room in a pub and you could charge a little bit on the door, pay for all the equipment and the website, and it breaks even, we are absolutely thrilled that it could support itself. We could just carry on doing it, which is a lot of fun to be honest.”

When lockdown occurred, The Word machine had to change tack. “We just thought, everybody’s in the same boat,” explains Mark. “Everybody’s sitting at home surrounded by their stuff. Nobody can claim that they haven’t got time or anything like that. Wouldn't that be kind of amusing [to get people on Zoom]. We started with writer Mark Billingham and carried on from there. And, you know, it just kind of all worked as a format.”

Picture: Twitter/Word In Your Ear

For the most part, Word In Your Ear has focused on music-themed topics and authors, as my bookshelf serves testament. Rarely has an in-person recording concluded without me buying from the trestle table at the main entrance. In the main, they’ve covered the bottomless mine that is rock and pop, but have even ventured into conversations about classical music. 

“Frankly, what we want are good talkers,” says David. “If you get good talkers, they talk about anything, and so that we’re always fishing for good talkers on all kinds of subjects really.” Mark picks up on this:“A lot of what we do is quite niche,” he says. “You know, really obscure books about certain aspects of music. What you need is an author who can make that book full of colourful characters, universally appealing, just a great big, you know, rollicking tale from start to finish. So even if you’re not wildly interested in artists they’ve written about, you still get something out of it, it’s what you want.”

This does, inevitably, raise the question about where the rollicking tales will come from in the future. Not wishing to get all middle-aged dad, the sort of rambunctious stories that began in the 60s and continued, to a point, up until the 90s, seem unlikely to emanate from the current crop of mainstream musicians. “Pop stars are extraordinarily well-behaved now,” David says. “They’re in terrible fear of doing anything that might be remotely considered ill-advised because it might cancel their career overnight. I’ve actually got a lot of sympathy for them.”

All of which brings us to Smash Hits. A week before our Zoom encounter, the duo devoted a tremendous hour to, specifically, the magazine’s 1981 Poll Winners edition, revealing such nuggets as Paul Weller’s favourite TV show that year (Minder), and that the first album Simon Le Bon bought was The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis (also the subject of his very first gig). During my own, brief, spell in 1987 writing for “Ver Hits”, it had a well established, unique style. It was serious music journalism, but also required musicians to be less up themselves and not just interested in only talking about what brand of flanger pedal they’ve used on their latest album.

“Smash Hits was perfect for the dawning of the video age,” reflects Mark. “Before, you’d just go on stage and ‘be’ The Stranglers. Now the success of your single depended on a video, which meant an incredible pressure to look as flamboyant and fabulous, and exotic and bizarre as possible. And that just led to a lot of fun with Smash Hits.”

“One of the thinks Mark and I often say is that nowadays you couldn’t do Smash Hits, in this climate, regardless of the decline of print [magazines] and so forth,” adds David. “Smash Hits dealt with everybody as ‘Oh God, Boy George - he’s a funny lad, isn’t he?’ and then ‘Here’s Lou Reed or whoever - they’re a funny lot also.’ Well, nobody’s allowed to be funny any more, because we have identity pop music, like we have identity politics.” “You’d be corrupting the nation’s morals if you are [Depeche Mode’s] Martin Gore in 2021 going on national television in a rubber dress,” quips Mark.

This isn’t an issue of political correctness, either, but for all the variety that still exists amongst today’s pop - not to mention good music - there has been a blandification of the creed. Perhaps that’s because it’s all been done before. Perhaps, also, it’s because there’s fewer people around to report on it, even to gently take the piss. “David and I desperately miss the music press,” declares Mark. “We miss its contribution, we miss the way it coloured people’s view of pop stars. Without the music press there’s no kind of context. [Pop stars] aren’t quite as three dimensional. They’re not as funny.” 

By me: Then Jericho make their Hits debut

Smash Hits, he says, turned pop stars into cartoon characters. “We made them a lot more interesting than they were in real life, you know?”. David picks up on this theme, pointing out that one of pop’s biggest stars at present is Ed Sheeran, but that there’s nothing really that interesting about him. “I know very little about him,” continues Mark, “and I have no great urge to discover any more. But if the music press was around, they’d be constantly trying to come up with some kind of explanation or dimension as to who he is, which could be interesting.”

Even when the Hits was ribbing stars, it was done in a gentle, almost loving way. The nicknames it came up with have stuck with me since: David Bowie was always ‘The Dame’ (a monicker afforded him by Neil Tennant, pre-Pet Shop Boys, when he was an assistant editor); another was Paul McCartney’s ‘Sir Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft’. Many were the work of the now sadly departed Tom Hibbert. “Tom took over the ‘Black Type’ letters page from me,” recalls Mark, “and I think he just started to give everyone a name. He came up with ‘Lord Lucan of Mercury’ [for Freddie Mercury], which I thought was really brilliant. And that really took off.” 

The Smash Hits’ ‘Sir’ prefix found its way into other arenas: “I remember going to see Queens Park Rangers in 1991, and Les Ferdinand was the big striker at the time. Hearing 27,000 people shouting ‘Leslie Ferdinand, Sir Leslie Ferdinand’, I thought ‘that came from Smash Hits, that’s amazing!’” Bowie, on the other hand, is one of the few stars to have eluded the Hits’ pages as an interviewee. “I think he considered himself a little bit above it,” says Mark, ruefully. “It’s a little disappointing, actually, because he would have been really funny. But, I suppose, he took himself seriously, or at least gave the impression he did.” 

Smash Hits was certainly an antidote to the somewhat ‘worthy’, ponderous music journalism that the likes of Melody Maker and the NME purveyed, along with their sometimes violent aversion to mainstream pop. To the teenage me, typing up ‘pretend’ reviews of records I’d just bought, initially just for the fun of it, my aspirations veered more towards the Hits brand of writing than the NME’s. After a while, I decided that writing about music was where I wanted to be, and my bedroom-typed reviews started to build a portfolio of writing samples. 

Ironically, it was the NME where I earned my first paid gig, contributing the first (and, possibly the last) Phil Collins live review to the paper, all thanks to having a bit of enterprise about me, and asking DJ Gary Crowley for an interview to add to my portfolio of writing samples. Gary, then at London’s Capital Radio, had been at the NME himself, replacing Danny Baker on its front desk. He gave me the contacts, and my career began, even though I’d not yet sat my A-levels. The portfolio worked, and I landed a staff job at a short-lived magazine called LM, joining the month that David and Mark’s better resourced Q launched. LM lasted just a handful of issues, and my stint, nine months, but it was enough to get me into the business - and freelance work at the very magazine I’d been consuming since my early teens. I’d be lying if I said it was easy adapting to the magazine’s distinct style...much to the frustration of the deputy editor I worked with. But, then, I was still just 19.

Also by me: a Smash Hits “live” review

Mark agrees that Smash Hits changed the slightly po-faced approach to music journalism that had been the nature of the broadsheets he and David had come from. “They took everything terribly seriously,” he says. “Part of the absolute joy of Smash Hits was not having to feel that way. We could look at everyone with a combination of affection and a kind of curiosity. There was a kind of quizzical air to it. You know, you love them all [pop stars] but you very fondly sent them all up.”

It makes ua all wistful: “You know, it used to be the best part of a million people in the UK bought a music publication of some kind over the course of a month,” states David. “That simply doesn’t exist anymore - the great engines that drove them, reviews, news and information.” Times have changed, he adds: “That whole world was based around the idea that you had to feel a certain way at a certain time. You were in a constant rush to go out and find out about the big new thing, and to buy the record. It just doesn’t matter anymore. There’s no pressure on you to be first in the queue to discover something.”

The same could be said for music journalism itself. When David and Mark started it wasn’t something you could train for, even at journalism schools. The irony, says Mark, is that today, when there’s no work, there are tons of university courses. “I regularly get people saying, ‘I’m looking for advice on how I get into it’, and I say the same thing, because all of my advice would be ten or fifteen years out of date - go and talk to somebody who’s doing it now, and they’ll tell you it’s a very different thing. I’m simply not qualified.” He takes me back to my own origins in the trade: “You know, to encourage some 16-year-old to think they’re going to write a 3,000-word piece about whoever they particular admire and get paid for it, is deceiving themselves.”

David agrees. “I’ve got a very old fashioned view of all that, which is that you couldn’t - as we did - now just read the music papers and think ‘I can do that’. I can teach myself to write a 400-word review, I can teach myself to write a feature, I can teach myself to write a news story, but if you then have to go and spend three years at college doing a media studies course, then it’s likely you haven’t got the basic tool required to be able to do it in the first place.” And he adds: “I don’t think you need to be taught that kind of stuff - you either intuitively do it or don’t bother.” 

“If you’ve got the kind of nouse, the energy and the enthusiasm,” says Mark, “write your own magazine. If you’ve got a sensational blog, people find out about it.”  David says that the online world is where energy and enthusiasm for music permeates today. “The only difference is that you used to have to work with people who bought ink by the barrel, who had a fleet of lorries and a distribution network in order to express yourself, or get your opinion out there. Nowadays you don’t have to. You can go on Twitter, you can go on Facebook. You can write your own blog.” Now, there’s a thought.

All things Word-related can be found at wiyelondon.com, including tickets for the splendid Word In The Park extravaganza in July.