Lighting the Fuse - Everything But The Girl return

An enjoyable catch-up with an old schoolfriend recently reminded me of the soundtrack to our teenage years and, in particular, the records we listened to at each other’s houses while under the premise of doing homework. One that stood out was Everything But The Girl’s Eden, their 1984 debut, which arrived amid the cod-jazz revival of the early ’80s (Sade’s Diamond Life, The Style Council’s Café Bleu, Matt Bianco, et al). 

However, rather than get stuck in a bossa nova groove, Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn - who’d formed the duo while at Hull University in 1982 - eagerly moved into new territories, with six more albums that took the duo out of the ’80s with explorations of indie guitar, electronica and thoughtful pop as they went. 

By the mid-’90s they reached their creative stride with the albums Amplified Heart and Walking Wounded (the former being boosted by DJ Todd Terry’s clubland hit remix of Missing). The creative dynamic shifted yet again with the album Temperamental, made immediately after Thorn had given birth to the couple’s twins (in her own words - stated in her excellent autobiography Bedsit Disco Queen - being reduced to “a guest vocalist on someone else’s album”). And then, nothing - until the release last Friday of Fuse, EBTG’s first album of original music since that 1999 release.

In the intervening years, Watt busied himself with DJing and random music projects, while Thorn released solo albums and collaborated with the likes of Massive Attack, as well as commenced her side career as a highly entertaining author - all while the couple raised their three children. “We probably made a conscious decision at some point that if we want the kids to stay sane, we want the family to stay together, you know, something’s got to give,” Watt explained to the New York Times last month. “I think we decided we would carry on working on our own solo paths for a while. It was almost like an escape valve from everything else.”

Their absence as a duo loaded the dice for when they started creating together three years ago, writing and laying down basic tracks at their Hampstead home. At first, they wanted to keep quiet their return to making music together: “We deliberately didn’t tell anyone that we were dong something, because we were both thinking that it might come to nothing - and that’s fine,” Thorn told the NME in January. “We’ve both been busy over the years with our own solo stuff, and it felt a bit perverse after so long to not even try.”

Picture: Everything But The Girl/Edward Bishop

Initially, they considered calling themselves ‘TREN’ (conflating Tracey and Ben), instead of restoring their band name: “It’s not going to be a small deal to come back [as Everything But The Girl] after this length of time,” Thorn explained earlier this year. While that worry is understandable, not pigeon-holing themselves with the jazz of Eden gave them a free pass to take their music wherever they wanted it to go. “We’ve never been a particularly nostalgic band,” Watt said in their NME interview. “We’ve always been known for making a different record every time. Sometimes that’s meant going against the mainstream, but we just try to keep ourselves interested and keep things contemporary.”

Fuse won’t be the first album conceived during lockdown, but like so many home projects started during that surreal period in all our lives, when sourdough loaves and LEGO Technical kist sprouted on kitchen tables, Covid-19 came with the Watt/Thorn household noticeably emptier. With all three of their children having fled the nest as adults, and Watt having to self-isolate due to being diagnosed, in 1992, with Churg–Strauss syndrome, an autoimmune condition, there was a void to fill. The couple started exchanging snippets of ideas with each other, without having any particular plan as to what they’d become. 

“I started to put things on my phone,” Watt told the New York Times. “I just tried to improvise without thinking too much about actually writing finished work. I would just sit there, with Voice Memo on the piano, and play and hope that I captured something. When Tracey came to me and said, ‘Shall we work together?’ I had these fragments and ideas of chord movements, improvisations, and some voicings that we hadn’t used before — slightly spiky, fourths and sixths rather than thirds and fifths. For people who’ve made music together for 20 years, to find a new note to land on was a lot of fun.”

But, still, there wasn’t any immediate intention to release it. They didn’t even tell their children they’d made it. “We wanted to come back with something modern-sounding,” Watt told the NME. “We’re not out there on the heritage trail doing ‘best of’ tours or playing arenas. We just wanted to make a piece of work that would sound great now in 2023. That was the driver.”

Fuse isn’t, though, a lockdown album per se. “It just struck us that the time was right after 23 years of waiting,” Watt said. “It’s hard to put a finger on why. We didn’t go into the studio with any plans. We knew there was a bit of pressure because it was the first thing we’d done in ages, but we just wanted to be a bit playful and experimental to see what happens. There wasn’t a masterplan.”

Picture: Everything But The Girl/Edward Bishop

Watt and Thorn have flirted with genres throughout their career. Fuse draws together many of those strands, but in a delightfully, contemporary way. Atmospheric, even downbeat songs are interwoven with more upbeat numbers - some even danceable - with Thorn’s voice a slightly deeper, more sonorous register than I remember of old. This adds to the album’s reflective, grown-up lyrics, such as When You Mess Up’s admission of imperfection, the life-assuring healing of Karaoke, and Nothing Less To Lose making a statement of repeated vulnerability. 

While the couple say that Covid didn’t influence their writing, even with the context of Watt’s underlying health, it’s easy to see - if not lockdown’s impact - its influence. “When I look back at the lyrics,” Thorn said in one interview, “I can see that there’s a lot of urgency...about trying desperately to make contact with someone. I’m sure that comes out of this long period of being unable to do that — feeling very cut off from people, feeling isolated.”

What does come across from their publicity round is that Fuse is not album they needed to do, or felt compelled to make, but found themselves doing. “It kind of astonished us,” Thorn has said. “I remember the end of [their final day of recording], we looked at each other and basically went, ‘Oh my God. It sounds like Everything But The Girl. It sounds like an album!’ Afterwards I said to Ben, ‘That’s the most fun I’ve had in a very long time.’”

The hope is that, even if Fuse came about by circumstance, Thorn and Watt enjoyed themselves so much that it marks the return to regular record making by them as a duo, who remain one of music’s most enduring and likeable partnerings. Thorn, too, is one of the ‘good ones’ on Twitter - if there can be such a thing as the platform descends into into a festering bin fire of extremism - engaging friends, peers and followers alike with the kind of conversation that made it a fun place to find yourself in the first place. As 60-year-olds, parents of grown-up children, and artists who’ve proven themselves to be comfortable out of the limelight as much as in it, you can’t help but finding Everything But The Girl likeable. Fuse marks an equally likeable return.

Criminal records

A casual stroll through Covent Garden recently left me in a state of shock. Visiting central London’s only chain record shop, my eyes were assaulted by the price of vinyl. Somehow, and since Christmas, there were ‘regular’, single-disc albums priced as much as £34.99. Thirty-five quid for a record - when did that happen?

To be fair, there was no real rhyme or reason for any of the pricing. Looking across current best sellers on the HMV website, Aurora by Daisy Jones & The Six is one of those with the £34.99 price tag, while the pink vinyl version of Lana Del Rey’s Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (which also comes with a poster) is £36.99. The new remaster of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon: Live at Wembley 1974 is £22.99, but that old staple, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is £24.99. For reasons best known to someone, Radiohead’s venerable OK Computer is £29.99.

Even allowing for some releases being on coloured vinyl, there is nothing musically obvious to warrant a difference of almost £20 with CD versions, and yet vinyl continues to outsell CDs, to such extent that the format has largely been marginalised in record shops in much the same way that, ironically, vinyl virtually disappeared as the new digital system got going back in the late 1980s. 

What makes vinyl’s pricing more remarkable is that younger consumers - somehow - appear to be buying records at prices that even I, with the salary to match, baulk at. So what is fuelling it? For a start, the CD is in terminal decline, 41 years after it was introduced by Philips and Sony. 

Last year some 33 million CDs were sold but, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, that was an 18% decline on 2021 when - probably driven by lockdowns and people discovering that they still had a CD player - the CD had enjoyed its first annual increase in 17 years. Vinyl, on the other hand, has continued to grow, with just under a billion pounds’ worth sold in 2022, amounting to just over 41 million records. Today, it represents 71% of all the revenue made from physical music formats. 

Why, is still an intangible. Music executives talk about the better sound quality of vinyl and almost everyone who had converted - or reconverted - to playing records again will talk up the tactile experience of putting a needle on the intro groove. 

That, certainly, drove the return of Baby Boomers to vinyl, having been previously converted to digital formats. Tentatively, they ventured into hi-fi shops and electrical departments and bought cheap turntables and discovered they could recreate their teenage years by digging out albums long consigned to the loft. However, their children also cottoned on, finding greater affinity with those 12-inches of plastic and the ever-increasing marketing ingenuity with which labels peddle exclusives, reissues and cute gimmicks like coloured vinyl.

Here in the UK, vinyl hit a 30-year high last year, according to the BPI, led by the cross-generational appeal of Taylor Swift, whose records seem to be bought by dads and daughters alike. It even led to the beleaguered HMV chain being revived, having almost disappeared completely before being bought by private investor Doug Putman, who also owns Fopp! record shops. “Walk in today, and it’s unbelievable how many ten, 15, 18-year-olds are in the store,” he told the BBC recently. “I’m telling you, that’s good for us long-term.” 

But even so, given the cost-of-living crisis affecting every age group, one way or another, the suddenly exorbitant price of vinyl must surely be impacting demand. But why is it so expensive? Firstly, there are some boring reasons for how a vinyl record is priced: the economics of pressing up records plays a huge part, wherein record labels and artists need to meticulously plan demand to ensure the pressing process is as efficient as possible. There are increasing costs with the raw materials, too, with the cost of shipping the lacquers used to master discs nearly trebling in the last year or so - another expense passed on to the consumer.

During the pandemic, where records were being ordered online, often on a whim, manufacturers struggled to keep up as they, too, were impacted by staff shortages, but some of these haven’t yet recovered, leading to records taking three to six months to get pressed, often leading to limited supplies, and higher demand, especially for premium editions. Metallica - the sixth-highest vinyl-selling act in the US - have even bought their own pressing plant to help with manufacturing their own records. 

We are, of course, mainly talking here about the new production of records, but the second-hand market has also experienced inflationary pricing (much the same as for cars, interestingly enough) as people have resorted to Discogs, eBay and market stall box digging to buy ‘authentic’ originals, with their scratches, blemishes and all. However, another factor affecting the supply of new vinyl is the actual length of records: in the 1960s and 1970s it wasn’t uncommon for an album to last no more than 35 minutes or, at the very most, 20 minutes a side. When the CD came along, artists could fill an album with up to 70 or even 80 minutes of music on a single disc. Vinyl’s resurgence has brought back the physical challenges, that a 12-inch album can only contain so much music within its grooves - even less with so-called ‘180 gram’ audophile releases which present a tradeoff of higher quality, usually to appeal to older consumers buying a classic album for the second or even third time in their lives. 

Marketing will have another affect on the cost of an album: record companies have become ever more inventive with the use of coloured vinyl, but each vivid, thematically-relevant colour requires additional materials and dyes to work, unlike the simplicity of dull old black. Vinyl’s resilience is, then, ultimately the result of clever salesmanship mixed with fashionable appeal. While manipulating a piece of software code to play an album on a phone or a home hub device is as simple as turning on a light, vinyl has managed to keep its cool. Which record companies are perfectly aware of. Desire is more impactful than mere demand, and the economics at play here shouldn’t be rocket science. 

Inflation is also impacting the price of an album, but the question is whether deflation will bring prices down as well. There is certainly little evidence that the vinyl revival is just a fashion craze - in fact, the format’s resurgence has been going for the last 15 years at least. But given how financially squeezed everyone in the record-buying demographic will be right now, inevitably, it remains to be seen whether a £35 impulse purchase is being deferred, especially when a new album can be conveniently ‘tasted’ on Spotify for £10 a month.

It’s going to be interesting to see whether pricing has any affect on this year’s Record Store Day, taking tomorrow. As was its intention, the initiative, founded in 2008 to drive traffic away from online vendors and into independent shops, had the effect of vinyl fans young and old (me included) splurging on the day’s limited edition releases. However, the trend for providing a sales bonanza for ‘legacy’ acts reissuing venerated albums and rarities, has come in for some criticism, with smaller labels and their lesser known acts often struggling for attention (and, also, feeling relegated by record manufacturers prioritising money-spinners like Taylor Swift).

Not that the major record companies will be complaining. At the end of the day, they know that consumers remain willing to pay a premium for vinyl - and not necessarily to experience the supposed “warmth” of a record. In 2022 the American industry body Luminate, found that half of vinyl buyers even own a record player. A similar story has been spun with the revival of cassettes, with acts like the Arctic Monkeys and Harry Styles selling thousands of tapes despite there being no clear idea on what they’re being played on. 

But sell they are, fuelled by teenagers wishing to own something kitsch, turning the cassette into a youth fashion, along with the revival of 1980s-style baggy clothing. “Growing up, cassettes were a rite of passage as we listened to our favourite artists,” Sophie Jones, interim chief executive of the BPI told The Times this week, though she pointed out that tapes represented a minuscule segment of music consumption. “Like vinyl, a number of contemporary artists are warmly embracing the cassette as another way to reach audiences and on occasions it has even helped them to achieve a No 1 album.”

For those of us who remember cassette as the original cheaper alternative to vinyl, we will have some fondness, but not much. Taking music on holiday was never much fun when, along with the Walkman, you had to lug a large box full of tapes to listen to. 

And, yes, there were the occasional disasters as tapes became wound around the deck’s playback heads (leading to the now lost phenomenon of roadside hedges ‘decorated’ with discarded magnetic tape, along with…er…mysteriously, porn magazines…).  

Make no mistake, physical formats are in the relative minority, whatever hipsters venturing out tomorrow for Record Store Day might think. Streaming remains by far the leading means of hearing new music and old alike, even if a ‘free’ listen on Spotify does lead to a physical purchase. 

But for all the convenience of streaming and, like so many one-click aspects of our now-digital lives - from ordering food to buying books and paying bills - there is something reassuringly old school about taking a record out of its sleeve, putting down a needle on its first groove, and listening to the artist’s intended track order before having to get out of the chair and flip it over. In a small way, it’s a reminder of a slower, less instant time, before the mouse or the remote control. I just wish it wasn’t so bloody expensive.

Dreams can come true - it’s just that this one is a fever dream

I have only once seen Real Madrid play in the flesh, and that was when a business associate took me to the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium some years ago for a home fixture against Getafe. It was a new football experience for me: kick-off at 9pm on a Sunday evening followed - as is the local custom - by dinner in a highly agreeable meal nearby (which meant not getting back to my hotel until almost 1am - perfect, then, for a critical meeting at 8am later that morning...). The football was average, but the atmosphere inside that awe-inspiring colosseum was electric.

Contrast that, then, with the atmosphere at Stamford Bridge around 5pm last Saturday, and what that means for mood around the ground tonight as Chelsea face Real in the second leg of their Champions League quarter final. Somehow, I don’t expect my second experience of seeing the serial European champions for a second time will match my first.

In fact, tonight promises to be a somewhat surreal episode in the fever dream that Chelsea’s season has been from the off. No one, not even the most rosy-cheeked optimist, is giving Frank Lampard’s team a hope in Hell of overturning Madrid’s 2-0 advantage from last week’s first leg. And with tickets at over £70 a pop, I’m even struggling to justify the “but it’s Real Madrid…” reasoning for seeing los blancos in the flesh against Chelsea in their current state. However, a lifelong fan does what a lifelong fan does.

Even by this season’s depths, Saturday’s defeat to an in-form Brighton at Stamford Bridge was a new low, and compounded by being Lampard’s first game in charge in front of the fans he played so brilliantly for over 13 years. The trouble is, on the evidence he’s presented over three games as interim manager, his appointment was purely a PR move by Todd Boehly and his co-owners. And even that looked like it had backfired when the American was seen remonstrating with fans in the tier above his executive box on Saturday.

Yesterday it emerged that an apparently excised Boehly followed his impromptu fan chat by marching from the West Stand across the vacated pitch to the home dressing room in the East Stand, telling the players that the club’s season has been “embarrassing”, and that the board expected better of a squad that has been added to with a £600 million spend during the two transfer windows that the Boehly-Clearlake Capital consortium has been in charge. Rumour has it that one particular player - thought to be Raheem Sterling - was made to feel particularly uncomfortable, given the princely sum that lured him from Manchester City last summer, for limited return since. However, to single out one player would be grossly unfair, given how awful almost all 16 members of the squad involved in Saturday’s game performed.

No doubt Boehly was trying his best to motivate the squad ahead of tonight’s game, with the Champions League now Chelsea’s only prospect for silverware this season, not to mention the only route back into Europe next term. It was reported that Boehly and his fellow board members, Behdad Eghbali and Hansjörg Wyss, spent about an hour in the dressing room, with one eye witness describing the scene as “weird”.

Goalkeeper Kepa Arrizabalaga, appointed Chelsea’s umpteenth captain of the season for the day on Saturday, downplayed the Boehly intervention, saying that it was “normal” for the American to visit the players after games. Lampard himself continued to apply his exemplary political skills during his pre-match press conference yesterday. “When an owner is invested in the team and wants to help and improve, it’s their prerogative to have the input they want,” adding that “past owners” - by which he clearly meant Roman Abramovich - weren’t always present in the dressing room. When the Russian did, it was either to celebrate a trophy, or to be a harbinger of doom for the current manager. “[Owners in the dressing room] is not a bad thing in terms of the identity of the club and where you want to get to,” he told journalists. “There is no problem with it. I had my things to say after the game. If the owner comes in and wants to be positive and speak to the players, then I think it is his part to do that.”

Much of the fanbase, however, pins the blame on Boehly for the mess Chelsea are in, with the £4.25 billion takeover - which did save the club after Abramovich had been forced to sell up - followed by the eye-watering outlay that brought in a phalanx of new players like Sterling, Enzo Fernandez, Mykhailo Mudryk and the loanee João Félix. In of themselves, exciting players, but injected into a squad with seemingly no plan or strategy for playing them. Thus, Graham Potter found to his cost that he was unable to get the best out of his expensive new charges, while still being saddled with wantaway deadweights like Hakim Zyech and Christian Pulisic (whom, inexplicably, he both continued to play). Lampard has now inherited the problem. Not only that but, in his own words, players he considers unfit, with some appearing unable (or unprepared) to carry out basic running at opponents.

All, then, is not happy in the Chelsea camp. Some fans will sympathise with Lampard, even if they’re not entirely convinced he's going to be able to restore any dignity to the remainder of the men’s team’s season (compare that with Emma Hayes’ Chelsea Women, who on Sunday booked themselves a place in their third consecutive FA Cup Final). However, Lampard does not have unanimous support: it is understood that in Boehly’s heated exchange on Saturday, sharp comments were made to him about Lampard’s interim appointment. You might think that to be an act of heresy, but such is the sulphurous mood at the club, that the side was booed off after the Brighton match, despite being the homecoming of “Super Frank”.

“With regard to the ownership and fans, passion goes both ways,” Lampard said yesterday. “The fans show passion and I don’t think the owners or anybody who comes to Chelsea can expect anything else. We have been fortunate enough that the club has been successful over the last 20 years or so. That means you want more of it.” Ever the diplomat, he continued: “The word passion is coming from both sides. These are passionate owners who want to bring a real vision to the club and we are probably the early stage of the process in those terms. We can all be passionate together and work in the same direction.”

The trouble is, there’s scant evidence of that on the pitch. Indeed, an impromptu team meeting led by Arrizabalaga in front of his own defensive area mid-game suggested that the players were starting to make it up for themselves. Lampard, you’d have hoped, should have been able to get this group of misfits playing for the shirt he graced as part of a team of serial winners. On Saturday, only Conor Gallagher and, to some extent, Mudryk, demonstrated any passion. Others, including the dependable wingbacks Reece James and Ben Chilwell looked off their game, possibly embarrassed by what and whom they were working amongst. 

There were too many other lows on Saturday to list here, though the ignominy of Sterling getting booed off stands out. Imagine that, happening to an English player and one of national distinction. But given that Sterling has apparently cut an isolated figure around the training ground, and is believed to have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the club (despite it paying him north of £300,000 a week), it could be said that he has become indicative of the toxicity at Chelsea, as they spiral deeper into the lower half of the Premier League.

Meanwhile, the process to appoint a permanent manager continues. Luis Enrique has already been interviewed, Mauricio Pochettino and relatively unknown Portuguese coach Ruben Amorim also remain under consideration, with Julian Nagelsmann looking increasingly the favourite (with members of the Chelsea board reportedly warming to him having initially been indifferent). However, the challenge for whoever gets the gig is that, on current evidence, Chelsea look unmanageable. To confound things further, Financial Fair Play considerations could leave the successful candidate with a squad drastically depleted by an end-of-season fire sale. Barely a day goes by without another name being added to the list of assets to be stripped. While the eBay catalogue of players many fans would readily eject writes itself (Zyech, Pulisic, Chalobah, Loftus-Cheek, Cucurella, Koulibaly and Sterling, at least), others might be more painful to part company with, most notably Academy graduates Mason Mount, Conor Gallagher and the highly rated young defender Levi Colwill, who could all leverage decent returns. Plus, to add to the new manager’s headaches, Romalu Lukaku will return to his parent club after Inter Milan signalled that they would not be renewing his loan deal, meaning a tricky ego will need reintegrating into a fractured side, despite being one criminally bereft of a nailed-on striker.

Even before the Boehly-Clearlake consortium arrived on the scene, Chelsea suffered from a bloated squad, only lightly offset by myriad loan placements. With a squad of 32 players today, including those acquired over the summer and January windows, Potter and now Lampard have had a near-impossible task keeping everyone happy. There have even been reports of not enough space in the changing room for everyone. More seriously, a working group that big presents challenges for the coaching staff at Cobham, let alone what Lampard must have to do to pick his best 11. On top of that, the new ownership brought with it a number of behind the scenes changes to technical and medical staff, which may have been reflected by some signs of player dissatisfaction spilling into matchdays.

‘Chelsea Twitter’ has been an unpleasant place for most of this season, where even the anonymous keyboard warriors - who’ve probably never set foot in SW6 - have whipped up dissent towards even favourite sons like Mount and Chilwell. The #PotterOut fraternity remained largely online until the crowd became noticeably more muted at Stamford Bridge itself, before becoming openly hostile towards the manager. By the time he was fired last month, Potter had largely lost the broad support, which forced the Chelsea board to act. But, by Saturday evening, after Chelsea’s third defeat in a row under Lampard, even the unthinkable of arguably the club’s greatest midfielder getting stick, was audible. 

The conclusion, then, is that Season 22-23 is lost. Lampard’s totemic figure notwithstanding, Potter could have been replaced by a house brick for the remaining games this term, and the dysfunction would probably be just as bad. Whoever gets to pick up the mess for next season will have a mountain to climb. He will have to rebuild a fractured squad, ensuring that some of the pricier additions who survive the summer cull are in the right frame of mind to compete for just the Premier League, the FA Cup and the League Cup. 

As many a wag has commented, there’s not a manager in the world who can come in and rescue this season for Chelsea. It remains to be seen whether Nagelsmann, Enrique or any of the others on the shortlist can quickly restore Chelsea to the European elite that, under Abramovich, London’s serial under-achievers became a part of. 

Perhaps, though, a fallow season or two is just what the club needs. That’s unless there’s an exceedingly unlikely miracle tonight in West London. Followed by another next month. And another, in Istanbul in June.

James Bond will return…as a thirtysomething

Picture: Columbia Pictures

And, so, we’re back to that again: who will be next to play James Bond on screen. Ever since Daniel Craig bowed out in No Time To Die, barely a month has gone by without the press running with one rumour or another. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, James Norton, Henry Cavill, Idris Elba, Regé-Jean Page and Jack Lowden, and many, many others have been, apparently, in the frame. One or two are even believed to have been actively auditioning. The cold hard truth, however, is that, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, probably, outside of producers Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson no one knows exactly where things stand.

Actually, there is one other person: Debbie McWilliams, who has been the Bond franchise’s casting director since 1981. “There’s no conversation being had at the moment,” she revealed to the Radio Times this week, pointing out that Broccoli has been busy with other projects (including the decidedly un-Bondlike films Ear For Eye and Till). That No Time To Die was released in 2021 (and then delayed by more than a year due to the pandemic), and no new Bond film has been put into production is, says McWilliams, nothing to be concerned about. 

“You know, it’s not unusual for there to be quite a big gap between different Bonds, it has been known to have a five-year gap. So, no, nothing.” That notwithstanding, the longer the gap, the greater the hunger for the press to fill it. “When there’s a gap in a newspaper, they fill it with a James Bond story, because they haven't got anything else to write about,” McWilliams said. “Why people can’t just wait and see, I don’t know.”

She is, of course, being cute. I may be biased, but she will surely know that the role of 007 is the most talked about in cinema. And while the press might - as they will do - simplify the process into who they think ‘looks’ like a Bond (or, simply, who they like), the actual process is far from straightforward.

Some fans have suggested that the next Bond could be a younger version, as other franchises like Sherlock Holmes, Inspector Montalbano, Indiana Jones and Star Wars’ Han Solo have done - even younger than Craig’s Bond in Casino Royale. “We’ve tried looking at younger [actors] in the past,” Wilson has said, “but trying to visualise it doesn’t work. Remember, Bond’s already a veteran. He’s had some experience. He’s a person who has been through the wars, so to speak. He’s probably been in the SAS or something. He isn’t some kid out of high school that you can bring in and start off. That’s why it works for a 30-something”.

Getting it right is fraught with challenge. “When Daniel was cast, I met hundreds of people and travelled here, there and everywhere,” McWilliams told the Radio Times. “Barbara Broccoli was the main advocate. She knew she wanted him pretty much from the beginning, but it was proving to everybody else which was the difficulty.” 

That, perhaps, draws reference to the fact that Craig didn’t look like any previous cinematic James Bond, the ideal that had been established by Sean Connery, more or less directly replicated by George Lazenby, and then followed - to varying degrees - by Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan. Craig was both blond and blue eyed, and not all that tall, either (a point made jokingly in the actor’s cameo as a Stormtrooper in Star Wars: The Force Awakens).

“When we started, it was a slightly different feel,” McWilliams said of the casting search that eventually led to Craig becoming 007. “We did look at a lot of younger actors, and I just don’t think they had the gravitas. They didn’t have the experience, they didn’t have the mental capacity to take it on, because it’s not just the part they’re taking on, it’s a massive responsibility.” Even when Craig was eventually cast, the decision encountered a hostile media: “It was unbelievably negative, I have to say,” McWilliams told Entertainment Weekly in another interview. “The press response was awful and I felt so sorry for him, but in a funny kind of a way I think it almost spurred him on to do his damndest to prove everybody wrong.”

This time around, McWilliams says there are no preconceived ideals as to who they cast. “There’s lots to be taken into consideration,” she says. “There isn't an absolute ideal mould. There never would be and never should be, because otherwise, it just becomes boring. It’s the best person for the job and one year it might be one person, one year somebody else – you can’t really predict.” It’s not, she says, “algebraic”. “It just doesn't work like that.” 

Picture: Unwind Media

That being said, an artificial intelligence app, DeepDream AI, recently created an image for gaming company Unwind Media of the perfect Bond, based on a brief Broccoli talked about last year of the actor being British, male, under 40 and over 5’10” tall. 

McWilliams suggests that Bond should look like “a regular guy”, adding that such a brief would rule out a Hollywood action star like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. “He has to have a great physique - it demands a high level of fitness - but he shouldn’t stand out in any situation.” That, then, might rule out Henry Cavill, long considered a leading contender, whose casting as Superman drew on his physique and chiselled appearance. Then again, Cavill wouldn’t look all that different to Timothy Dalton, whose portrayal of Bond - sadly curtailed by contractual wrangles to just the two outings - is considered by many to be the most definitive interpretation of the Fleming creation.

“The gift of casting a James Bond film is you don’t need to cast a well-known name,” McWilliams concluded in the Radio Times. While Moore and Brosnan were well known from television when they became Bond, Connery, Lazenby, Dalton and Craig were much less known. Many fans - including this one - would have loved to have seen Idris Elba in the role (not, by the way, for any culture-war baiting reason, but simply because of his screen presence and that he has displayed shades of Bond in many of his past roles, like The Wire’s Stringer Bell and detective John Luther). The idea of a complete unknown to reboot the post-Craig 007 is not a bad idea, either.

According to McWilliams, they wanted to “give Bond a bit more of a menace” with Casino Royale, which is why they went with Craig as more of the “blunt instrument” Ian Fleming intended for the character with his novels. Craig had, says McWilliams, a bit more menace: “Let's face it, as good as Pierce was, he’s not a menace, whereas Daniel is. You feel a very strong presence in the room with him, and I think that that is incredibly important.”

Whoever Broccoli, Wilson and McWilliams go with for ‘Bond 26’, there will be one key hurdle for the actor to negotiate: the screen test. “It’s really just to see how that person looks on screen, and how they respond, and how they feel sitting in that chair,” McWilliams told the Radio Times. 

At a BFI event last year to celebrated the 60th anniversary of Dr. No’s release, Wilson revealed that they test all potential Bond actors by having them recreate one particular scene from From Russia With Love - arguably my favourite entry in the series - in which unwitting SPECTRE agent Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) attempts to seduce Sean Connery’s 007. 

The scene follows Bond’s killing of a KGB assassin and finds him returning to his hotel room to unwind, discovering Tatiana in bed waiting for him. “Anyone who can bring that scene off is right for Bond. It’s tough to do,” Wilson said, explaining that in that one sequence, Bond has to exude both sex appeal as well as invoke the Cold War without trivialising the latter or making the former too cheesy, something that lesser spy films and the various spoofs have usually done.

The world has, of course, moved on from the Cold War, but given the ratcheting up of geopolitical tensions since No Time To Die was released, Bond 26 will not only present a challenge in the casting, but also in the storyline it produces. Assuming they’ll be involved in the project, longstanding scriptwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade will have their work cut out. The suggestion from Broccoli and Wilson is that the script will be developed before casting decisions are made, including choosing their next James Bond. Casino Royale rebooted the series (following the questionable Die Another Day, Brosnan’s final outing) by starting at the beginning, with Bond earning his licence to kill, commencing a five-film arc that ended - avoiding any spoilers if you still haven’t seen No Time To Die - with a pretty conclusive outcome. To say the whiteboard is completely empty for the next Bond film, and therefore its lead actor, is an understatement. The expectations aren’t too modest, either. 

Just when you think you've figured football out...

“Football,” Danny Baker first observed back in the 1990s, “is chaos”. It's a theme he regularly returns to in his frequent rants on Twitter, usually of an evening while a so-called ‘elite’ fixture is taking place on television. The thinking is that the vast array of punditry deployed by the media suggests that there is something ‘scientific’ about the beautiful game, other worldly and therefore self-considered to be beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. This, Baker contests, is bogus.

I raise this largely as a result of the chaos at Chelsea this season. Graham Potter, who replaced the fired Thomas Tuchel, who replaced the fired Frank Lampard, has just been replaced on an interim basis by...Frank Lampard. “It is totally in keeping with the current chaos [that word again] at Chelsea under co-controlling owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali and the Clearlake group,” the BBC’s chief football writer Phil McNulty wrote on the corporation’s website, highlighting how, since the takeover last summer, the new owners had pumped in £600 million to buy new players, sacked Tuchel and then Potter after just 31 games in charge. “But the return of Lampard might just be the most eyebrow-raising development of the lot,” he added.

We like to think there’s logic going on at our football clubs. We expect it to be an exact science because coaching and training is governed by xG statistics and computer modelling. Clubs employ technical directors and sporting directors (I still don’t quite know the difference) on top of ‘head coaches’ (never, these days, simply “manager”) amongst the phalanx of specialists keeping the complex Formula 1 car that is a top football team on the track. Everything is therefore planned, programmed and finely tuned to the nth degree. It’s not. Because then you send your team out, and Kai Havertz is selected to lead the line.

On Tuesday night, Chelsea’s first interim coach of the week, Bruno Saltor (who’d never before picked a team at this level) put out more or less the same side that had lost so egregiously to Aston Villa three evenings previously, leading to Potter’s dismissal. Against Liverpool, it was largely painting by numbers to the untrained eye, and probably to more informed observers, too. It was also an abject reminder of just how both Chelsea and their opponents on the night have fallen this season. “Mid-table mediocrity,” one match report concluded. “Two bald men fighting over a comb,” was my erudite contribution.

Unbeknownst to most of us at Stamford Bridge until newspapers ran the picture you see at the top of this post, Lampard was observing from an executive box, the guest of Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley, Chelsea’s two sporting directors. This quickly turned into the suggestion that the 44-year-old could be on his way back, though in what capacity wasn’t known. At the same time, the former Spain coach Luis Enrique was said to have flown in to London for talks with the club about the vacant manager’s position, while the newly available former Bayern Munich boss Julian Nagelsmann was also under consideration, along with a fairly predictable list of runners and riders drawn from the European leagues.

At some point on Wednesday it emerged that Lampard was being considered as an interim solution, a stopgap to the end of the season, enabling the club to take until then to consider candidates for the full-time job with, perhaps, more care than that they applied after Tuchel’s abrupt exit. With a two-leg Champions League quarter-final against Real Madrid (under Lampard’s old boss Carlo Ancelotti) to play, starting next week, and some pride to be restored in the Premier League, putting Chelsea’s record goalscorer back in charge would at least be good PR. By Wednesday evening, the Lampard banner, unfurled in the Matthew Harding Lower section before kickoffs during his previous spell, was being retrieved from the back of whichever cupboard it had been stashed away in when its subject was fired - apparently with deep regret - by Roman Abramovich in January 2021.

“It’s a pretty easy decision for me,” said Lampard 26 months later, at a press conference yesterday. “This is my club. I have a lot of emotions and feelings. I’ve come with a belief I can come and help the cause until the end of the season. I’ll give my utmost to give the fans what they want until the end of the season. There’s a lot of talent in the squad. I’m excited to work with that talent and to help them.”

We shall see. The unavoidable elephant in the room here is that Lampard was sacked by Ambramovich on the back of Chelsea taking a southerly trajectory in the Premier League, followed by his dismissal two years later from Everton, with the Merseysiders in even greater peril, recording nine defeats in 12 league games to leave them in relegation territory. In both situations, there were mitigations. But even for this lifelong Chelsea fan, all romanticism aside, you hope this latest temporary arrangement doesn’t end in tears, for a second time.

Appointing club legends as managers is fraught with peril. It’s why I hope that Gianfranco Zola never comes back to Chelsea as head coach. He is rightly held in such high regard, you’d hate that to be jeopardised. Lampard’s first spell in charge carried the same risk, which eventually came to fruition. You can only hope that, in this limited new arrangement, he knows what he’s taking on.

“Of course, it was a surprise in terms of you never know a decision the club will make,” he said yesterday when asked about coming back. “There’s been lots of change in the Premier League this year. I’ve been particularly enjoying my period at home - it’s one of those where you can really throw yourself into your family, your wife and children, things you tend to put to one side when you’re working.” He stressed that Winstanley and Stewart put forward a specific proposition: “It wasn’t simple, because you have to take a lot into account in your heart and your heart,” Lampard explained, adding, knowingly, ”but this is Chelsea”.

So what is the task at hand? After taking Chelsea to Molineux on Saturday for a Premier League fixture with Wolves, they fly to the Spanish capital for that first leg with Real Madrid, a team which ruthlessly buried Barcelona 4-1 in their Copa del Rey ‘El Clásico’ on Wednesday evening. In any other season, an encounter with Madrid would be what the modern era Chelsea does well. But in this season, Lampard’s task - getting a bloated, lop-sided squad of over-priced players to gel in a way they haven’t hitherto - seems impossible.

There is, though, some precedent. In March 2012 Roberto Di Matteo replaced the failed experiment that was André Villas-Boas, immediately improving form to deliver credible wins in the Premier League and, more significantly, progress in the Champions League, beating Barcelona in a semi-final to take on - and beat - Bayern Munich in the final. “Roberto did an incredible job to stay on,” Lampard ruminated yesterday, but in typically diffident footballer style, measured that by adding “but that’s a different time in the club’s history. What is important to me is to park it to one side and get on the job.”

Lampard has always stood out as an intelligent, personable bloke. As a player, he was always regarded as a studious one, not least because his West Ham coach father Frank Sr drilled footballing discipline into him with hothousing vigour. The same concerns Chelsea fans had when he was originally appointed as manager of the club he spent 13 years at as a player will creep back this time, but if nothing else, this unexpected coda to his two-and-a-half-spell as head coach is a masterstroke of fanbase appeasement.

Picture: Chelsea FC

“We are delighted to welcome Frank back to Stamford Bridge,” said co-controlling owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali in a statement. “Frank is a Premier League Hall of Famer and a legend at this club,” it continued by way of explaining the thinking behind the appointment. “As we continue our thorough and exhaustive process for a permanent head coach, we want to provide the club and our fans with a clear and stable plan for the remainder of the season. We want to give ourselves every chance of success and Frank has all of the characteristics and qualities we need to drive us to the finish line.”

Perhaps, then, it is another experiment. Lampard won’t necessarily provide continuity, but may at least ease the sulphurous atmosphere that engulfed Stamford Bridge as Graham Potter’s hapless reign faltered ever further. In his press conference he made clear his deep and undeniable knowledge of the club, the staff at the Cobham training ground and, most importantly, many of the current players. For those acquired since his departure, they will be fully aware of Lampard’s high esteem at the club they’ve joined as well as his standing within the game at large. That alone might pay dividends, given that Chelsea’s expensively assembled squad has at times recently looked like a group of talented individuals without any semblance of unity.

Stamford Bridge, specifically, has long been trolled by visiting fans for a perceived lack of energy amongst the support. “Is this a library?” they bate us with. That has certainly been the case of late. On social media alone, Lampard’s return has certainly put smiles back on faces but if he doesn’t get a grip on team cohesion and confidence, and instil tactical thinking that seemed to desert him at Everton, those smiles might soon disappear. Chelsea’s season has already been written off, barring unlikely progression in the Champions League, but as the latest of Chelsea’s many interim managers - Di Matteo, Hiddink, Benitez et al - Lampard has history to live up to. No pressure, then.

End of the line

If ever there was an afternoon at Stamford Bridge when I needed a pick-me-up, it was Saturday. The day before I was made redundant, and with football - to evoke Karl Marx - one of my go-to opiates, I was hoping that Chelsea would deliver. I was clearly to be disappointed. 24 hours later, Chelsea head coach Graham Potter joined me amongst the unemployed (although, it should be noted, with considerably better compensation).

Credit where it’s due, Aston Villa were just more organised, more committed and better drilled. Not for the first time this season with visitors to the Bridge, they were an opponent who didn’t create many chances, but when they did, took them well, with excellent goals from Ollie Watkins and John McGinn. Potter, in his post-match comments, would bemoan Chelsea’s better possession stats, but stats don’t win games. Goals do. 

On Saturday, as it has been for countless Saturdays this season, not to mention some Sundays, the occasional Wednesday and one obscure Friday, it was hard to see where Chelsea’s goals would come from. With Reece James, arguably Europe’s best right wingback, consigned to central defence, and Ruben Loftus-Cheek - a pedestrian midfielder at best - unable to create any width, Chelsea’s notoriously anaemic attack had little supply. On the left, Ben Chilwell, James’ opposite number and just as impactful, was forced into spending more time defending that attacking. It all pointed to the same thing: Chelsea hadn’t been set up right.

Graham Potter never felt right as a Chelsea manager, but fans were prepared to give him a chance, stoically supporting the rare opportunity of an Englishman in the dugout. But before our eyes, the fanbase began to erode, and the #potterout tweets proliferated. On Saturday, the 50% of supporters yet to turn on him, did. The atmosphere at full time, with large swathes of empty seats visible, was notably sulphurous. Last night’s club statement was inevitable. 

Unlike many, however, I held back from the Graham Potter pile-on that built up in the wake of his appointment after Thomas Tuchel was abruptly dismissed in September. Todd Boehly and his co-owners had signalled that their £4.25 billion takeover would herald a period of stability, a commodity missing during the turbulent Roman Abramovich era, when managers came and went like trains at Clapham Junction. Potter had never achieved anything at a so-called ‘elite’ club, but he’d built Brighton & Hove Albion into a decent side and on relatively meagre means, too. From one angle, however, he looked like the good soldier, a nice bloke who would drive the new owners’ long-term “project”, whatever that was. 

The conclusion now is that long-term thinking is fairly pointless in the Premier League, when judgement is meted out on day-to-day results. Even if Boehly and co-controlling owner Behdad Eghbali were prepared to stick with the Englishman, the noise around him wouldn’t go away.  In the end, sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Lawrence Stewart pushed for an immediate change and got it.

In fairness, the decision put Potter out of his misery. In February he spoke about the unforgivable abuse his family had received in the wake of Chelsea’s poor performances - many of which weren’t his fault as injuries began to rack up just as a new squad, which hadn’t had the benefit of a proper pre-season, toiled. In further mitigation, the spending spree of close to £600 million that the Boehly-Clearlake Capital went on in two transfer windows, bloated the squad with more expensive players than even José Mourinho would have known what to do with, adding unbelievable pressure to Potter who found himself charting new and decidedly richer professional waters.

“You have to accept that when the results are what they are, you accept criticism and it should come,” Potter reflected in February. “But that isn’t to say it’s easy at all. Your family life suffers, your mental heath suffers, and your personality suffers. It’s hard.” That may have won him some deserved sympathy, but the results continued to be poor. “Clearly it is a process of how to get our message across better. How can we structure things in a way to help the players? Because that is what we are here for. When results aren’t good, you have to accept that we haven’t done it well enough.”

In every post-match interview and pre-match press conference, Potter would pursue the same passive defence: “I feel the support of the players, I feel the support of everyone here,” he said after being beaten 2-0 by a managerless Tottenham (Antonio Conte being absent due to gallbladder surgery). “I understand the frustrations externally but among the players it is a desire for us all to do better and that is the pleasing thing. The results haven’t been good but we are still there fighting for each other.”

If I was writing his lines, as a PR pro, I’d probably be having him say the same thing. The reality, however, on the pitch was a whole lot different. Even if the intent was there, the execution wasn’t. Potter’s 31 games in charge - which included 11 defeats, 12 wins and eight draws - resulted in Chelsea’s worst managerial record in the Premier League era, which began with a nominal revival in the early 1990s as the late Matthew Harding’s investments brought a touch of glamour to the club, including a new stand, and players like Ruud Gullit, Gianluca Vialli and Gianfranco Zola.

But nothing is ever simple at Chelsea. BT Sport’s brilliant recent documentary Pound Land - The Battle Of The Bridge recounted the fractious rivalry between Harding and chairman Ken Bates who, himself, had led a valiant effort to save Stamford Bridge from being turned into flats. Bates had bought the club at the end of an equally turbulent period, when the club faced bankruptcy as a result of over-extending itself by building the Bridge’s East Stand (where I’ve sat for the last 20-plus years) on the back of the club’s successes in the early 1970s. The late ’70s and much of the ’80s were marked by relegations, financial ruin and the scourge of hooliganism. 

The arrival of ‘name’ players in the 1990s commenced a period of increasing success that ultimately led to Roman Abramovich buying the club in 2003, and leading to 20 titles over the course of his 19 years’ ownership. We had literally never had it so good. But if the near-bankruptcy of the ’70s, and the fight to keep Chelsea at Stamford Bridge were existential threats, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year genuinely took the club to the abyss. The Government’s sanctioning of Abramovich forced the sale that brought the Boehly-Clearlake consortium to the rescue. 

The last ten months since the takeover must be put into some context. That Potter leaves Chelsea with such a disappointing record is unfortunate, but let’s face it - at least he had a Chelsea to be fired from. 

That notwithstanding, however, questions should quite rightly be asked about the club strategy since the takeover, particularly of the £600 million in player acquisitions that seemed more scattergun than purposeful, and whether Potter was ever the right manager to take charge of them. 

“We have the highest degree of respect for Graham as a coach and as a person,” Boehly and Eghbali said in a statement last night. ”He has always conducted himself with professionalism and integrity and we are all disappointed in this outcome.“ As they should be.

Of course, no one will ever know whether Thomas Tuchel, whose firing remains shrouded in suggestions of backroom disagreements (he wasn’t exactly a compliant employee at Paris Saint-Germain…) would have fared better, but given what he delivered since replacing Frank Lampard in January 2021, taking the team on to win the Champions League itself, makes one wonder whether his departure was really for the best. And if it was, why was Potter, a manager seen as the driver of a decent Ford Focus, given the keys to a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport like Chelsea? Potter will have his reasons for his team selections, but for the paying fans, they’ve often been hard to fathom. And if they’re hard for the crowd to comprehend, it’s likely that they’d be difficult for the players too. 

Chelsea’s next manager will have his work cut out. He’ll be inheriting a lop-sided squad that should be challenging for titles but, barring an incomprehensible miracle in Europe, will next season be focused solely on domestic silverware. A much-needed clear-out this summer, partly to balance the books for Financial Fair Play, might allow that new head coach to start from scratch, with a proper pre-season and a blueprint of how to go about things. In some respects, that clear-out began last night, with Graham Potter’s departure. The onus is on Boehly and Eghbali to choose his successor with a little more understanding of the task he’ll have to deliver on.