40 years of the CD - and it’s not dead yet

“Will Smith, Willennium?!”, scoffs Ricky Gervais’s misanthropic widower Tony Johnson in the latest series of After Life, as he’s trawling through his somewhat retentive brother-in-law’s in-car CD collection. “Yes,” Matt replies, “as in the Millennium.” “Yeah,” Tony retorts, “about the last time someone bought a CD.” 

Well, actually, not, according to new figures from the UK record labels’ association, the BPI, which revealed that after a 17-year decline, CD sales have picked up again. I should point out that this reverse was the result of blockbuster albums last year by Adele, Ed Sheeran and ABBA and, presumably, shifting in vast quantities from supermarket checkouts (take an educated guess as to who bought them). But as someone who still buys physical media, and has largely eschewed streaming, I do take a somewhat Luddite pleasure in knowing that CDs - in the format’s 40th year - are still selling. I like to think that it’s the result of the same sense of tactility that keeps me hanging on to physical music formats, more so than any considerations of sonic fidelity. It’s this thinking that CDs, like vinyl records and even cassettes, appeal to a combination of the newly middle-aged, the baby boomers and younger hipsters who’ve bought into the kitsch appeal of the older formats. 

The CD was an evolution of the clunky LaserDisc format that appeared at the end of the 1970s. Philips, one of the companies involved in its development then joined forces with Sony to develop an audio-only optical disc, which appeared in the summer of 1982. The first CD player went on the market that October, with the promise of a format offering “perfect sound forever”. For my part, I was a relatively late convert: I was still a teenager in 1982 with little awareness of this new hi-fi Eldorado. On top of that, the first player  was well outside my economic scope, given that my meagre paper round wages were mostly spent on vinyl and cassettes at Our Price. 

“The first player cost $1,000 – a lot of money in 1982,” Philips research scientist Jacques Heemskerk told The Guardian a few years ago. “We developed the discs and the players at the same time, then licensed the technology to other companies to make their own. Once we convinced Panasonic, all the others followed.” The price of players would soon start to come down. Philips and Sony invested heavily in marketing the CD. “We needed to do a lot of advertising and knew pop music would be the largest market, but we couldn't start with anything extreme, like punk,” explained Heemskerk. “So we made a deal with Dire Straits to promote it: their music was all put on CD, and they appeared in posters and advertisements. When Brothers In Arms became the first million-selling Compact Disc, we knew we’d underestimated how quickly it would become the dominant format. The vinyl album was so established, and in the US it seemed unthinkable that the cassette would disappear. But after that, things changed very, very quickly. Despite this, it would be a full 13 years before I took the plunge and bought my first CD, the result of taking a PR job at Philips, having access at last to a player. But even by 1995, when I came to work for the company, there were new challengers on the horizon, including Philips' own ill-fated Digital Compact Cassette format, and Sony’s MiniDisc.

27 years on, my CD collection continues to grow, as does my vinyl library, with the decision as to which format seemingly arbitrary. Before I moved in with my wife-to-be, I chose CDs to listen to in the car on the drive between South-East and South-West London, and vinyl for the at-home experience. Since moving in, a month before lockdown, I’ve worked almost exclusively from home, with a CD-only system in the living room where I work, and the turntable elsewhere, making the purchase decision even more random and based on choosing the format to match the ‘mood’ of how I want to consume the music - i.e. partially on in the background, or fully muso-style with no distraction. Yes, I’m a nerd. But even experts can’t make up their minds which is best. “When CDs first came in, I was decorating my house,” recalled Philips’ Heemskerk. “So I decided to get rid of all my vinyl albums, and get my old Rolling Stones and Beatles records on CD. It still hurts. Even though I worked on the CD, and it’s technically the best, I’m not sure people will have the same warm, emotional feeling towards them as I did with the vinyl album, with the beautiful 12in artwork.”

Of course the Compact Disc, being just that, does have its significant ergonomic advantage over vinyl, but the audiophile view is that vinyl is better. There’s a degree of fetishism to that, but as my teenage step-daughters will attest, having asked for and receiving only vinyl for Christmas, records will always be cooler than CDs, which are not and have never been cool to them. 

For a product born of the 1980s, the decade of somewhat sterile modernity, a music format that was as perfect as digital technology could enable seemed appropriate. It was also simple to use and totally portable, which led to the commoditisation of CD drives appearing in any electrical appliance that could fit one. It also contributed partly to the obesity crisis, because once inserted in the player, a CD would, unlike a record, not require getting up out of the chair to turn over, and could even be manipulated using a remote control.

I’ve actually lost count of the number of CDs I’ve accumulated since my first foray into the format, 27 years ago. Much of this is the result of rampant consumerism on my part, as the acquisition of a CD player coincided with my first visits to the United States when, in the days of two dollars to the pound (yeah, cheers Brexit…) I’d start any holiday or business trip to the US with a trolley dash around the nearest branch of Tower Records. I once took a 12-hour round trip from Mammoth Lakes in California to Fresno - via Yosemite National Park - just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers CD, before returning to Mammoth via a giant loop around the bottom of the Sierra Nevada mountains and then back up north on the near-mythical Highway 395. 

On another occasion, I went to visit a former executive of Sky TV at her new palatial office in The Helmsley Building in New York after another trolley dash around a nearby branch of Tower. Before we could properly catch up, her waste bin was full of cellophane wrappings, stripped from new purchases in the hope of not drawing attention at customs in London. That, in itself, highlighted one of the most annoying things about the CD - the so-called ‘jewel case’ (itself the subject of a lucrative and vigorously defended patent owned by Philips), which was a pain to open, with the spindle thingy in the middle often losing teeth. Buying in the US was even more trepidatious thanks to a near-impregnable wrap that required a surgical scalpel to get open, thanks to a pull tab that NEVER worked.

I can’t even remember what my first CD was: I know it wasn’t Brothers In Arms, which became most associated with the format’s acceptance in the mainstream thanks to Philips’ marketing tie-up with Dire Straits (the CD’s earliest appeal seemed to veer towards classical music enthusiasts). My collection grew to around 1200 CDs at one point, infused by hundreds of cover-mount discs from monthly music magazines. In 2010 I decided to downsize, taking a good half of that library to a specialist ripping service in Arnhem (I was living in the Netherlands at the time) to have it industrially transferred to a hard drive, covering the cost by selling the discs to a record shop in Amsterdam for a euro each. A decent deal. What was left were the albums I couldn’t bear to part with, albums like all true music obsessives I’ve probably owned on different format over the years, and have been sucked into the marketing hype of remastered special editions. This duality has been perpetuated most expensively by the purchase of the posthumous Bowie box sets as CD packages, in addition to the odd fetish vinyl acquisition.

The CD isn’t, however, perfect. It is just a little bit…uh…dull. Industry experts I worked with would refer to it as a “carrier”, which is about as anodyne a description as you could come up with. No wonder the CD always used to lose out in the NME’s regular ‘Vinyl, CD or MP3?’ questionnaire. But what it lacks in cool it makes up for in convenience. When I first started buying CDs, the game changer was the ability to take what seemed like hundreds of albums on holiday in one of those clear-sleeve cases. But then the iPod came along. And Napster, and with it the seismic shift from physical media ownership to digitisation. Some will say that this was a linear development: just as the digital CD was meant to kill off analogue formats, the ripping of CDs to playback on iPods and then phones opened the door to the removal of physical media altogether, in the process denuding the record industry and artists of the wheelbarrows of cash they’d earned for decades.

I accept that streaming is cheaper. It also allows an album to be auditioned before making a longer-term commitment. And what better convenience than storing all your music in the cloud, freeing up shelving for…whatever. I, however, will still maintain, delusional perhaps, that there is nothing quite like a physical music library. When we first bunkered at home for lockdown we became used to Zoom calls with colleagues and friends carefully framed in front of well-stuffed bookshelves to make them look erudite and well read. Interviewees for TV news bulletins appeared to compete with each other to see who had the most exotic book collection. But a record library - different matter. And when you think about it, you can cram more CDs into one than vinyl. At risk of sounding intrinsically shallow, I’ll take that. Long live the CD.

Fascination: the enduring legacy of David Bowie

We’re barely eight days into 2022 and I’m already blogging about David Bowie. Sue me. But with today being what would have been The Dame’s 75th birthday, and Monday the sixth anniversary of his death, the propensity for Bowie to still surprise and provide compelling cultural fascination shows little signs of abating.

Just this week Variety revealed that the Bowie estate has sold his entire publishing catalogue - more than 400 songs (including 111 singles and 26 studio albums) - to Warner Chappell Music, the Warner entertainment conglomerate’s music publishing division - for figure estimated to be “upwards of $250 million” (it hasn’t been officially disclosed). The deal drives on the current boom in rock’s biggest names monetising their recordings, following Bruce Springsteen selling his catalogue to Sony for an eye-watering $550 million, and Bob Dylan’s similar agreement with Universal for an equally colossal $400 million.

With the Bowie deal WCM has got its hands on some of the most revered albums of the rock era, encompassing Bowie’s studio output from 1968 right up to Blackstar, released just two days before his death. It also includes both the less well received Tin Machine releases and the ‘lost’ album Toy, which was released in full yesterday as a three-disc package (a single-disc version appeared in November as part of the Brilliant Adventure box set). 

“All of us at Warner Chappell are immensely proud that the David Bowie estate has chosen us to be the caretakers of one of the most groundbreaking, influential, and enduring catalogues in music history,” WCM’s CEO Guy Moot said in a statement. “These are not only extraordinary songs, but milestones that have changed the course of modern music forever. Bowie’s vision and creative genius drove him to push the envelope, lyrically and musically - writing songs that challenged convention, changed the conversation, and have become part of the canon of global culture.”. 

For its part, a representative of the Bowie estate hailed Warner as “capable hands” adding: “We are sure they will cherish [the catalogue] and take care of it with the greatest level of dignity.” That, though, comes with some risk. The entertainment industry has a history of precious bodies of work transferring to corporate ownership with mixed critical results. Disney’s assumption of the Star Wars brand, expanding its universe with myriad spinoffs is still to win over the audience beyond the established fanbase of George Lucas’s 1977 creation. Likewise, there are concerns that Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, and with it the James Bond films, will see the imperious cinema property diluted into a similar sprawl as the Star Wars and Marvel franchises.

What might, to some, be surprising about the Bowie deal is that he was, in life, very particular about his work, maintaining tight control over it. Curiously, what isn’t included in the agreement with WCM is the ‘first’ album titled David Bowie, the record released in 1967 which appeared on Decca’s Deram imprint. That album firmly reflected his then-interest in theatrical, Anthony Newley-style whimsy, rather than either the prevailing beat pop of the early ’60s or the emerging progressive sound that manifested itself that year most profoundly with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 

One of the songs recorded for Deram was The Laughing Gnome, a still-divisive song amongst fans, with purists refusing to accept it is a ‘true’ Bowie song. They prefer to regard it as a childish novelty beloved of Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart’s Junior Choice, along with The Runaway Train, Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West) and Tubby The Tuba. That, though, simply defines it by association. It is something of a novelty, for sure, but deserves its place in the total Bowie canon, something I know that rock star Steven Wilson wouldn’t disagree with. In his forthcoming autobiography Wilson claims that receiving the 1973 reissue of The Laughing Gnome for his sixth birthday inadvertently planted the seed of his own Bowie fandom. I would agree, especially as Wilson and I received a copy each for our respective birthdays, courtesy of my parents (we were born a week apart, were neighbours and childhood best friends). You can read more about this in March when Steven Wilson: Limited Edition Of One is published by Little Brown.

Part of what Wilson and I absorbed about Bowie, subliminally at first, was his breathless, relentless, restless search for something new, something different, something else. That’s what Warner Music has bought into. Not one of those 26 album is a replication. Not even the Tin Machine entries lack something adventurous. Amongst the many valid superlatives used to describe Bowie’s career, “visionary” crops up again and again, along with a profound sense of individualism. “He spent his whole life trying to empower people, and I think that’s what he would have continued to do,” the V&A’s Geoff Marsh told Dylan Jones for a posthumous gathering of Bowie’s friends, recounted in September in The Times. “He once said in an interview that ‘I’m doing this for me’, i.e. he was doing what he was doing because that’s precisely what he wanted to do. And he spent his entire life encouraging other people, especially the young, to do the same.”

Bowie was, of course, rightly lauded for “pushing the envelope”, to reuse that horrendous cliche. WCM’s Moot is correct in describing Bowie as inspiring those “not only in music, but across all the arts, fashion, and media”. To that add technology: in 1999 Jeremy Paxman interviewed Bowie for the BBC’s Newsnight, asking him about digital technology. “The potential of what the Internet is going to do to society - both good and bad - is unimaginable,” Bowie told a visibly sceptical Paxo, who responded: “It’s just a tool though isn’t it?” “No,” Bowie replied, with wry disdain, “it’s an alien life form [laughs]. Is there life on Mars? Yes, it’s just landed here.” He then continued, presciently: “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying. The actual context and state of content is going to be so different to anything we envisage at the moment. Where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.  It’s happening in every form. That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.”

Picture: BBC Newsnight

The year before, Bowie launched his own Internet service, BowieNet. It was, at the time, ground-breaking: for a monthly fee, members got their own davidbowie.com email address as well as  exclusive access to audio and video recordings. They could also participate in chat rooms, which Bowie himself often popped up in. At the time most other stars’ websites were pretty dry affairs, but not Bowie. It was, one user recalled, the first attempt to create an Internet community around an artist. He even used it to crowd-source ideas for new music, with the track What's Really Happening? later appearing on the Hours album. 1995’s Outside drew on a bespoke software application called Verbasizer, into which Bowie typed in different sentence which were then randomly selected and turned into the source of new songs. Four years later Bowie participated in Netaid, a streamed concert that drew an online audience of more than two million, then a record. His enthusiasm for his own online venture waned as the 21st century dawned, and Bowie’s much publicised health issues in 2004 saw him effectively withdraw from public life.

This week’s Warner deal is not, though, the first time that Bowie’s music has been monetised. In the mid-1990s a scheme was devised by his financial manager to sell asset-backed securities, nicknamed ‘Bowie bonds’, which paid out a share in future royalties for 10 years. Another deal, with EMI, saw Bowie sell bonds on the back of royalties from the albums he’d released between 1969 and 1990, but the venture suffered from the music industry downturn in the early 2000s. Even that was something Bowie had predicted in 2002, when he told the New York Times that music would become “like running water or electricity”. He’d foreseen the rise of streaming, with the meagre returns for artists we now know about, and its impact on physical media sales.

All of these exercises serve as a reminder that pop music is rarely as altruistic as either art or ‘just’ an entertainment medium. Business, as The Beatles found to their cost, often gets in the way. But while the Bowie estate’s deal with Warner Music is another chapter in the posthumous commercialisation of his career (which has generated a steady stream of box sets and special editions over the last few years), it shouldn’t do anything to fundamentally change either the Bowie legacy, or this fan’s fascination with it. 

There will also be plenty more to come from it, too, in the weeks and months ahead: later this month the 2022 Sundance Festival is expected to premiere a new Bowie film by Brett Morgan (whose credits include The Rolling Stones’ Crossfire Hurricane and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck) which pulls together previously unseen live performance recordings, with Bowie’s longtime producer Tony Visconti providing music direction. And then, next month, we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars making their live debut, at a long-defunct pub which once sat less than three miles from the house I was born in. Kismet, again. 2022 promises to be another busy year in the enduring legacy of the late David Robert Jones from Brixton - and me and my wallet can’t wait. 

New year, new problems, old story

Picture; Facebook/Chelsea FC

The moment when, four minutes before the end of the first half of Chelsea’s encounter with Liverpool yesterday at Stamford Bridge, the two young lads sat immediately in front of us had had enough and slouched off to the East Stand bar to watch the remainder of the period, said it all about the home side’s performance at that point in proceedings. 

Chelsea had been as insipid as I’d seen them in recent weeks, despite this being Liverpool. I utter the Merseysiders’ name with a degree of vituperative disdain. Because we have form. History. Go back to the 1970s, when Liverpool had a regal air about them, such was their domination of English and European football. Chelsea were in the doldrums, especially as the 1980s came close, partly the result of dire finances and partly the result of just not being very good. 

To the pre-teen me, fixtures between Chelsea and Liverpool was Subbutteo made real: Blues and Reds. Liverpool were, as Manchester United were to become in the ’90s, lauded without question. To this end, the residual rivalry between Chelsea and Liverpool - or, at least, their fans - should have fizzled out years ago. But it keeps appearing, like niggling bouts of gout. I’ll spare the lengthy list of flashpoints, but it would include Chelsea beating Liverpool in May 2003 and pipping them to a Champions League (which also swung Roman Abramovich’s towards the West London club), and then the pyschodrama between José Mourinho and Rafa Benitez when in the blue and red corners respectively (skirmishing that took a perverse turn when Benitez became Chelsea’s interim manager and then went and won them the Europa League). If you dig back into my blog post archive you’ll find a longer essay about the Chelsea-Liverpool back-and-forth. 

Brought back up to date, Liverpool arrived in SW6 yesterday with its manager buried away, self-isolating with Covid, and Chelsea dealing with Romelu Lukaku giving an unauthorised interview to Sky Sports Italia, in which he appeared to question manager Thomas Tuchel as well as his own future to the club that paid Inter Milan £97.5 million in the summer to take him off their financially-troubled hands. And so, there was an air of unsettledness about Tuchel’s team as the game kicked off, Lukaku not even on the bench, and they found themselves 2-0 down by the 26th minute. There were plenty around Stamford Bridge carrying an ominous sense of foreboding as Liverpool threatened to run riot. 

It wasn’t just a case of it looking unlikely that Chelsea would get back into the game - a two-goal deficit at this level, and Chelsea’s form going into the game not inspiring much confidence - but the mood around the club had been progressively souring in recent weeks. A familiar story, too: I’ve lost count of how many times Chelsea have gone into the Christmas period looking suddenly shaky, followed by the arrival of a new manager by March. In fact the pattern this season has been almost identical to that 12 months ago when the wheels came off (or were forced off) Frank Lampard’s tenure, prompting Tuchel’s appointment and a near-miraculous revival that saw the Blues win the Champions League by May.

In the first third of this season Chelsea were being mentioned - or at least muttered - as being genuine title contenders, with an imperious defence anchored by the age-defying Thiago Silva, a goalkeeper in Edouard Mendy who seemed to stop everything, and a dynamic attack that saw wingbacks Reece James and Ben Chilwell vie with the recognised forwards for goal-scoring. Tuchel had steadied the ship at the back in his first few months, but the Chelsea backline had become increasingly vulnerable in recent weeks. Throw in a giant hole in midfield left by the mercurial N’Golo Kate, out with injury, and Mateo Kovacic, out with Covid, the spotlight soon shone on both a leaky defence and an ineffective attack, itself bereft of Lukaku due to injury and then a bout of Covid himself.

So, when squad numbers in the 60s and 70s start appearing on the bench, drawn from the Under-23s, things started to look worrying around one of the most lavishly-equipped teams in European football. You had to, though, afford Tuchel some sympathy, as you do any Chelsea head coach. A Chelsea manager is expected to deliver a trophy a season, but it’s hard to see where one will come from this term, given that Manchester City are running away with the Premier League, retaining the European Cup looks even more unlikely than it did a year ago, and the Carabao and FA cups, which continue this week, progress at a time with Chelsea both depleted and seemingly demoralised.

But hold on. While the lads from seats 109-111 in Row 19 of the East Stand Upper were supping their half-time beers a few minutes early yesterday, Chelsea defied the odds and clawed back two goals. Two good goals, too, especially Christian Pulisic’s 46th-minute equaliser. Come the second half and we were treated to one of the most entertaining 49 minutes of football I’ve seen this season. No more goals, sadly, but that didn’t matter. And it wasn’t just Chelsea, either - we had a proper ding-dong. A brilliant end to ridiculous Christmas football scheduling, which has seen clubs play every two or three days just to satisfy home TV audiences gorging themselves on Quality Street and turkey sandwiches.

Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

The question is, what happens next? Wednesday’s Carabao Cup tie with Tottenham will prove another test for Tuchel’s team, though it’s more than likely that next Saturday’s FA Cup Third Round tie at Stamford Bridge against Chesterfield will provide a runout for the fringe players and Under-23s rather than any of the first team regulars. Because with them, Tuchel has other challenges to address, and they’re the kind of challenges Lampard encountered at this same point a year ago - players that should be delivering that weren’t. Admittedly this time the German has more injuries to contend with, but this is where he will have to dig deep, as he did when he first came on board at Chelsea. He will not just draw on available resources but have to organise and inspire. Where they deliver is another matter entirely, given where Chelsea sit in the grand scheme of things. But like it or not, the job falls to Tuchel, who has demonstrated more than adequately that he is someone Chelsea would be mad to jettison at the first sight of trouble, as they do so often when it seems that the silverware cabinet is looking unlikely to welcome any additions this season.

Football is fickle. Go back just six weeks and Chelsea were six points clear at the top of the Premier League. They’d also just put Juventus to the sword in ruthless fashion, and in a spell of games when, at various times, they’d been without the likes of Kante, Havertz, Werner, Mount, Kovacic and Lukaku - players any side would kill to have on their books. But it was during that Juventus game that Ben Chilwell ruptured his ACL. The left-sided wingback had been key to Chelsea’s progress from simply being a good defensive side to one that could prise open opposition defences. 

Now, only an act of God or a spectacular collapse will give any of the chasing pack hope of catching up with City. But that shouldn’t mean Chelsea can’t finish the season with something to show for their quality in the run-up to the December collapse. Their Carabao Cup tie with Spurs is a semi-final, putting them only 360 minutes away from a trophy, even if it’s not the one they’d most like. They’re still in the Champions League, and without gilding the lilly, they’ve defied the odds - even against the Bayerns of this world - before. They probably shouldn’t even be defending champions based on last season’s form if we were to be honest. And if we’re counting competitive opportunities, next month Chelsea take part in the Club World Cup. 

Mindset will be the fuel that drives them. Tuchel doesn’t just have to organise Chelsea and select the right combinations and formations of available players but also instil in them the verve that sometimes makes all the difference. It’s a confidence that, yesterday, was lacking in Christian Pulisic’s atrocious miss early in the game while odds-on to score, but was there in spades when he volleyed the ball up into the top right corner of the Liverpool goal. Tuchel was handed something of a poisoned chalice when he took over at Chelsea on 26 January last year. He wasn’t just replacing another doomed head coach, but the club’s record goal scorer, Lampard. To some fans Tuchel had risen without trace; Google filled in the blanks but his recent history at Paris St. Germain suggested another European technocrat and a troublemaker too. A year on there is a strengthening relationship with the fanbase which also reflects what he is contending with. 

Twitter and radio phone-ins, the great modern sounding boards of public opinion, have appeared to back his decision yesterday to drop Lukaku from the matchday squad, not just drop him from the starting line-up, and you could conclude from the way the team responded to going two down to Liverpool that the punishment of a recalcitrant teammate didn’t have any detrimental effect on team spirit. 

Picture: Chelsea FC

The Lukaku saga isn’t over, however. ‘Clear the air talks’ might straighten things out, but the last thing Tuchel needs right now is an agitating player. Most fans, though, appeared to support Lukaku’s exclusion from the Liverpool game, concluding that maintaining leadership and discipline trumped appeasing a star ego. Amongst pundits there was a mixed view. Darren Bent tweeted: “I understand Lukaku has done wrong and should be punished appropriately but leaving him out of the squad today for one of the biggest games of the season, when your [sic] still trying to stay in the title race and his form in the last 2 games seems extreme. What's people's thoughts?”. Michael Owen coyly wrote: “If reports are accurate, it’s a huge decision from Tuchel to leave Lukaku out of today’s squad. But in the long term interests of the club, it’s a good one. No player is more important than the club and while being employed by someone, you can’t speak out like he has.” 

Graeme Souness was characteristically uncompromising, branding Lukaku’s comments in the Sky interview as “ridiculous”, “disrespectful” and “enormously“ damaging to Chelsea, adding that it was the behaviour of an impetuous 19-year-old rather than a senior player at 29. “I can't tell you a worse thing that a player can do at this moment in the season,” Souness added. “To come out and say basically, ‘I don't want to be here, I don't want to play with [these] players’ and how that damages Chelsea going forward, it has to.”

So, what happens next? Today, Tuchel and Lukaku were meant to have “talks”. In his post-match comments yesterday Tuchel attempted to play down the issue. “It’s not Chelsea-like [for Lukaku to say what he said in the interview] but it’s also not the worst thing in the world.” “[It is] not the first time an interview out there causes some noise nobody needs. But we can handle it. I don’t feel [it was a] personal attack. On Saturday, new statements [came out] and it got too big, too much noise, and we lost totally the focus of the match.” 

That last statement is the salient point. Lukaku has provided an unwelcome distraction just as his team was having to deal with injuries and Covid absences. Given the way their energy and concentration was noticeably exploited by Liverpool’s first two goals, you could easily say that the Lukaku distraction had an immediate effect. But, then, the way in which Chelsea fought their way back into the game, equalised and then went on to match Liverpool in what would end up being a satisfyingly enjoyable draw (even if it did allow Manchester City to open up an even bigger lead), suggests that no player is greater than the club he plays for.

Picture: Chelsea FC

We’re not yet at the stage of Lukaku leaving Chelsea. He’s ceainly not going to leave in the January window. There’s no guarantee, either, that he will move on in the summer. Inter can’t afford to buy him back, anyway, which is why they sold him in the first place. But the player must also remember that Chelsea managed to win the Champions League without him, on the back of a nervous few months that had seen another manager ejected. But we shouldn’t be naive. Player power (yes, you, Marcos Alonso and Antonio Rüdiger...) played its ugly part, as it had with José Mourinho, André Villas Boas and even Antonio Conte, all victims of uppity strikers. One hopes that cool heads prevail within the Chelsea hierarchy now. There’s no denying that a slump has occurred over the last six weeks, and while injury and Covid have played their part, the squad hasn’t been decimated so wholesale. Each week Tuchel has managed to send out players with first team credentials, albeit augmented by untried youngsters on the bench, just in case. Pundits might be tempted to revive talk of Tuchel’s tempestuous demise at Paris, and who knows if he is a changed manager now. But after some misgivings at first, largely the result of the how Lampard was displaced rather than anything about the incoming head coach, Tuchel has mostly proven to be an inspiring manager. Easily one of the best in the world. Chelsea would be mad to dispense with his services now, but you wouldn’t put it past Roman Abramovich and his capricious management philosophy. To boot, we’ve long grown used to Chelsea’s fire-and-hire cycle, largely because it seems to have worked. 

Judging by the way Stamford Bridge sang Tuchel’s name in the opening and closing minutes of yesterday’s encounter with Liverpool, the first time I can recall this season at home, he has certainly won over the faithful. We have, though, been here before…