Raiding the lost Ark

The trouble with posthumous albums is one of suspicion. There’s an inherent fear that material of any merit would have been released by the deceased during their living years, and that anything issued post-mortem is only ever going to be a cynical money grab by the expired’s estate. 

Legacy album deluxe box sets frequently fall into this category, promising all sorts of “previously unreleased” baubles which are invariably outtakes left off the original record for good reason. Too often they’re no more than pointless souvenirs, the gift shop T-shirt you see on the way out of the museum. These are curiosities for completists who feel their collections of a given artist’s work are lacking the alternate versions that you would probably only listen to the once in exchange for that hefty wheelbarrow of cash left behind for the privilege.

Posthumous releases, on the other hand, fall into a category of their own. In some cases they are grave digging exercises or, at least, examples of poor editorial decisions by surviving family members, lawyers or both claiming to represent the dead artist’s interests and enduring legacy. Occasionally, however, a genuine gem will be uncovered, such as Jeff Buckley’s Grace, Joy Division’s Closer or John Martyn’s Heaven And Earth. In other cases the estate finds a way to fulfil the artist’s previously unrequited wishes, such as Tom Petty’s Wildflowers & All The Rest, which was released last year as the full double 1984 album Petty had intended (before record company types chopped it in half), along with a complete live performance and acoustic demos. It is a wonderful document of a much-missed musician at his creative best.

So this brings me to Prince. When he died in April 2016 he left behind two legacies: firstly, the extraordinary body of work committed to record after signing to Warner Bros at the age of 19 - around 40 albums in all - and secondly, the even more extraordinary body of work rumoured to be lying in a supposed vault. Like the Lost Ark, the Paisley Park archive became the subject of myth, but also, it is alleged, wrangling amongst those closest to Prince over how to open it up and access the supposed riches within. But now it has, with the release today of Welcome 2 America, the first ‘proper’ posthumous Princ release (in so far as 2019’s Originals compiled demos written and then given away, and 2018’s Piano And A Microphone, lifted from a single cassette tape, and comprising 35 minutes of - you guessed it - vocals and piano takes of more unreleased demos, with the exception of one of Nothing Compares 2 U). 

Prince was a restless creator. Complete albums were recorded and then abandoned, often on a whim. Thus, it’s believed that the Paisley Park vault contains at least ten completed albums committed to tape between the early 1980s and 2000. Among them are two albums recorded (but not released) from each of 1986, 1987 and 1989, and all titled - though no one really knows whether these are working names or not. Welcome 2 America was recorded - and abandoned - in 2010, four years before Prince’s death, but it remains unclear as to why, beyond the belief that he just didn’t want to release it. Certainly quality wasn’t the issue as it is, frankly, divine. 

If there are any questions about it, it’s to try and figure out what Prince was aiming at, with a record owing more to the Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder or Curtis Mayfield soul of his youth. Actually, it probably owes even more to Gil Scott-Heron, such is the central theme of social conscience that runs through the 12 tracks, making statements on the country’s racial and political divisions a full seven years before Donald Trump moved into the White House, and four years of recriminative madness ensued, much of which can be looked upon as prophesied by Prince on this album. “Land of the free, home of the slave. Get down on Ur knees. Hit me” he says on the partly spoken title track. “Hope and change, everything takes forever. And truth is a new minority”. If it had been written and recorded a day after 6 January this year, it wouldn’t have been a better fit.

Prince's estate has called the album a "powerful creative statement that documents his concerns, hopes and visions for a shifting society”, in fact drawing on reflections of the issues facing black Americans during Barack Obama’s first term as present. Morris Hayes, one of Prince’s longest-serving musical collaborators (and something of a creative consigliere) recently revealed that, musically, the album’s origins came from a challenge. After seeing a speech by activist and thinker Cornel West, in which he professed the view that, as much as he loved his “brother” Prince, “he’s no Curtis Mayfield”. So, Hayes recently told BBC 6 Music, Prince set about proving West wrong.

Picture: Prince Estate

While there is plenty of Mayfield-style R&B on Welcome 2 America (Born 2 Die, with its falsetto vocal and synth grooves being a prime example) it is in stark contrast to his late career dalliances with a variety of genres (and not always satisfyingly so). As a result, it feels more complete, more consistent, and while musically incongruous to contemporary music in 2010, feels like the Prince album you would have wanted to hear in any era. 

Jazz-funk mixes with playful pop fare like Hot Summer, and more contemplative, sombre pieces like Stand Up And B Strong, which features the New Power Generation’s Shelby J as co-vocalist. It’s one of several tracks that Shelby likens to Broadway numbers, with theatrical lyrics and a sense of ensemble performance. Imagine a show like Hamilton, but written and composed by Prince. There are traces of pure soul on 1000 Light Years, and nods to hip-hop with Running Game (Son Of A Slave Master), but the overall vibe is more of an easy-going stroll through urban American styles, peppered with statements that are clearly (but sometimes subtly) designed to make a point.

Prince, as I think we all know, was an enigma. Even now, five years after his death, we probably know as little about him as we have any pop star since Elvis Presley. We think we know him: he cultured an image that partly allowed him to hide behind character - the “Purple Perv”, as Smash Hits once styled him. But right from the get-go, from that 1977 signing to Warners, we were clearly dealing with a talent of outrageous proportions. The much-shared video of him performing the solo on The Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps in an all-star line-up showed just what a precocious gift he had. It was a preposterous performance that also reminded the world that Prince was more than just a flamboyant eccentric who once changed his name to a symbol out of protest.

Here is what maintains our fascination in Prince, or at least, what maintains mine. Musically he was derivative, as all pop stars were, but also he was pure original. Like all good progressive artists he never stood still, which is why he built this vast collection of unreleased material. 

Picture © Marc Ducrest

I only ever saw Prince live twice: the first, at Wembley Stadium in the 1990s, in which he rattled through the hits, was, frankly, underwhelming. The second was all the more different: an exhausting (for me) three-hour funkiest in 2013 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in which he hardly touched the hits, 1999 and an encore of Purple Rain notwithstanding. And it was fantastic - easily one of the greatest gigs I’ve ever been to. This was brought home by the fact that I’d got my Stravinsky Auditorium strategy right that Saturday night, planting myself for the full 30-track extended set right up against the stage, with Prince himself performing a matter of feet in front of me. It was a schooling in catalogue depth, but also the extent of his musical references, inventively covering relative obscurities by Aretha Franklin, The Impressions, James Brown, Mary J. Blige and even Rufus & Chaka Khan’s Ain.’t Nobody. 

Three years previously Prince had the foresight to see where the country of his birth, the country that produced these same musicians, was going. Some have said he’d always had that vision, and that Welcome 2 America is merely a sequel to Sign O’ The Times, but I would disagree. After a period in which he was every bit as prolific but nowhere near as commercially successful, largely due to a restlessness in finding a defining new identity for his music, on Welcome 2 America he seemed to find it.

A NIMBY writes: twenty is plenty

Picture: Brake

At the age of 53 I am officially middle aged. I also live in a London suburb that is officially classed as having a predominantly middle-class demographic. This, by the way, is the same borough in which The Good Life was set. Sundry other TV sitcoms, featuring middle-aged, middle-class characters have been filmed around here, most probably because their writers and producers were drawn from the very same population. So with those credentials established, I’m at liberty to launch into full NIMBY mode, and support the growing campaign to change the default 30mph speed limit on local and residential roads to 20mph. 

To set the scene, our street forms part of a labyrinth of roads built at the end of the 19th century and beginning to the 20th to accommodate railway workers constructing the London to Southampton and Portsmouth lines that cuts through the town. My great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather worked on that railway, having moved from a Hampshire hamlet to this area for the work. Not that long ago I discovered that the Poulters lived in a house in the next street to ours, where my grandfather was born. This is not exactly germane to this post, but it gives me a strong sense of the area’s history, the area in which I was born and was proud to return to last year when I moved in with my girlfriend. That was shortly (and luckily) before lockdown rendered me largely imprisoned in the living room for the working week, from which I’ve had a unique vista on the traffic going past the front door. And plenty of it goes too fast.

In particular, I suspect, some of the traffic is rat-runners trying to avoid the congested high street at one end, and another side, the parallel main road that connects us to our borough seat, Kingston-upon-Thames. Being a street built in the Victorian era it wasn’t designed to be a sprint course for 21st century cars, to that extent that you daren’t park outside your own house for fear of losing a door mirror, or worse. You go to excess lengths to prevent pets from going out through the front door for fear that they won’t come back alive, and you hold your breath at the sight of the elderly or children trying to cross the road. Some of these speeders, it must be said, are delivery vans, and as someone who has come to rely on home deliveries over the last year, I share some of the guilt for the speed with which they dart from one dropoff to the the next.

There is, though, no ignoring the fact that given the chance, and the appeal of a supposedly straight road, drivers exceed the 30mph limit. I may not have use of a radar speed gun, but I can see with my own eyes when a vehicle is too fast, and can’t help feeling that a lower maximum speed limit (or - horror - more speed humps) might be the answer, especially when considering that a car travelling at 30mph is five times more likely to kill a pedestrian crossing the road than at 20mph.

20mph zones in built-up areas have been increasing, and quietly so. More than a third  of the UK has them, and at least half of London’s roads. Wales is trialling eight pilot schemes ahead of 20mph becoming the national limit in April 2023, and the counties of Cornwall and Cambridgeshire voted for wider use of the 20mph limit in this May’s local elections. Even the United Nations is promoting 20mph as the international default for residential streets. However, the lack of national uniformity impedes acceptance, according to the road safety charity Brake. “Breaking the speed limit is breaking the law and those who do so should be punished,” says Joshua Harris, the charity’s campaigns director. “We must make a success of 20mph limits, but to do so we need more enforcement, which is delivered consistently across the country.”

Picture: 20’s Plenty For Us

The government has now been called upon to make 20mph a national speed limit to bring down numbers of road deaths and injuries. TRL, the body previously known as the government’s Transport Research Laboratory, says that the 30mph is out of date and the casualty figures point it not being fit for purpose. However, campaign group 20’s Plenty For Us  believes that bureaucracy and cost impacts are getting in the way of local councils implementing the lower speed limit and even install new speed limit signage. campaign group, said that as long as 30mph is the default, any local authority that wants a 20mph limit must obtain individual traffic regulation orders and install expensive repeater signs.

20’s Plenty For Us has calculated a financial benefit to local authorities from reducing speeding casualties through a 20mph limit, estimating that for a borough like London’s Westminster, it would cost £1 million to impose a mandatory 20mph limit, but that this would cut annual casualties by a sixth and, ultimately, save almost £12 million every year.

While it sounds like a simple solution to reducing deaths, there are doubts that 20mph is all that effective. To start with, compliance with the 20mph limit is poor: a government-commssioned study found that the majority of drivers break 20mph speed limits, and I must admit, on a 20mph stretch of main road, ironically, adjacent to ours, you need cruise control to maintain the correct speed, as even careful accelerator pedal control isn’t always effective. The study found that just 47% of motorists comply with the 20mph when driving near houses, with better compliance of 65% in city centres. 

Figures have found that 87% of motorists caught speeding in a 20mph were doing so by more than 5mph. Technology, says the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, a charity which advises MPs and peers on transport safety, is the answer, and has encouraged the government to make a system called Intelligent Speed Assist, which automatically reads speed limit signs, mandatory on all new vehicles.

There are differing views, however, on the effectiveness of 20mph limits. In Manchester, a 20mph scheme rolled out on all minor residential roads has been scrapped after it was found the restriction made no difference to the number of accidents - or drivers’ speeds, which had even gone up. There is also the counter view that speed limits aren’t the answer, but so-called Low Traffic Neighbourhoods are the answer to to reducing casualties. Last Friday figures from the first London-wide study of the capital’s 70 or so LTNs found a dramatic improvement in road safety, with the average casualties falling by more than half. Motorists, of course, loathe LTNs, claiming that they add to congestion and pollution on main roads, but researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College and the University of Westminster, who carried out the study said that LTNs were “associated with a substantial decline in road traffic injuries”, on a par with 20mph speed limits.

Punishment remains one of the measures traffic enforcement teams hope will deter speeders. Earlier this year it was announced that fines for drivers caught speeding above the legal limit would rise by half under new rules issued to courts. The most serious offenders will have to pay the equivalent of 150% of their weekly pay, an increase on the previous penalty of a week’s earnings. A £5,000 cap on fines will also be abolished when the new guidelines take effect, but for the wealthiest offenders, it could mean a fine of many thousands of pounds as there is no upper limit.

Edmund King
Picture: AA

Drivers do, though appear to accept lower speed limits. “Most motorists accept the use of speed cameras and most support lower speeds where appropriate,” says Edmund King, president and head of public affairs at the AA. However, he adds, “Blanket 20mph zones can backfire.” King’s organisation advocates evidence-led self-explanation, saying: “The AA would like to see more signage to explain why a 20mph speed limit is in force, such as outside a school, hospital or pedestrian area, instead of the blanket approach which inspires little respect”. 

To be effective, King says, speed limits must reflect the roads they’re applied to, such as school zones, so that motorists can clearly understand the reason for a restriction. “We need more variable speed limits linked to time of day. For example, in the US, most drivers slow down outside schools with flashing yellow lights, but not at 3am when there are no children around. Research suggests that blanket 20mph zones dilute the speed limit’s effectiveness and compliance.”

For now, though, there are no plans to introduce a national 20mph speed limit, with Department For Transport sources recently pointing out to The Times the “simplicity of the current system”, pointing out Rule 124 of the Highway Code which states: “The presence of street lights generally means that there is a 30 mph (48 km/h) speed limit unless otherwise specified.” 

Local councils can set their own speed limits in certain areas, however, but these must be clearly signed, with the government’s own guidance saying that this could be a 20mph zone in a built-up area near a school. Perhaps I need to redesignate our house a seat of learning.

Age is just a number: David Crosby's For Free

If you ever get into one of those pub discussions with someone with trenchant views on venerated musicians still making records, chances are that at some point they’ll declare that old farts should simply step aside and let the next generation have a go. This assumes that there is a threshold at which retirement should be mandated. But at what age would you set that? 50? 60? 65? 70? 

It’s somewhat preposterous that creativity has any age limit - upper or lower. The case for older musicians being gently eased into their dotage by taking away the keys to the recording studio does, occasionally, get strengthened by someone releasing an utter stinker. I won’t name names. Given, though, that what we term ‘pop’ music has been with us since the mid-1950s, and not everyone has been killed off by old age, drugs, drink or other forms of misadventure, there are plenty of acts from the classic rock and pop age still plying their trade admirably.

The Rolling Stones, for example (Mick Jagger turns a respectable 78 next week and can still get away with skinny jeans), and the 94-year-old Tony Bennett; Paul McCartney, also 78, put in a creditable effort with his McCartney III, late last year, while Willie Nelson, 87, has released 14 albums alone in the last 11 years. I’m no great fan of Bob Dylan, for that matter, but last year’s Rough And Rowdy Ways, his 39th studio album, was a tour de force.

So, a month shy of turning 80, David Crosby delivers For Free, and it is wonderful, in all dimensions. Being the fifth solo album since 2014’s well received Croz, you could say that it represents a continuing purple patch. With his 2017 album, Sky Trails, Crosby said there was a lot still to come: “There was a lot of pent-up creative juice,” he said of the writing renaissance after Crosby, Stills and Nash finally wound itself up. “It’s as if I’d been in a dark room and someone turned on the lights”. In 2021, the lights are well and truly still firmly on. 

The first thing that strikes you about For Free is how fresh it sounds, not the least of which Crosby’s ageless voice. If you had no idea that he’d been a pioneer of the hippy folk-rock movement and stalwart of the Laurel Canyon scene more than 50 years ago with The Byrds and then CSN (oh and, go on, CSN&Y), you’d never guess that the principal voice you hear on this album is about to enter its ninth decade. This is an even more remarkable achievement when you consider Crosby’s historic dalliances with the law, substances various, heart attacks, a liver transplant (widely believed to have been paid for by Phil Collins) and sundry other medical contretemps over the years. But that voice, once part of so many classic harmonies, is as sweet sounding as ever. To be honest, I could have enjoyed For Free if it was just a-capella recordings.

Part of the freshness comes from the co-production by James Raymond, the son Crosby put up for adoption in 1962, and with whom became reconciled in the late 1990s, leading to musical collaborations ever since. “Can you imagine what it’s like to connect with your son and find out that he’s incredibly talented - a great composer, a great poet, and a really fine songwriter and musician all around?” Crosby says. “We’re such good friends and we work so well together, and we’ll each go to any length to create the highest-quality songs we can.” 

In that regard, more than any other, For Free delivers comprehensively. It closes with the bittersweet I Won’t Stay For Long, a poignant piece written entirely by Raymond but clearly about his father’s advancing years. “I’m standing on the porch,” it establishes. “Like it’s the edge of a cliff. Beyond the grass and gravel lies a certain abyss.” It sounds mawkish but, conversely offers a hand of hope for the future. It’s a satisfying conclusion to an album that commences in equally pleasing form, with the rousing River Rise, co-written by Crosby and Raymond with Michael McDonald, setting the scene. From this listener’s perspective, it’s a resonant love letter to Crosby’s native California, McDonald’s blue-eyed harmonies injecting a little of the Golden State that he added to his work with the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan. Speaking of which, one of the album’s highlights is a track written with and featuring Donald Fagen, Rodriguez For A Night, which manages to out-Dan the Dan with its combination of groove and a sophisticated lyric that, as per, only Fagen might get about a mythical former hell raiser.

That gives an indication of the topics elsewhere on the album. Not fantasy figures, as such, but a reflection of life’s challenges and its opportunities. There are, too, nods to the community - physical and spiritual - that Crosby was a part of back in those sun-dappled Canyon days, from the album's cover portrait of the singer painted by Joan Baez, to the title track, a retread of a regular Crosby interpretation of a Joni Mitchell song, but one sounding as fresh as if it had been written yesterday.

“It’s not how much time you’ve got because we really don’t know,” Crosby recently told US radio legend Howard Stern. “It’s what you do with the time that you have. I’m trying to really spend it well. I’m very grateful for each day that I get and I try to do it making music because I think the world needs music.” Sentiment that could easily have been expressed at the turn of the ’70s, but given where the world is today, as valid as ever. 

There is a sense, however, that Crosby is winding up with For Free. Its tracks, its lyrics - while not mournful, far from it - do suggest an octogenarian putting things in order, and his comments to Stern appear to back that up. But if he and Raymond are capable of producing more like this, the notion that age is just a number will continue to be served. Let’s not tempt fate, though. Let’s enjoy this delightful record for what it is.

Fountain of youth: Gary Crowley's lost ’80s continue

An unwritten convention in music appreciation circles is that the 1980s are to be maligned. Probably something to do with Thatcherism, yuppies, conspicuous consumption and hair. I generalise horrendously, of course, but somewhere in the mix, in music terms at least, the ’80s remain perceived as weak by comparison with the foundational ’60s, or the inspirational early ’70s and that decade’s raucous end, and the #madforit ’90s (during which any band with a guitar dipped its toes into those previous decades for reference ) that came after the party balloons in between had been swept up. 

It’s an issue that mildly sticks in the craw of Gary Crowley, an undoubted ‘face’ of the 1980s, who’d gone from fronting the reception desk at the NME to fronting his own show on London’s Capital Radio and the early Channel 4 music magazine Ear Say while barely out of his teens. 

“It was an exciting time,” Gary says now. For all of its reputation for confected frivolity, the early ’80s had a surprising edge to it: “I mean, half of those artists were all punks anyway,” he adds. “One of the positive things about punk was this kind of have-a-go, DIY attitude that continued into the ’80s.” Many bands had progressed from art colleges and the punk scene, but rather than simply continue with the Angry Young Man schtick, they put on designer suits, scooped up handfuls of hair gel, and brought the punk philosophy to soul music. “Just look at old episodes of Top Of The Pops from the time,” says Gary. “You’d have Dexys [Midnight Runners], and Adam And The Ants and The Jam. Of course, you’d still get novelties like your Joe Dolces and There’s No One Quite Like Grandma popping up every now and then, but it was mostly an exciting time.” 

The dancefloor, in particular, was where some of that punk energy migrated to. “From Orange Juice to The Pale Fountains to Animal Nightlife - everybody started talking about the soul music they grew up with,” recalls Gary.  “Along with the excitement in soul you had the beginnings of what became rap, as well. I mean, The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels of Steel in 1981 and Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa. It was just like, ‘Wow! Where is this going?’”. 

Crowley’s excitement was galvanised by the much-respected Tony Hale, then head of music at Capital. “He was the guy who gave me this chance. He said, ‘Listen, I want you to play what you want to play. I can promise that there won’t be any sort of restrictions’. And thankfully he really was a man to his word as well.” 

“I was never a musical snob,” Crowley reflects. “I mean, obviously I love punk and I loved new wave as a kid. But I was never an expert on soul or dance music. That was more of my sister’s kind of thing, really. But I would hear that stuff when she was playing it with her mates in the bedroom, so there was an awareness. Fast-forward to ’81, ’82, and I’d be buying Philadelphia or Motown compilation albums, just discovering that stuff for the first time.” Hip-hop was still an unknown. At a Camden Palace DJ gig on his 19th birthday, Crowley introduced ‘PAs’ from The Higsons (fronted by, no less, Charlie Higson of The Fast Show fame), Culture Club, Bananarama, Steve Strange and Spandau Ballet. When he played Planet Rock the crowd didn’t get it. “I played it on the radio show a couple of times but for most people it seemed to go over their heads. I thought it sounded great in the club, absolutely fantastic.”

It’s an approach to playing music on the radio that Crowley has never shied away from. His Wednesday night ‘People’s Choice’ slot on Capital would tie-up household phone lines as teenagers like me camped on (as one did in those days) to the only phone in the house, trying to get on a panel of listeners judging the week’s best new releases. I never did get through, but once I’d decided that music journalism would be my career, the 17-year-old me managed to secure an interview with Gary that I’d use to show potential employers what I was capable of. That led to him introducing me to the NME’s Mat Snow, who commissioned me to write some live reviews. 

My original approach was the same sort of chutzpah that Crowley himself had employed at a similar age, when he ran into Joe Strummer on the street and got himself invited to a Clash tour rehearsal (along with a gaggle of Lisson Grove schoolmates). That same MO landed him an interview with Paul Weller in 1977 for his fanzine, breathlessly contacting the Weller residence in Woking from a West London phone box, to be put through to the Modfather by his mother Ann. On leaving school Gary landed a job at Decca Records before moving to Carnaby Street and the NME, where he was put on reception duties after the previous receptionist - one Danny Baker - got promoted to a writing position. 

This was the time of punk, and that spirit was still in the air when the still-teenage Crowley broke into radio, embarking on a 40-year broadcasting career that continues today with his Saturday evening pleasurefest on BBC Radio London. There he enjoys much the same freedom afforded him at Capital and GLR [London’s BBC local radio station which took a proudly independent approach to music], unrestrained by playlists and algorithm-dictated scheduling.

Now an infuriatingly youthful 59, Crowley remains the effervescent music enthusiast he’s been throughout his adult life, and highly knowledgeable, too. His mental record library is as deep as his anecdotal archive of stories from myriad encounters with musical heroes like Paul McCartney (a supposed 20-minute TV interview was once extended to 40 - “He likes you,” explained a Macca aid).

Having been in the front row of the music scene in the early ’80,  Gary is perfectly placed to launch a second volume of Gary Crowley’s Lost ’80s, a sumptuous, 65-track, four-CD box set featuring a 32-page book with Crowley’s own notes detailing the frankly incredible track listing he compiled. A 21-track, clear vinyl, 180g double-LP is also available. Most ’80s compilations will be a predictable parade of the usual suspects but Crowley discovered a formula, with 2019’s Volume 1, to tread the path less followed. Relative obscurities from Wham!, Depeche Mode, Prefab Sprout, Spandau Ballet, Culture Club and Bananarama sat alongside truly lost acts like The Suede Crocodiles and Strawberry Switchblade. Volume 2 is equally stuffed with the familiar and the unfamiliar, such as the opening track of Disc 1, The Style Council’s instrumental Mick’s Up from their Introducing... EP. “Expect a selection of not only the bigger names, with some of their ‘lost’ gems, but also a raft of lesser-known artists,” says Gary. “Many of the latter came nowhere near the mainstream but most certainly - in my honest opinion - deserve another chance to shine under the spotlight.” 

So, along with staples of the 1980s’ first half, like Altered Images, Madness, Swing Out Sister, The Blow Monkeys, Elvis Costello, The Undertones and Nick Heyward (albeit with delightfully lesser-known examples of their work) - there are, again, ‘lost’ entries that made their impact on Gary at the time, like Pressure Point, Polecats, Stephen ’Tin Tin’ Duffy and Funkapolitan. There’s also a healthy nod to the early ’80s cod jazz-soul movement (which seemed to provide a Soho soundtrack that culminated in the flawed, but still cherished film adaption of Colin MacInnes’ coming-of-age novel Absolute Beginners) with Working Week, Marine Girls, Dee C. Lee, Sade and the very mighty Animal Nightlife.

“When I was compiling Volume 1, one of the things that really stood out for me was the influence of the ’60s and ’70s,” Gary recalls. “Whether it was George Michael or Paul Weller, or Mick Head from The Pale Fountains, they were aspiring to be Burt Bacharach or [the Small Faces’] Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane.” Volume 1, he adds, somewhat suggested its follow-up: “I must be honest and say as soon as I delivered the track listing for the first compilation I already had a selection in mind for a sequel.” That first package came out of a similar compilation of punk and New Wave music he put together with his Soho Radio pal Jim Lahat. “I said to Demon Records - almost before the finished copies of GC’s Punk & New Wave were delivered - I’ve got a great idea for another box set: the music that I was playing on the radio show or a lot of the bands that were appearing on Ear Say.”  

“In a way,” he adds, “it’s trying to reclaim the ’80s, and take the decade away from that easy, lazy, naff version with the poodle hair. I hate slagging off bands, and you know what? If it works for somebody, fine. Not everything was my cup of tea back then - Nik Kershaw and Howard Jones were never my ’80s. The ’80s that I was into was this eclectic group of bands, like The Style Council, Everything But The Girl, The Pale Fountains and Grandmaster Flash. That period,” he stresses, “was my ’80s”.

Gary recognises that the decade can be compartmentalised into the period before and after Live Aid: “It did get a little naff in that middle part. I’ve said before, in a reverent way, that Live Aid had a little to do with that. Because with a lot of those sort of bands, those artists, the hair got bigger, the shoulder pads got wider, and they all started looking like Princess Diana - and started hanging out with her as well!” he quips. 

Even now, in the mind’s eye, the second half of the ’80s seems dominated by the rock chumocracy’s Prince’s Trust gigs and their Armani suits, and a somewhat slicker brand of music and pop star image. Again, a horrendous generalisation, but Gary says the period still had much going for it. “I think the mid-’80s did start to sound a little bit homogenised, but thankfully in ’87 and ’88 an edge started to come back.”

“It got good again towards the end of the ’80s, with Guns N’ Roses, The Happy Mondays and so on. A very important band for me at that time was The Wonder Staff. I always remember going to see them just after they’d signed to Polydor but hadn’t yet released anything. I was like, ‘Oh my God! This is amazing!’. They had this energy in the club that night. It was like a punk gig. Miles Hunt was a great front man. That was an exciting time, especially to be on air at GLR. It’s certainly an idea for another compilation...” he adds. Knowing Gary, he’s probably already put together the track listing. Someone at Demon Records should be getting a phone call any time soon.

Gary Crowley’s Lost ’80s Volume 2 is released on Friday 23 July.

Mixed signals: buying records on your high street

Barely a fortnight after Sainsbury’s announced that it will stop selling CDs and DVDs in the face of streaming services dominating media consumption, and just a few days after the second Record Store Day ‘drop’ for 2021, dear old HMV has celebrated its 100th birthday by announcing that it is planning to 10 new shops this year.

While this is hardly a raging endorsement of physical media continuing to enjoy rude health, it at least is a positive sign that the oft-predicted death of such formats is being kept at arm’s length. Sainsbury’s said that its decision was the result of consumers increasingly getting their music and films online, although conversely it added that it would continue to sell vinyl records in some stores, a reflection of vinyl’s hipster appeal amongst everyone from teenagers to the middle-aged getting back into the format and succumbing to impulse buying while out doing the weekly grocery shop.

Notably, Sainsbury’s supermarket competitors are continuing to sell CDs and DVDs, so the decision isn’t necessarily the shock headlines might suggest. There is no denying that CDs, DVDs and even Blu-ray Discs are in long-term decline: I’ve blogged before about the minor conflict this has placed me in, having worked for Philips on the consumer electronics industry’s launches of DVD and Blu-ray Disc, the company having co-developed the CD with Sony in the decade before, starting the rise of the 12cm ‘optical’ disc as a multi-faceted carrier of digital entertainment and media content.

But, progress is progress. The irony of all this is that the CD and its various offspring were meant to kill off the vinyl record, and yet that format has enjoyed a resurgence, with UK salesreaching 4.8 million in 2020. Indeed, the BPI says that LP sales will eclipse CDs this year for the first time since the late 1980s. “Demand [for CDs] has been following a long-term trend as consumers increasingly transition to streaming,” a BPI spokesperson told the BBC. “Resilient demand is likely to continue for many years, enhanced by special editions and other collectible releases. If some retailers now see the format as less of a priority, this will create a further opportunity for others, such as independent shops and specialist chains such as HMV, to cater to the continuing demand.”

While I rarely buy a Blu-ray edition of a film or a box set these days (I now share a house with my family and don’t have the space for masses of media as I had in my single days, so online services make a lot of sense) I do still buy music, with a combination of vinyl, CDs and digital copies, depending on my mood, collectability (e.g. special editions) and even whether I’m purchasing an album on spec, as opposed to a must-have I might want to have on display. I wouldn’t be the only one who sees vinyl collecting as much as an Instagram fetish as about music appreciation. I am also of the High Fidelity mentality, one of those middle-aged men who still derive pleasure from rifling through racks in musty independent shops staffed by ever-so-slightly intimidating cooler-than-you types. It’s an age-old tradition and long may it continue.

There is, though, still a place for the HMVs of this world. When the chain went into administration in December 2018, threatening anyone with entertainment media on their Christmas lists, it cast a pall over the future of buying and owning records. One of HMV’s attractions, from a mass consumer point of view, was that it made ‘supermarket’ shopping for entertainment easy, with multi-buy bundles (e.g. “2 for £10” offers) a cunning ploy to part cash for more than you might have entered a shop in search of. My CD collection is certainly the beneficiary of deals like that (along with regular holiday raids to American chains like the now defunct Tower Records and Amoeba, particularly during the days of more favourable dollar-pound exchange rates).

News that HMV will open 10 new outlets this year is a glimmer of hope on a couple of counts: firstly, COVID-19 has hit the ‘non-essential’ retailing sector hard thanks to high street lockdowns over the last year and a half. This has been accompanied the double- or even triple-whammy of media sales shifting to core online retailers like Amazon for home delivery convenience, along with the continuing growth of streaming services. Doug Putman, the Canadian entrepreneur who bought out the HMV brand from administration in 2019, and has since reopened 107 sites, has warned that the future of on-premises retailing in the UK is still not guaranteed.

Doug Putman
Picture: Joe Fiorino/Canadian Broadcasting Company

Putman says the government needs to urgently fix business rates, which are based on property rates but are notoriously slow to adjust to market levels, resulting in retailers and other high street businesses continuing to pay very high costs in the face of rising competition from online services with a lower cost base. “If the government doesn’t fix the rates, high streets are going to see a lot more vacancies,” says Putman. “Business rates just don’t make much sense. You can pay zero rent and not make a profit on a store as rates are too high.” 

As seen recently by announcements by Gap and other fashion retailers, in-store shopping is facing an existential crisis, and the pandemic hasn’t helped, even accelerating its demise. It is sad, says Putman. “Outside of the illness, when you look at people’s lives, a big part of that is walking outside and going to the high street and doing some shopping. When you see bookstores and coffee shops, and HMVs, closed and everything online it is not as much fun as it used to be. Hopefully people have seen this world where everything is Amazon and it is not all that great.”

Steven Wilson launches his album To The Bone at the HMV store in Oxford Street

One of HMV’s priorities will be to restore its flagship to London’s Oxford Street. The retailer opened its first HMV shop in 1921 when, as the Gramophone Company (which became EMI in 1931), it took over an old clothing shop at no 363. The shop was closed as part of the administration process at the end of 2018, but Putman has said he would like to find a new location in Central London. The prospects of that, however, amid continuing schism in both domestic and foreign tourism to London, might make it unlikely in the short term, given that the cost of commercial property in the city is driving retailers out, rather than drawing them in.

The other challenge for HMV will be market dynamics. While Sainsbury’s might be getting out of CD and DVD sales in the face of slowing turnover for the formats, others, like Tesco and Asda will continue to take “market share” by undercutting traditional music retailers - be it HMV or the independents. Industry writer Graham Jones has noted that supermarkets stick to a narrow choice of CDs from popular chart acts like Ed Sheeran, rather than back catalogues and more eclectic fare. Indeed, in 2008 Jones discovered an independent record shop buying bulk copies of the latest Coldplay CD from Morrisons, rather than wholesale from the record company because the supermarket offered them for less.

Speak to more hardcore music consumers, as opposed to impulse shoppers, and the love of physical media continues to drive behaviour. One of the pillars of CD and vinyl buying to begin with, over streaming, is the belief that it’s always available, a point that does suggest continuing Luddite sentiment that the Internet can go down, or that titles can disappear due to licensing windows ending. This conveniently ignores the fact that lugging 12-inch records and even CDs around isn’t so convenient if you don’t have anything to play them on. But there’s no denying the emotional bond that people - yes, like me - have to the physical format. “I can't imagine a world where media is not in your hands and not yours,” one seasoned consumer recently told the BBC in response to the Sainsbury’s news.

There are, then, two issues at work when it comes to HMV expanding, a little further, as it tries like so many other bricks-and-mortar retailers to remain afloat on the high street. Firstly, there is the inexorable rise of online shopping - regardless of the pandemic - which is a convenience that is now just an established fact. And secondly, in HMV’s case, there is the cultural shift away from physical ownership as the shift continues to digital.

“People obviously love going out shopping,” Doug Putman told the BBC this week. “They like touching and feeling and that’s something that online is not going to replace. He remains sure that the high street, despite increasingly gloomy predictions, will not become one long parade of charity shops and coffee chains, as so many have become. “I’m still very optimistic on the [HMV] business and business as a whole on the high street,” Putnam added. “I still think the high street is just something so special.” He has a point, but it’s one that flies in the face of convention, and that high streets have become centres of the service economy rather than the destinations of discovery they once were. I do know that if HMV were to open up round the corner from me I’d probably be forever in it, but I suspect that I - and perhaps my vinyl-loving teenage step-daughter - would be the exception.

Electric dreams

    

© Simon Poulter 2021

There was an irony about yesterday. The day before so-called Freedom Day was spent trapped in a car for the better part of seven hours on the hottest day of the year. The plan was quite simple: drive to Kent for a pub lunch with my girlfriend’s mother, who is visiting the UK, and because of the global lurgy, had been unable to come over for the last 17 months. Yesterday she was finally free from quarantine. What we didn’t bank on was the traffic jam from hell. 

In fact, it wasn’t just a traffic jam. I don’t actually know how you’d describe it, but we were caught in it for the entire afternoon, and you couldn’t really make it up. Thanks to Twitter (which became our saviour authority, as there was absolutely zero coverage of this event on the radio or in any mainstream news outlets) we learned that piping had fallen from the underside of a bridge crossing the motorway near the Darenth Interchange, damaging three vehicles that had been driving underneath it. This led to the M25 being closed in both directions at one of its most sensitive pinch points, the Dartford Crossing. All this had happened barely minutes before we passed the M20 turnoff, seven miles further south, which we could have taken us cross-country to the pub. In the other direction, traffic queued from Dartford  back round the M25 for several miles. Nothing. Was. Moving.

It was hard not to think of an episode of One Foot In The Grave in which the Meldrews and their friend Mrs. Warboys are stuck in the mother of all jams. It is an exquisite pantomime of in-car incarceration, culminating in the exchange where, first, Victor Meldrew lets out one of his trademark “Oh, God Al-mighty!!!” exasperations, to which Mrs. Warboys offers to ease tensions with a “sucky sweet”. “Sucky sweet?!” exclaims Meldrew. “I'll be sucking on that exhaust pipe in a minute, much more of this.” 

He spoke for anyone ever stuck in a jam with little or no explanation as to what’s going on. In fact, were it not for Twitter searches of “M25” we wouldn’t have a clue what was going on and why, for four and a half half hours, we moved just two miles. On, let me say again, the hottest day of the year. It is, as my girlfriend remarked, a true test of character to be stuck in a hold-up like that, in heat like that, knowing that your day was totally wasted, without losing it. That line from Pink Floyd’s Time, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way” kept running through my head. 

It took perspective. Firstly, nothing you can do about it. You’ve drawn the unlucky card today, but be thankful that whatever it was that had caused the event, what you’re going through, is probably nothing compared to the poor souls in the accident. And then, as you sit in your air-conditioned car, in relative comfort, you ponder the irony that in Germany and parts of the Netherlands and Belgium, people are without homes and businesses because of catastrophic flooding caused, the consensus seems to be, by global warming. And what caused global warming? Well, us, mainly, and our cars stuck in traffic, with the engine running, aircon on.

I don’t mention this flippantly, but yesterday’s M25 horror came just 24 hours after we’d been at a car showroom discussing a new car. The finance agreement on my current ride is coming to an end, and with the global chip shortage affecting the supply chain, a brand new car won’t just simply be available at the end of September when, ideally, I hand over the keys. My dilemma is whether to finally go green and get an electric vehicle or, at the very least, a hybrid. By 2030, it will not be possible in the UK to buy either a new petrol or diesel vehicle, with the Government adopting a Year Zero approach to getting everyone to switch to “EVs” in order to break dependency on fossil fuels. I get that. 

Science fiction has regularly depicted a future where people glide about in near-silent cars (TV’s Logan’s Run springs to mind), but this had nothing to do with saving the planet as, simply, futuristic mystique. In truth we’re almost there. Almost. Every mainstream manufacturer - not just Tesla - now offers fully electric and hybrid cars as part of their standard ranges, so you could say that things are moving in the right direction. But it’s still not enough. While EV ownership has moved beyond the early adopter stage, the UK still has a woeful lack of public charging points, rendering the usage of EVs as viable alternatives to petrol and diesel - especially for long-distance driving - to be limited.

Picture: Audi

“Why risk an electric car if you can’t charge it?”, ran a headline in The Times last month, prompting letters from readers reporting their own frustrations. “We bought a fully electric Mercedes car earlier this year,” wrote one. “It’s great to drive, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The recharging structure is woefully inadequate and unreliable. I have just spent 40 minutes driving round my local area to find a point where I can charge the vehicle overnight.” Another wrote: “Vehicle charging is so slow it adds far too much time to longer journeys. Despite all the incentives and promises, the UK simply isn’t ready. It’s a shame.” Charging infrastructure is clearly part of the issue: “We live in a northern village, dominated by tightly packed terrace housing with no front gardens or drives,” wrote another Times reader, pointing out that many houses in older towns didn’t have easy access to on-street charging points or even from running a cable from the house to a parked car. 

It’s clear that there is a desire to go electric, and eventually we all will, whether we like it or not. But there are still many obstacles to overcome. One is the premium EVs still command. Yes, over the ownership of one the lower cost of fuelling will more than compensate for the higher purchase cost, but consumers still baulk at the average £10,000 higher outlay for a brand new fully electric or hybrid model. Even worse is that a hybrid offers no tax incentive in the UK. All of that, says the government, will change. Transport minister Rachel Maclean recently predicted that the “total cost of ownership” of EVs would even out by 2025 as the cost of manufacturing fell in the way that technologies always come down in price as they are adopted in greater numbers. Grants and tax benefits, Maclean said, were still making fully electric, plug-in cars attractive, though the absence of any incentives other than fuel economy are preventing semi-sceptics like me from choosing hybrid models. 

© Simon Poulter 2021

Stuck in yesterday’s mega jam, I was struck by the number of fully electric cars we passed, and though UK sales are up this year by 145%, such vehicles still only make up 7.5% of total sales. Clearly, there is a long way to go before 2030. Cost is one thing, but endurance is another. 

Battery technology is still relatively immature, which places questions on how an EV would survive our experience like ours yesterday, not moving for the better part of four hours, with the air conditioning on full blast in 30-degree heat. I could actually see the petrol gauge lower as a result of idling with the aircon on. How the electric cars around us managed, I have no idea. MPs have expressed concerns about the prevailing lack of charging infrastructure in the UK, especially on the motorway network. Broken down EVs that have run out of juice on motorways while stuck in congestion have become a regular annoyance for the breakdown industry. 

There are also concerns that, for all the environmental benefits and carbon reductions by going electric, EV batteries contain rare metals that are difficult and dangerous to extract, and that huge amounts of energy are consumed in their processing. On top of that, they have a shorter working life than conventional fuel engines. Questions, too, surround whether the energy to recharge them comes from renewable sources.

As admirable - in principle - as the shift to electric vehicles is, there are concerns that the strategic thinking isn’t fully thought through. Research published last month by the Institute for Public Policy Research called on the government to invest £6 billion over the coming four years to incentivise other forms of transport, like bikes an e-scooters, to break our dependence on private cars overall. This comes amid concerns that the number of cars on UK roads will rise by 2% over the next 30 years, with the shift to electric cars even adding to the congestion. More land, the report added, would be needed for parking.

Something has to give. I’m no nailed-on environmentalist, but having worked from home exclusively over the last 16 months, watching the world go by out of the living room window, it’s been easy to see how much traffic has been generated by the shift to online shopping, for example. Countless white delivery vans - probably mostly diesel - along with food delivery mopeds go up and down our street in the course of a day (and I’ll admit to having contributed to all of that, especially having been largely immobile for the last three months and relying on the likes of Amazon and Deliveroo). As ever, this is a tradeoff: by not driving myself, I suppose I’m easing congestion. The shift to hybrid working, with many companies pledging to never going back to five-days-a-week office working means that there must be a change to the sort of traffic our residential streets endure, as home delivery becomes even more the norm. Hats off, then, to DPD which is gradually converting its fleet of delivery vans to fully electric vehicles from Chinese manufacturer Maxus. It is, though, only a start - the 1,500 EVs DPD is buying will only be a fifth of its total UK fleet of 8,000 vehicles.

Picture: DPD

Weighing it all up, the pros of EVs probably outweigh the cons. Yes, there is an environmental tradeoff in adopting battery-powered cars, but this is probably better than continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, as well as fossil fuel-based pollution contributing to almost one in five deaths in the UK. But we’re not there yet. As much as I would love to own Audi’s splendid new Q4 ‘e-tron’, which has earned rave reviews from the motoring press for its handling, looks, equipment and comfort, £44 grand is a lot of money for a car, Replacing my equally good Q3 with a newer version would cost at least £10k less. 

Of course, I could just not bother with either, and walk, cycle or take the bus, which would probably be, morally, the right thing to do. It just wouldn’t be all that practical on a sunny Sunday when you fancy a pub lunch. 

Put out that fire before it takes hold again

Things had been going so well. A month of football festivity that began with Andrea Bocelli at the Stadio Olimpico performing Nessun Dorma, the anthem of that glorious summer of 1990 when football was a regal festival that brought the nation together (up until the point when it went pear-shaped on penalties, of course). England’s progress through Euro 2020 has been a thing of joy, too, not just because they kept winning (and winning well), but because we had, or so we thought, an England team to got behind as a nation. An England team that was about youthful exuberance, a wealth of squad-deep talent, a manager whose past pain was felt by everyone, but whose enduring humility and all-round niceness carried through a vision for his side. 

Even the moronic booing when England players - black and white - took the knee in their opening Group D game against Croatia, eventually gave way to cheers from fans more genuinely inclined to get behind their players, as the privilege of having a ticket to a Wembley international should require. But, clearly, we’d been lulled into a false sense of security. For all our pride at football coming home to where it began, we’ve had a painful reminder of the neanderthal tendencies that lurk not far from the surface. 

Without dismissing it, the drunken yobbishness at Wembley (and in Leicester Square) was tragically inevitable. An 8pm kickoff, you say, for the biggest game in 55 years? Great! When do we start drinking? What has emerged as more disturbing is the motivation amongst those who violently tailgated their way into Wembley Stadium on Sunday evening in truly disgraceful scenes that would have ruined many genuine fans’ experience before a ball had even been kicked. Sadly, though, worse was to come in the wake of the final kick.

Picture: Twitter/England

The racist abuse directed at teenager Bakayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho after their penalties missed should shock everyone, but sadly, they come as no surprise. That booing at Wembley, a month ago today, was a warning that for all our belief that football has become a more inclusive place, after the horrors of the 1970s and 1980s, this country’s culture wars have given rise to it once more. 

Some time ago I likened the febrile mood in Britain to that of New York in Ghostbusters. I didn’t make the comparison to be flippant, but to analogously illustrate how the emergence of cultural division and nastiness was like the film’s fissures and cracks in Manhattan sidewalks revealing the pink slime bubbling up from the underworld. Since the European referendum, there seems to have been a legitimisation of hate on grounds other than just binary politics. The murder of Jo Cox was a sign, as was the desecration of a Polish cultural centre in West London not soon after the vote. The faceless keyboard warriors who posted disgusting abuse on the England players’ social media accounts (not to mention the astonishing volume of people who ‘liked’ those comments), can be directly traced to the UK’s culture war, legitimised by politicians who’ve facilitated and even encouraged the ongoing assault on wokeism, and given licence to the right-wing media and the gobshite rent-a-quote controversialists that provide them with clickbait.

Footballers are normally relatively timid when it comes to their public proclamations. Asked if they’d be in a starting line-up and the doctrinal response is always: “That’s up to the manager - I’m just happy to be a part of the squad.” So it is “extraordinary and unprecedented,” in the words this morning of political correspondent Chris Mason on BBC Breakfast, “that we have an England footballer in Tyrone Mings - in a direct and public and unequivocal way - taking on one of the most senior politicians in the country, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel.” 

Patel - who’ll I’ll readily describe as being thick as mince - gave her tacit approval of the knee taking at Wembley being booed by branding it as “gesture politics”, tapping into the frequent message of the right associating the practice by footballers with the alleged Marxist beliefs of America’s core Black Lives Matter movement. Asked by GB News if she would criticise booing fans, she said: “That's a choice for them, quite frankly”. The Aston Villa player - who has previously met Patel to discuss issues of racism - had enough last night, tweeting: “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as 'Gesture Politics’ and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we're campaigning against, happens.". He is, Mason correctly described, “boiling with anger”. He’s not alone: Anton Ferdinand - caught up in that ugly racism episode involving my own club’s John Terry a few years ago - added to the debate on the BBC, citing his own experience of the racist abuse he’s had to endure in his football career, calling on the government to something about the social media platforms facilitating the abuse. 

Whether you take the flimsy view that those responsible were just drunken idiots mouthing off, or you see it as the thin edge of a nefarious wedge that seeks to dehumanise minorities, and history has taught us where that leads, it all boils down to the same thing: that any form of abuse, directed at any minority or, for that matter, majority, is symptomatic of a lack of respect for fellow humans. I understand how some people believe that political correctness goes too far, and that wokeism or cancel culture can be irritating, but I’ve never understood how just being kind should come to being wrong. That lies at the heart of online abuse, that social media has enabled commentary that invariably wouldn’t be made to someone’s face. Not to labour the point, but abusing someone for not scoring in a penalty shootout is nothing short of cowardice in the face of bravery. 

Inevitably, the online comments on Sunday night have reignited the debate over social media platforms being unable to police themselves, and that legislation - such as the UK government’s proposed Online Safety Bill forcing Twitter, Facebook and all the rest to make social media a safer place for everyone. The counter to this is that it would effectively be a form of censorship. At the time of writing, a petition calling for greater governance of social media in the wake of the England players’ treatment had reached 500,000 signatures. I can only expect that number to get bigger.

The trouble is that even with Boris Johnson yesterday calling on the footballers’ abusers to “crawl back under the rock from which you emerged”, his own lack of condemnation for those booing England players at Wembley will count amongst the abusers themselves. Patel’s comments, compounded by the tweet that launched Mings’ into orbit, will only have worsened things.

The sad part of this is that a football tournament that, mostly, provided a beacon of hope for inclusion and social cohesion, ended with a stark return to the behaviour that most right-minded people had hoped had disappeared. Of course, it hadn’t, and like a resurgent disease, had simply found somewhere to lay low. On Sunday it erupted. It was sad enough to lose a final on penalties, but nothing - nothing - in any players’ miss, whether Saka, Rashford or Sancho this time, Chris Waddle and Stuart Pearce in 1990, or Gareth Southgate himself in 1996, warrants the level of ferocity that now, in the age of social media anonymity, has been directed at the latest three players. Even more so the colour of their skin. 

The genuinely frightening thing, however, is that in a country where I’d thought myriad minority cultures are accepted and integrated, and in particular, the offensive attitudes towards black football players that blighted the British game as recently as the 1980s, are still there, and they have an outlet. And it’s all part and parcel of a country that has become divided by the politicians who are meant to lead and unite us. It comes from the top. 

Football came home, but couldn’t find the front door

Picture: Twitter/England

The cold hard truth this morning is that England lost. There’s no sugar-coating the reality. We can look upon last night’s Euro 2020 final profoundly and stoically accept that England took Italy to penalties, and that football’s horrible, harsh lottery was the thinnest of margins that divided them. But, Italy scored three, and England just two. As if to compound the mood, it was cold and wet this morning when I woke at an equally cruel 5am to carry out an early work duty. Cold and wet. In July. England personified. 

The pain of last night at Wembley will wear off. It always does. Italy, let’s face it, were nailed-on finalists from the competition’s outset. L’Azzurri came to the Euros with an impressive record, and Roberto Mancini’s side maintained it. To the very last kick. Credit to them: yes, they resorted to outrageous shithousery at times - they usually do - but from start to finish, they exuded a class that the so-called other ‘big hitters’ lacked. Hence the earlier exits of France, the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal and Spain.

But when you put things into that perspective, England’s progress must stand as all the more impressive. Don’t get me wrong - this isn’t some ‘Little England’ pitch: England are a European football giant, it’s just that there are plenty of other giants. There are less giant teams, too, that defy predictable expectations about the usual suspects, like Denmark, for example, who overcame a near tragedy in their opening match to take their campaign to a semi-final. But, perhaps, as chastened as the England team might feel this morning, we finally saw an England in this tournament that we could enjoy.

And while the curse of penalties means that England still remain potless after 55 years, the positives surely must outweigh the disappointment. Getting to a final IS a big deal, and one that, we have all been reminded ad nauseam in recent weeks, has alluded the country since 1966. And though it defies logic, to lose on penalties is still only an unfortunate coda. We wallowed in those wayward spot kicks in 1990 and 1996 being endlessly replayed, but we always seem to forget that in both those cases England took Germany to kicks on level terms in open play. It only takes a blade of grass or a boot lace to make the difference.

Picture: Twitter/England

Hardcore England fans will, though, find it hard to gloss over last night’s missed penalties, but whatever we think of the five who stepped up, remember that they stepped up. A 23-year-old, a 21-year-old and a 19-year-old amongst them. It tales balls to hit those balls, and while, yes, that was what decided matters, how England got there by far outweighs the disappointment. Or, at least, how they got into the final. We’ll have to accept that Italy extending its unbeaten run to 34 games included them applying all their guile and cunning to get back into the game. Going 1-0 down after two minutes in a final can feel like a hill too hard to climb, and it looked to be that way for the first half. But Italy worked their way back in, wearing England down, making it hard for the home side to regroup and regather after each assault. 

Luke Shaw’s sublime goal so early in the fixture will go down as one of the best scored in the white shirt, while the Italian equaliser was a dismal effort bundled over the line. But they all count. And the Italian habit of stretching out games - and stretching opponents in the process - made the descent to penalties inevitable. As extra time ticked down - the first period and then the second - the sight of England’s assistant manager Steve Holland compiling a list behind Gareth Southgate had the air of a hangman preparing his noose in the village square. The knot in the pit of the stomach grew tighter, as if it hadn’t been tense enough for the hours and even days leading up to the game. 

I’ll be the first to admit, I’m horrible to be around when England play at tournaments. I don’t know why I can’t enjoy myself when so many others do. I’ve carped cynically about the euphoria that has carried through Euro 2020 as England progressed, worrying about the “Football’s coming home” refrain as being less of a rallying call as a jinx. I’ve growled at the media coverage, the predictable front page jingoism and the Crosses of St. George flags emblazoned across housing estates like demolition tarpaulins. Nerves got in the way of me being able to appreciate just what Gareth Southgate’s team has done for the country over these last few weeks, a country emotionally and physically sapped by a pandemic, but which found a Blitz-like spirit in the tournament.

Picture: Twitter/England

I hope, then, that we pick ourselves up. Football didn’t come home last night, and our hubris will have to reconcile that. But at least it found the front gate. It even found the keyhole, but like an inebriate returning late from the pub, couldn’t make the key work. Next time, they might. Southgate has much to build on, not least of which, his own performance as the England coach. That building work will also require an honest assessment of his decision making, the far-too late applications of Rashford and Sancho as substitutes, and the selection of young Bukayo as a penalty taker, which could legitimately call into question whether the strongest five were chosen to take the kicks. But these are the judgement calls that disproportionately overshadow the wider achievement of a young squad under Southgate who played like they were enjoying themselves, playing for each other rather than with each other, as has been the charge against England squads in recent years. There was an undoubted freshness about England at these Euros, unencumbered by history. They’ve got only a matter of months to prepare for the next World Cup, and you’d hope that won’t leave enough time for last night’s hangover to linger. If Southgate channels the positives, who knows what these young men can do next year in Qatar? Hopefully, he’s made this same squad hungry for more.

There’s so much more I could reflect on about England this morning. There’s so much more I can reflect on about the last few weeks. “The pain continues” is the inevitable view of the press today, but it really should be seen as a sting rather than a wound. It’s irritating, it’ll itch. It will remain red and angry for a few days more, but it won’t stop us daring to dream again. Football is about winners and losers. Some win, some lose. It doesn’t get simpler, or any more dramatic than that.

A Gap in the market

Picture: Gap Inc.

For most people living outside of the United States, the 4th of July “holiday” is one of those things they’ve heard about but have probably given very little attention to. Independence Day, to many non-Americans, is just a preposterous Hollywood romp about an alien invasion. To Americans, however, you diss it at your peril, especially if you’re British (you know, after the 1776 brouhaha, and all that…). Thankfully, the 4th of July hasn’t, like several American occasions - and I’m looking at you, Halloween - replicated itself here. But there’s no escaping the fact that pretty much most of our culture has, in one way, shape or form, been influenced by the United States over the last century or so.

 Of the top ten global brands in 2017, seven were US-based. It will not come as any surprise, either, as to who they were: Apple, on whose product this blog post has been written, published and promoted; Microsoft, whose software we make use of pervasively whether we know it or not; Google, without whom we’d know nothing; Facebook whom, without us, would know nothing about us; Coca-Cola who refresh us; and IBM, who largely led the charge of technology to begin with. 

Then there are our high streets: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Subway and Domino’s are all present in mine, and you can add Burger King and Pizza Hut to that list in most other locales. And then we have the American coffee culture - romanticised in Seattle in the ’80s, made fashionable by Friends in the ’90s, and now in more or less every city and town centre you can find, ubiquitous by the branches of Starbucks and their European chain imitators. America is everywhere. Its technology might rely on components from China, but whether it’s posting nonsense on Twitter, or ordering an Uber, one way or another, we are now somewhat enslaved by the US (and Silicon Valley in particular).

When I visited America for the first time (as detailed in my recent post about UFOs), it was partly to satisfy the exposure to American culture that had been a part of most of my life up until that point. As a child, the item of clothing I most coveted was a denim jacket, because Colonel Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man wore one. When I went out on my bike, I pretended to be Jon and Ponch from CHiPs. Z-Cars didn’t even get a look in. 

X marks the spot - Sun Studios
© Simon Poulter 2021

It would be a while before I’d come to appreciate the American DNA in the music I consumed. Little did I know or understand the blues roots of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, or what triggered Lennon, McCartney and Harrison to pick up guitars as teenagers. A trip, many years later, to Sun Studios in Memphis, and standing on the exact spot that Elvis Presley recorded That’s Alright Mama, brought it home to me: how so much of what I’d been consuming since first becoming musically aware, sprang out of that exact spot downstairs at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee, with two pieces of black tape marking it.

Such is the influence of American culture - projected through its domination of entertainment and the window on the US world that Hollywood, principally, has provided, that secretly we want to be American. Why else would we spend more than $73 billion last year on jeans, the utilitarian garment of leisure and, increasingly (thanks to Silicon Valley), the office, which began life as workwear for miners in the 1870s in - guess where? - the good ol’ US of A. 

From hoodies and baseball caps, tracky bottoms to trainers (oh, alright then, “sneakers”), we’ve allowed ourselves to be dressed by America. Its clothing is cheap and functional, and for a range of generations, ubiquity itself. Walk through any shopping centre and mentally note how much American fashion dominates: middle aged men in polo shirts, fortysomething mums in All Stars, even the backpacks carried by students. All of which calls into question why Gap has so spectacularly failed in prevailing in the UK and Ireland, this week announcing that it would close all 81 stores in the UK - 23 by the end of July and the remainder by the end of September. 

On that first trip to the US, in 1992, I was like a child in a sweetshop on discovering Gap for myself, and then finding branches everywhere I went. For very little money (even less when the exchange rate was more than two dollars to the pound), I stocked up on American casualwear staples like jeans, T-shirts and sweatshirts with logos. True, it would hardly get me profiled in GQ, but this was comfort food for the wardrobe. Over the next couple of decades, as my trips to the US became more frequent - both for leisure and for work - no visit would be complete without stocking up at Gap, especially as my weight fluctuated. Got thin? Throw out the XXLs and stock up at Gap! Piled on the pounds? There’s a size waiting just for you! Likewise with Gap’s sister brands, the even cheaper Old Navy, and the more upmarket Banana Republic.

Picture: Gap Inc.

When Gap opened up in the UK, it offered the same retail experience as its homeland, which meant that for those craving a bit of the America tasted on holidays to Florida, California or New York, you could replicate it here. The brightly lit, white-painted shops, the SoHo loft-style wooden flooring, the colourful arrays of smart-casual standards like chinos and button-down shirts, artfully but functionally arranged. The chain, which was founded in San Francisco in 1969 by Donald and Doris Fisher, proliferated outside its native America, eventually peaking at 3,800 shops worldwide. It, and its sub-brands, were an unmitigated success, driving fashion uniformity throughout the world. That, of course, was before COVID-19, and we all went online for our work-from-home all-day pyjama bottoms.

Gap’s disappearance from these shores will not be exclusive. The company is undergoing a strategic review of its own US operations, with nearly third of its retail base there being closed by 2024. Here, where its first UK shop opened in 1987, is blaming “market dynamics” on the retreat. In essence, its appeal has gradually eroded, as online retailers have provided alternative clothing ranges - some bordering on designer-level. Basically, it’s the same story that has afflicted other big retailers like Debenhams and Arcadia’s Top Shop, high street perennials, you’d think. 

Picture: Gap Inc.

Not everyone, however, is struggling. Just look at Primark, whose cheap-and-cheerful appeal was highlighted profusely back in April when the rules on ‘general’ retail outlets were eased, and queues for the chain were seen snaking round the block. Gap, on the other hand, isn’t disappearing for good in the UK: the company believes that its brand is strong enough for it to continue online. I’ve certainly found their webstore invaluable over the last year as lockdown coincided with my latest weightloss programme, requiring another eyewatering binge. 

My loyalty is, I’ll admit, the result of laziness, a lack of imagination and an unwillingness to part cash for anything more exotic. In other words, I’m in my ’50s. Summer’s here, and I need a pair of shorts. Gap has what I need, and I can’t be bothered with buying more or less the same thing from Marks & Spencer or Next, for pretty much the same price. Somehow, a pair of cargos from M&S are just not the same as a pair from Gap, where - when paired with a hoodie and a baseball cap - I can faithfully replicate that ‘American dad at barbecue’ look (which, if you ever attend an American barbecue on the 4th of July, will be exclusively attended by American dads in cargo shorts, hoodies and baseball caps).

Picture: Gap Inc.

That, though, is the key to Gap’s success - and its failure. It’s the shop you go to for classics, not to be on-trend. For unimaginative men like me, it’s where you shop to ensure you’re kitted out in the right uniform, the camouflage blend you into the background. That suits me just fine, and I’d expect the same story to be told by most of my peers. For women, on the other hand, the story might be different, and probably more detrimental to Gap’s fortunes. Women with a hankering for following fashion trends more faithfully have increasingly turned off Gap and found other, sharper places to buy their togs. 

Gap’s appeal - both from the clothing it stocked to the shops they sold it in - began to wain. Fashion writers commented on the quality of its lines dropping, and that, frankly, the stores’ Manhattan look becoming passé. On Sky News the other day, as Gap’s exit from British high streets was sinking in, one women commented that the chain had “stopped being relevant”. 

The comments were eerily similar to those which accompany the numerous schisms that Marks & Spencer has gone through, every time disappointing financial results are posted. Perhaps, in Gap’s case, people have stopped wanting to look so American...