Opening up the window on the world

Picture: Channel 5/ITN Productions/Jaimie Gramston

Let me share a personal secret with you. Some years ago, while living in Paris, I visited a therapist every other Saturday morning for a while. It was no biggie. There was no personal crisis that led me to those hour-long chats. There were, though, two triggers for seeking a friendly ear: I’d only recently moved to France from the Netherlands, separating from my-then girlfriend in the process. I was in a new and somewhat pressured job, while getting my head around a new town and a new language. I wasn’t struggling - living in Paris had been a long-held aspiration (blame a lot of Inspector Clouseau and Alain Delon films) and I revelled in it, but with a lot to process, and no local friends to unload on (and I wasn’t going to burden my new colleagues with any of this), I needed an outlet. On top of all that, The Sopranos had shown that it was OK to talk about ’stuff’, not that I was trying to equate myself with Tony Soprano, or that I harboured any latent desire for my therapist.

So the point of bearing my soul here is that one of the themes that came up regularly in my hour-long Saturday morning chats in the 20th Arrondissement was ‘escape’. To be clear, I wasn’t looking to escape the very city I’d dreamed of living in, but whenever I looked up and saw a plane above Paris it triggered a form of FOMO. I wanted to be on that plane, going somewhere – anywhere. We never did get to the bottom of this wanderlust, and to be honest, newly single I didn’t do badly for travel. 

Whether business trips to New York and Miami, or private weekends in Milan, Hamburg or back home in London, the Air Miles added up. But when I look back on all of that travel, nothing could be classed as adventurous. Even though a week spent driving Route 66, from Chicago to Los Angeles, was a marathon that took me through states and cities I wouldn’t have otherwise found time for, it was America. Familiarity. Chain hotels and drive-throughs, classic rock on the radio.

I never did find out which branch of pyschotherapy my therapist subscribed to (Freudians and Jungists don’t tend to telegraph their associations) but I’m sure she would have readily concluded that I’m a creature of both habit and familiarity. When it comes to travel, I probably still am. Language, culture and now, thanks to a health condition, food seem to present too many barriers. Which, I know, are all ridiculous reasons not to go somewhere in the modern age, and after centuries of human exploration. 

I genuinely wish I could be more dauntless. Television doesn’t help: I’ll watch Simon Reeve nosing around a Brazilian favela and wonder ‘why couldn’t I do that’? The answer is that, probably, I couldn’t. Television makes it look easy. Even if Reeve has the look of a backpacking student, he’ll be accompanied by a film crew, and probably hired security, interpreters, and that sort of thing. But television, to quote Lord Reith, really does provide a window on the world. The trouble is that, in the midst of all the endless celebrity travelogues, few really do open it. 

The exception is surely Michael Palin. For a comic actor many of us still associate with Monty Python, his travel series - ever since his own version of Around The World In 80 Days in 1989, have been compelling, engaging and truly educational without being preachy. And unlike many comedian-driven travelogues, free of over-wry ‘look at that thing!’ wackiness. From travelling between the North and South poles or encircling the planet’s middle, to the Sahara, the Himalayas, Eastern Europe, Brazil and North Korea, Palin has conducted the journeys most of us would or could never do, either because we don’t have the means, or the inclination.

Picture: ITN Productions/Jaimie Gramston

His latest, Michael Palin: Into Iraq, has done it again. Beneath an undoubted affability, Palin found humanity thriving in a country which has a claim to being the cradle of civilisation, and yet has been scarred by frequent bouts of humankind’s destructiveness. The narrative of Iraq for at least the 30 years since the first Gulf War is that it has been one of the world’s great basket cases, much like Afghanistan. But despite the seemingly perpetual turmoil – war with neighbouring Iran, then the first Gulf War and its sequel, followed by the post-Saddam collapse into tribalism and the rise of ISIS - humanity has prevailed. As Palin showed, Iraq is not a bombed out desert land. Travelling the length of the Tigris, from just over the border in Turkey to Basra, one of those names we now only know for its place in conflict, Palin found Iraq’s beauty, its stunning architecture, the culture that made it the centre of the civilised world at one point in history, and most importantly, its people.

The experience had a profound effect on him: “By the end of March we were back from battle-hardened Iraq having travelled for almost three weeks and seen things, people and places the like of which I’d never seen before in all my travels,” he wrote in a blog post. “The scenes weren’t always happy. Many of them reflected the violence of the past few decades when Iraq was disfigured by war and the threat of war. But we met some souls who’d been through it all and whose resilience was an inspiration.”

Indeed, amongst the still-chaotic administration, and latent dangers that prevail in areas where the Western military is still present, Palin found reassuring normality. The flamboyant tailor in Erbil running up a smart suit, the café society that draws both men and (surprisingly) women out for tea in the evenings, and the children on a bombed out street in Mosul that reduced the normally genial presenter to blurt out “Fuck me!” at their stoicism. In a classroom, eloquent school kids spoke in perfect English of their desire for Iraq to be treated as a ‘normal’ country, like those in Europe. It was a truly levelling moment.

This, though, is still the contemporary narrative, and here’s what drew me in. Palin admits to having been fascinated by Iraq since childhood, when he was given a copy of Arabian Nights. It’s this connection to history – real history – that should spur us into visiting places that might be unfashionable, that don’t have McDonald’s drive-throughs and familiarities, but which may have contributed more to the world than, to quote Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday, “an ’ot dog.”

Palin’s “relentless optimism” in the Iraq series wasn’t meant to airbrush out the turmoil, and it certainly wasn’t a glorified advert for the country’s tourist authority. In one scene he visits the site of the Camp Speicher massacre in 2014, in which 1,500 Iraqi cadets were killed by ISIS. The undoubted gloom of Iraq’s recent past can’t be undone, but Palin showed that, actually, there should be plenty for tourists to come and see for themselves, if they’re willing and able. 

The people, first. Simplistic to say, I know, but they’re not all Kalashnikov-wielding monsters. They are young, aspirational, ambitious, thriving, even. There is wealth and prosperity amid the prevailing dysfunction. I can’t help feeling that it would be nice to contribute to it, as a Western tourist. Perhaps, for now, we have to accept that modest adventures are our limit, and let television be our gateway to more exotic or harder to reach places. One day, though. One day.

Bored! Bored! Bored! Bored! Bored!

Those of you of a certain age and dispensation will recall the final episode of The Young Ones, which finds the Scumbag College quartet in the garden, their finals over, and numbed with boredom. 

To break the slump, Ade Edmondson’s Vyvyan comes out of the back door, swinging a cricket bat and shouting “Bored! Bored! Bored! Bored! Bored!”, before cartoonishly battering Rik Mayall about the head, rhythmically accompanied by more shouts of “Bored!”. I know how he feels.

When Lockdown I occurred last March, Britain was on the cusp of an agreeable spring that became a glorious summer. The tedium of house arrest was, for me at least, kept at bay by - in no particular order - a new job, a garden, blue skies, the absence of commercial aircraft and the sound of birdsong. By the time Lockdown II arrived in October, Christmas was already in sight and there were things to do. The lifting on restrictions six weeks later enabled a partial return to the things that felt like freedom: sitting somewhere other than your home for a coffee; the simple pleasure of shopping; and, in my case in particular, a return to the discipline of swimming three or four times a week.

Lockdown III already feels different. Even after just two weeks. I’m not going to question its wisdom - perhaps we should never have come out of lockdown in December, given the state we are now in. But the weeks ahead are, I’ll readily admit, not looking good for mental wellbeing. When the highlight of my weekend is an arduous visit to the dentist, and a welcome opportunity to interact, in person, with someone I neither live with or work with, you know things are bleak. I’m now at a stage when I’m clinging to excursions to Waitrose and our local Italian deli, which sells salads and coffee at its front door, as opportunities to change the vista. Travel documentaries now provide release rather than an aspirational glimpse of places to go when this thing is over. I’ve now stopped reading the weekend holiday supplements, such is the cruelty of seeing pictures of idyllic beaches, swimming pools and even city centres we won't be able to visit for a second year running.

A few years ago I decided to have therapy. Now, before you start thinking that I’ve gone all 'Hollywood victim' with this, it was simply a measure I thought might be useful, rather than a response to any episode. I’d just moved to Paris, started a new job that later became an even more intense one, I’d split up with my then-girlfriend, and I was contemplating my ageing parents’ health. So, if Tony Soprano could confer with Dr. Melfi as a central part of his narrative, what harm would come to me in seeking a friendly ear? 

I’d be hard pushed to say, conclusively, that therapy ‘cured’ me of whatever I felt the need to talk about, but one thing came out of it that has stayed with me ever since: freedom. Early on, we discovered that seeing planes in the sky, presumably heading off somewhere, made me yearn for escape. Travel became my escape, and living in France and working for an international company meant that I was regularly fulfilling my wish. But, now I think of it, living in the heart of Paris and with a Métro station right outside the front door, I had one of the greatest cities in the world at my disposal.

In fact, on the return journey from those Saturday morning sessions near the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery, I would catch a bus that, vaguely, seemed to be going in a westerly direction back to the 6th arrondissement where I lived. Without anything in particular to do on a Saturday, those bus journeys through the districts north of the Seine were, of themselves, not spectacular, but at the same time, provided fascinating snapshots of Parisian street life and neighbourhoods going about their business, queuing for the boulangerie or discussing politics while waiting to buy the weekend cut of beef. 

There’s nothing, I suppose, that stops me doing that now, except that meandering bus journeys are out of the question during lockdown, meaning that a good long walk is all that’s left. It’s fine, especially when you interrupt it with a takeaway coffee at the midpoint, but a meagre ration nonetheless. I was deeply envious of Boris, last week, allegedly getting out on his bike for a seven-mile trip from Downing Street to the Olympic Park. Yes, I know that political conveniences dictate that he was breaching the spirit of what we’re all supposed to be observing, but I couldn’t help feeling somewhat approving. Assuming he rode the seven miles via surface streets, and didn’t have his Plod detail drop him off, he would have sailed through the City and the East End on his way to Stratford, riding through some of London’s most historic parts. It may not be the capital’s most salubrious district, but it would have been somewhere else. And that’s what I’m missing right now.

Get me to the church on time!

© Simon Poulter 2019

As I was compelled to mention in my recent post about Sarah-Jane Morris's John Martyn project, I hold a fascination - some might say obsession - for the meagre musical connections of the south-west London suburbs in which I grew up. This partly stems from the discovery that Martyn himself was born only a thirty minute walk from the New Malden house where I later sprang to life, a revelation akin to discovering royal blood in my veins.

That discovery gave no indication that there would be more intersections to come. The first - and clearly foremost - came when I met my other half and learned that she not only lived in New Malden (in a house more or less backing on to that in which my grandfather and his siblings were born), but also worked at my first junior school. Bizarrely, too, she grew up in south-east London, where I currently base myself. Then came the revelation that my local Greenwich MP, Matthew Pennycook, also hails from the area and even went to my secondary school, some years behind me, before going up to Oxford (a rare event for Beverley Boys, I can assure you). The next connection in this uncanny sequence, however, was another musical one: via an intimate basement gig one Saturday night in Tufnell Park, over there in that North London, my mate Sean introduced me to the music of singer-songwriter Peter Bruntnell. And, guess what? I discovered that Bruntnell was at Beverley too, albeit a few years ahead of me.

Readers, I will not bore you further (and again) with the other remarkable collection of rock connections to my home area (Clapton, Page, Beck, et al), because Bruntnell is one of two pressing local musical matters to address here. Once described by Rolling Stone, no less, as "one of England's best kept musical secrets", demonstrating customary American understanding of the United Kingdom construct, Bruntnell has, since 1995, delivered a stunning canon of Americana-tinged, bittersweet brilliance. And he's now added to it with a sumptuous new album, King Of Madrid. Incredibly, it's his 13th, which means that the previous 12 have probably passed under your radar over the last 25 years since he released his debut. But if that is so, then you will have missed out on a body of work redolent of one of my favourite periods of musical history, when the canyons of Los Angeles were a vital source of earnest musicianship and hippy ideals, and produced the likes of Jackson Brown, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons and more.

King Of Madrid continues in that rich Americana vein and should, with the right visibility elevate Bruntnell to an entirely different altitude, possessing the kind of hooks, lyrical richness, lusciously strummable guitar work and Bruntnell's gently urgent vocals that wouldn’t be out of place on anything emanating from Laurel Canyon in the late '60s. I’d even go as far as comparing Bruntnell with Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, perhaps not for their denim earnestness, but more for the subtlety of lyrical observation attached to his rooted music. On this release, Bruntnell targets the utter mess Britain is right now, peaking with National Library taking shots at the legacy left behind by David Cameron (including soundbites from the former prime minister), while Memory Hood, London Hood and the album's title track, take clever potshots at the febrile state of the nation.

We stay in the KT postcodes, sort of, and add a very strong touch of Sheffield for the next musical revelation, also brought to me by the aforementioned Sean, whose appreciation of Americana goes unmatched. One spring Sunday morning, seven years ago, Sean sent me a link to a free stream of Richard Hawley's then new album, Standing At The Sky's Edge. Hawley had, like Bruntnell, hitherto passed me by, despite his early Britpop work in the Longpigs and later collaborations with fellow Sheffielder Jarvis Cocker. And yet here, on this particular lazy Sunday morning, lying in bed in my apartment in Paris, I became engulfed completely by Hawley's collection of songs about three families living in Skye Edge, a housing estate in Sheffield's Park Hill district, one of many Hawley has embraced in song. Sky's Edge subsequently turned out to be a new direction, leaving behind the gentle country croons of its predecessors and instead embracing a reverb and distortion-drenched set of psychedelic epics. I listened to nothing else for what seemed like weeks after hearing it. Two weeks after the awful Bataclan attack in Paris, Hawley was the first gig I went to, itself an emotional rollercoaster for everyone inside the Alhambra theatre, barely a fifteen-minute walk away from the terrorist atrocity in November 2015. Hawley's gentle humour and mellifluous songs were, that night, just what Paris needed. A musical arm around the shoulder. Soothing reassurance.

And so it is with a gentler context that the bequiffed and typically double denim-clad Hawley comes to a church in Kingston-upon-Thames, New Malden's 'parent' town, to launch his delicious new record, Further. Noting the "Holy! Holy! Holy!" banner behind him on the apse wall of St. John The Baptist Church (a change of venue from the All Saints Church, which was recently - and surreally - the location of a gig by Jack Bauer himself, Keifer Sutherland), Hawley is soon riffing in his dry South Yorkshire humour, suggesting "Hawley! Hawley! Hawley" as a more suitable slogan.

Even with one semi-accidental F-bomb, he is never disrespectful of the environment, making ample use of the ecclesiastic ambience to enhance the acoustic guitar work of Hawley and his ever-present sidekick Shez Sheridan, as they make their way through an eight-song set that includes new music such as the Beatle-esque Doors, the dreamily shimmering Emilina Says, Galley Girl and its tale of highwayman derring-do, and the utterly winsome My Little Treasures, a song which took Hawley 12 years to write, about two of his late father's drinking buddies. From previous albums Hawley and Sheridan combine wonderfully to produce all-acoustic versions of Sky's Edge and even the glitterball romance of Tonight The Streets Are Ours, returning after the briefest of discreet beer breaks to end with the absolutely mellifluent For Your Lover Give Some Time from the Truelove's Gutter album, a song that, via its bittersweet lyrics, shines the spotlight on Hawley's delicious barrtione.

The set is short and sweet, a promotional opportunity for Kingston's fine emporium Banquet Records as much as a Richard Hawley Gig, but in the church setting, before a largely white middle aged and middle class congregation - Kingston captured in its essence - Hawley wraps yet another soothing arm around the shoulder. The last time was in the tragic aftermath of Paris, almost four years ago. This time, we're in the innocent, perennially untroubling London suburbs, in a residential parish church. The circumstances and location couldn't be more contrasting.

The tea really does taste better, and other observations

© Simon Poulter 2016

So, I’ve been back in London just over a month, after 17 and a half years living abroad, which is a statement that, I know, carries a whiff of the exotic. However, I'm not suggesting for one minute that I've been off-grid, khaki-clad with a pith helmet, observing still-primitive Amazonian tribes, or carrying out a long-term study of penguins in their natural habitat, or in my wilder moments of Walter Mittydom, living the rock star lifestyle in a Malibu hacienda, occasionally doing something with gated reverb.

No, for most of those years away I've been sat in an office. Furthermore, I've hardly been cut off from my homeland. Frequent commando raids to visit family, friends, Stamford Bridge and carry out sundry business commitments, more or less in that order, have kept me in regular contact. That said, there is a substantial difference between weekend trips to the home island and living somewhere day-to-day (or, simply, "living", as I had been doing exclusively in Britain before being coaxed elsewhere).

Of course, moving to the Netherlands - and subsequently California, back to the Netherlands again and then France - as I did, wasn't exactly volunteering for the first manned Mars mission. These countries do, I established quite quickly, have flushing toilets, and if you know where to look, shops selling Marmite. But coming back has thrown a spotlight on things I had missed, or more importantly, didn't know I'd missed.

With worldly-wiseness comes additional awareness of your home country and recognition of things you'd never have been conscious of before moving abroad, or that you suddenly become aware has become a thing while you've been away. Here, I offer my first observation: cars pushing into traffic from side roads. I honestly don't recall this ever being a custom (interestingly enough, in Holland cars coming out of a side road have right-of-way, which I didn't know until it was almost too late…the first time). During my driving lessons I was taught to wait until there was a break in the traffic and then pull out. Now the norm seems to be to simply stick the nose of your car out, forcing others to stop. And often the driver in question is actually trying to blag his or her way onto the other side of the road, forcing traffic on both sides to stop. I don't know when or where this came from, or why. It's possible that it is simply a consequence of Britain's roads becoming ever more congested, as property, demographics and population increases - including net immigration - have put more cars on the streets. Another good reason for me to eschew car ownership and make use of public transport, a trait I warmly embraced in Paris, and am happy to continue as I base myself in south-east London.

This brings me to my second observation: the sense of entitlement. I blame Simon Cowell. For many things, actually. At risk of committing the most middle-aged thing I've ever written, Britain has, in the years I've been at large, developed an assumption of on-demand, instantaneous everything, from Cowell's drive-through fame culture to 18-year-old footballers skipping the traditional cleaning-the-stadium-toilets-with-a-toothbrush apprenticeship and going straight to Range Rover ownership. And don't get me going on compensation.

With this entitlement comes an erosion of civility, something the Brexit referendum seems to have accelerated, with social media becoming the prime medium to tell complete strangers exactly what is thought of them. There is some credence to the argument that if Gary Lineker or Lily Allen tweet about refugees they are putting themselves out there, and that their freedom to express themselves is rightfully matched by those who dare to troll them. But, as I’ve blogged before, spend any time on Twitter and, much like the bubbling stream of bile that is the Daily Mail and its unhinged, tin-foil hat-wearing, demonstrably illiterate readership, you will succumb to both madness and despair at how people, shielded by their keyboard and the semi-anonymity of their handle, feel entitled to say whatever the want without consequence, and without any basis of a relationship to so.

This manifests itself, post-Brexit, with Polish community centres being vandalised, hijab-wearing Muslim women being verbally abused in town centres, and knuckle-dragging thugs staging protests about claiming their country back, not that I ever noticed that it had been taken away from them. And, guess what? After Tuesday's presidential earthquake, it's happening in America, too. Let right-wing populism win, and all of a sudden there are those acting like it's 1933 Germany, when brown was the in-vogue shirt colour.

When I left Britain in 1999 there was no such thing as social media. If you wanted to complain you either wrote to Jimmy Young, Points Of View or The Times. If you wanted to rant at complete strangers there was always Speaker’s Corner. Now, you can meltdown, Basil Fawlty-style, on Twitter. Which I did, without remorse, recently when trying to get broadband installed. Broadband providers go to great lengths to draw you in with slick marketing: TV ads with Hollywood celebrities and websites that connect you to directly via chat to experts helping you pick the right package. And then the horror begins: after handing over a large sum of money, you then wait for the service to begin. Except it doesn’t, so you connect by online chat again…where it takes half an hour for someone to take up your case, only to inform you that another department handles your type of package and you should call their helpdesk. Which you do, and you then spend an hour on hold due to “a high volume of calls”. In my case, I clocked up a full three hours on hold trying to find out why BT had arbitrarily cancelled the visiting installation engineer, and then cancelled my order altogether. Here Twitter comes into its own. It’s amazing how responsive companies become when their reputation is challenged publicly. It shouldn’t be like this, of course. You should just be able to call a number and someone answers, more or less straight away. Britain’s population may have grown in recent years, but not so much that some of a telecommunications provider’s substantial profits can’t be invested in extra customer support personnel.

There are many more line items I could complain about the Britain I’ve returned to, from London’s choked, gridlocked traffic, to those Estuary accents where each sentence ends with a rising pitch like a question?, to jogging bottoms as workwear, young women wearing make-up applied by an industrial sandblaster (and eyebrows which may have been drawn with an extra thick Sharpie), to Nando's. But that could sound ungallant about my return, which would be wrong.

Throughout my time abroad I’ve eulogised about my adopted surroundings. Amsterdam remains an adorable village masquerading as a national capital. California will always be where I go for sunny people and sunny weather in a geography that offers cities as majestic as San Francisco and as relaxed as San Diego, and the eye candy of its beaches, mountains and deserts, of Lake Tahoe and Yosemite. And Paris. What can I say that I haven’t already? An architectural history museum that you can actually live in, with subsidised public transport and the amusement of people watching without being judged for it.

But it's not for nothing that for some time I’ve wanted to come back to London. For a vibrancy matched only by New York; for its culture, its art, music, exhibitions and theatre; for its diversity; for its ability to blend modernity with traditionalism; for the sense of newness I keep finding around every corner, nestled amongst the old; for the joy of taking a Thames Clipper to the football; for tea that really does taste better; for breaking my umbilical cord with the south-western suburbs I grew up in and welcoming me to the south-east of the capital.

As much as there is a degree of architectural vandalism going in London, with the rapid forestation of huge, new towers of glass and steel dominating the skyline, there is also an unshakeable excitement about the place that I notice and experience every day I step outside. Even post-Brexit, with the banks and other corporate institutions supposedly buggering off to Frankfurt and Amsterdam, London feels as resilient today as ever before. It’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, is a force for good, putting himself about on the world stage in an enthusiastically statesmanlike manner, declaring the British capital open. If he could do something about the traffic, Heathrow and the epidemic of knife crime, he would be somewhere close to the country’s best politician (and certainly more effective than either the leadership of the party he represents or the self-serving scoundrels they are supposed to be in opposition to).

All this aside, I'm not going to make melodrama out of my repatriation. Really, there hasn’t been a lot to it. Essentially, I arrived, and then went straight down the pub. It has all been relatively easy - as really I should have expected, though that’s not to say there have been things to get used to again, not to mention things to do for the very first time. But I’ll be honest, the star of all this has been London.

I'm writing this in New York, the self-styled ‘greatest city in the world’, a description much like The Rolling Stones being the world’s greatest rock and band. If so, then London runs it close on many points, and even beats it on others. Kind of like The Who, The Kinks and Led Zeppelin. It really is good to be back.

Your move, Mr. Bond

As friends and family will attest, I have a ridiculous affinity for pop trivia. This only worsens when I find myself in, or perilously close to, a location with a strong pop culture connection. For example, I once spent an afternoon in Los Angeles getting shots of street signs on Mulholland Avenue and Ventura Boulevard just to make a short video set to Tom Petty’s Freefallin’. Later in that same LA trip I risked arrest for 'doing a Hugh Grant' by driving repeatedly through the ‘No Cruise’ zone on Sunset Boulevard, purely - and obsessively - to get the perfect shot of the sun setting in order to match it to Steely Dan’s Hey Nineteen (which begins with the line: “Drive west on Sunset to the sea. Turn that jungle music down, just until you’re out of town”).

In the Seattle suburb of Renton - principle attraction, the factory that makes the Boeing 737 - I spent a wet Sunday morning trying to find Jimi Hendrix’s grave. When I did I was astonished to discover that, at the time (1998), there was nothing more to mark the final resting place of rock’s greatest guitarist than a slab with the outline of a Stratocaster on it and the inscription “James Marshall Hendrix - 1942-1970”. I'm pleased to report that since then the grave has been appropriately ‘upgraded’ with a gazebo that now draws in fans to pay proper respect.

More recently in Paris, on discovering I was living right across the road from an apartment which featured in a pivotal scene in The Bourne Identity, I launched a tour of other locations from the film, mostly to satisfy myself that they were as seen. I’d already set a precedent for such film-nerdishness when I first moved to Paris, realising that I was just around the corner from Avenue d’Eylau, which appears in Thunderball as the HQ of SPECTRE.

Here in Florida this week I am equally doused in film and television trivia, especially due to how much the state has appeared in the Bond films, most notably Licence To Kill and Daniel Craig’s first outing, Casino Royale. Which leads me neatly - if highly tenuously - on to the prospect of whether Craig himself will put in another appearance as 007.

“I'd rather slash my wrists than do another one,” was the somewhat nihilistic statement Craig gave Time Out last year when asked. Even taking a little actorly petulance into account, Craig was reacting to the fact he'd taken such a physical punishing making Spectre. Perhaps, at the time, the prospect of a fifth outing as Bond was too much. Cue a flurry of rumouring and theorising as to who could take over, with Tom Hiddleston instantly installed as lead favourite, purely, it should be noted, on the back of The Night Manager (and despite the fact he would be too fey and too posh). In the same frame came Idris Elba (a good shout, actually), the bloke off Poldark who takes his shirt off a lot, Tom Hardy and Damian Lewis, and sundry other himbos on the Equity register. There were even some creditable attempts by the likes of Gillian Anderson and Emilia Clark to throw their respective hats into the ring.

But, while a female Bond or a black Bond might make for interesting change of direction for the 54-year-old series, it would still be regarded as tampering with the DNA of the most longest-running and lucrative franchise in film history, something producers Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson have had little room to play about with. Whether they or anyone else likes it or not, the mould for the screen James Bond was set by Sean Connery, and Craig apart, the Bonds that have followed - George Lazenby, Roger Moore (to some degree...), Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, have been more or less the same type.


Craig, of course, was the “wrong” Bond, when he was announced: five-feet-ten-inches and blond. And, yet, he has revitalised the franchise. Some would even say that he has finally unlocked the hold Connery’s legacy had over the character. For those of us - and there are many - who found the final Brosnan outing, Die Another Day an overblown and, frankly, ridiculous mess of CGI and ludicrous plot devices, the Craig films have restored Bond to the gripping spy adventures that Connery established in the first place.

“I got the best job in the world doing Bond,” Craig said on Saturday at the New Yorker Festival, sporting blond hair for a new film which recalled Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love. “The things I get to do on a Bond movie, there’s no other job like it,” Craig said. “If I were to stop doing it I’d miss it terribly. I get a massive kick out of it. And if I can keep getting a kick out of it, I will.”

So, is this a change of heart? Well, for one thing, Craig is believed to be contracted to do a fifth Bond film, but such arrangements are never absolute. However, when challenged about his wrist-slitting remarks, Craig joked: “They say that shit sticks, and that definitely stuck,” adding that: “It was the day after filming [had ended on Spectre]. I'd been away from home for a year,” adding that the physical strains of one of film’s most physically demanding roles had taken its toll.” But, not wishing to appear ungrateful, said: “Boo-hoo. It's a good gig. I enjoy it.”

Even if his comments to Time Out were somewhat in the heat - or the pain - of the moment, his quip about “It would only be for the money” may have a ring of truth about it, being reportedly offered up to £120 million to play Bond again. Officially there are no plans for ‘Bond 25’, but given the way these films are made, don’t be surprised if, next month or in December EON productions calls a press conference at Pinewood Studios.

“A Bond movie is by the skin of your teeth,” Craig explained in New York on Saturday. “You get it shot and six months later it’s released. There’s no time for focus groups. You make the movie and then you put it out. It’s one of the most thrilling things as an actor you can do. It’s the way Barbara likes to shoot.”

Ultimately, Broccoli will make the decision on Craig being offered the role again, or whether they move on. “There’s this constant debate about who's going to be the next Bond,” Skyfall and Spectre director Sam Mendes has said recently. “The truth is – and here’s the headline: it’s not a democracy, it's not The X Factor, it's not the EU referendum, and it's not a public vote. Barbara Broccoli chooses who's going to be the next Bond: end of story.”

Craig himself has confessed to being ambivalent about who might take over the Walther PPK if he did decide not to do a fifth Bond film, but has also suggested that the calibre of replacement needs to be high. “You’ve got to step up. People do not make movies like this any more. This is really rare now. So don’t be shit.” One thing is certain, there’s little chance that Bond 25 won’t get made - this is Hollywood, after all, and if anything, the four Craig Bonds have revitalised the series. Anyone taking over now would be stepping in to a golden opportunity. And for Craig himself? He’s only 48. Roger Moore was 58 when he ‘retired’ from the role, although by then it had become preposterous. Craig clearly has a strong sense of his own ability to play he role. It would be nice to think he’s got one more in him.

Frexit, stage left

© Simon Poulter 2016

So that's it. Seventeen-and-a-half years after I moved to Amsterdam, and embarked on a journey that took me to California, back to the Netherlands and then, since New Year's Day 2011, Paris, I'm back "home". Yeah, London, baby!

Well, I say home, but it really is where the heart is. And mine has been enchanted by Amsterdam's canal-lined streets, the perma-sunshine of the Golden State, the quaint, rural Dutch village where I 'settled' for six years, and then on to Paris. Of course, I've never been that far from the old country: Amsterdam and Paris are barely an hour by plane, five hours by road, and with family and a Chelsea season ticket to return to, not to mention business commitments, it does sometimes feel like I've never been away. But in reality, there’s a big difference to actually living back here again and the frequent commando raids I’ve made over the last 17 years to stock up on Shreddies and deodorant, or to buy suits from Marks & Spencer that properly fit (France doesn’t do suits for someone of my…er…shape - more so short-arsed men who stay stick thin through chain-smoking and thimbles of weapons-grade coffee that renders them nervous energy-burning furnaces).

Returning to Britain after the better part of two decades as an ex-pat brings many new things to get one's head around. When I left in 1999 there was no broadband, no WiFi, and the Internet - which I accessed on a company-provided laptop - was connected to via a tectonically-slow dial-up connection. On top of that, everyone was running around like Chicken Licken predicting that the sky would fall in because of the Millennium Bug. This also reminds me that I left the UK in the 20th century and have now 'returned’ in the 21st. Of itself, this is not a particularly breathtaking fact - as it's been the 21st century everywhere else I've been - but it does shed daylight in on how Britain has changed.

Immigration may have been the extreme sunburn-sensitive topic that dominated the Brexit debate, but it has made for an enriching character shift to many British communities. There's not a café or coffee outlet in London now not exclusively staffed by eastern Europeans (and more power to them - at least they are happy to serve your cappuccino without giving off the sense of the job being beneath them...). A few Christmases ago I took a bus into Kingston-upon-Thames and was struck by the variety of accents and languages being spoken on the top deck. Here, in the area in which I was born and grew up in, were now conversations in Polish or Czech (working in an international community tunes the ears to foreign tongues), as well as Korean, the result of New Malden (my hometown) hosting Europe's largest Korean community, a legacy of Samsung basing its European HQ there a few years ago. And you know what? The Korean supermarkets and street signs, Polish delis, and Lithuanian-run tea shops have brought a new vibrancy to the area.

The other thing I've noticed is how risk-averse Britain has become and how bossy it is as a result. Such is the health and safety culture here that there is barely a trade not required to wear high-visibility attire (including, even, police horses). Viewed from space, I'm fairly sure that the United Kingdom shows up as a fluorescent yellow triangle in the North Sea. In France there is no such paranoia. In fact, health and safety just doesn’t exist. You can walk under construction cranes shifting heavy loads without so much as a “look up” sign to warn you, let alone a 100-metre safety perimeter and mandatory hard hat wearing. As with many things in France, workers are merely an inconvenience to be shrugged at in that inherently insouciant French manner.

Travelling by public transport in Britain is to be subjected to a never-ending babble of reminders and instructions. Actually, orders. Recently I was in a rush to catch the Heathrow Express into London, and I got barked at over the tannoy by the platform guard: “No need to run! Plenty of time!", in a voice not dissimilar to the schoolteacher on Pink Floyd's The Wall ("YOU! Yes, you laddie! Stand STILL!"). This was the same guard who’d shouted at everyone not to board the train until vital security checks were carried out, and then barked at everyone to board quickly. You can’t win.

Once on board a moving train, Bossy Britain subjects you to a running commentary, telling you which station you’ve just left, what station comes up next, what line you’re on, who runs that line, what terminus you’ll end up in. On the London Underground it’s even worse: “The next station is Bank.” “We are now at Bank.” “Mind the gap as you get off.” “Please allow people to get off before you get on.” “Move down inside the carriage please.” “Move RIGHT down inside the carriage please.” “Stand clear of the doors.” “The doors are closing - stand clear of the doors.” “The doors have now closed”. “The next station is Holborn”. I’m sure some public transport workers in Britain are failed wedding DJs - the type who just won’t shut up.

When I left the UK in 1999 I had a mobile phone that made calls and sent text messages. And that was it. Apple was regarded somewhat dismissively as a niche company with overpriced products designed for creative professionals and no one else. I used to drool over Apple Powerbooks in shop windows like Mike Myers drooling over that white Stratocaster in Wayne’s World. And then the original iMac came out, and all of a sudden the idea of an affordable and cool-looking computer at home seemed viable and attractive. I bought one in Amsterdam in 1999, commencing an addiction to the Apple brand as powerful and as financially destructive as an acute crystal-meth habit. Apple cleverly marketed the digital lifestyle, and I have enthusiastically bought into it.

While I'm trawling through the annals of an already-distancing past, let me also mention my football club. In 1999 Chelsea were still flirting with financial near-death, but since Glenn Hoddle had become manager in 1994, and players like Ruud Gullit, Gianfranco Zola, Gianluca Vialli and Frank Leboeuf had been added, the club’s stock had steadily risen.

© Simon Poulter 2016

By the time I set off for Holland, Vialli had replaced Gullit as player-manager, but they were still perennial sixth place contenders. Their 1995 run in the old Cup Winners’ Cup was their only foray into Europe since 1971. I made the decision to keep my season ticket when I moved abroad. Such was the growing popularity of the club, fuelled by the stars now playing in blue, seats for home games at Stamford Bridge were already becoming scarce. Even when I moved to California I decided not to give up the ticket, knowing that a three-year waiting list would be too painful to endure if I had to start all over again. In 2004 the Abramovich era began, bringing with it José Mourinho, and trophies and titles like I’d never seen in my lifetime. It’s going to be nice going to Stamford Bridge more often again, especially midweek games (I’ve only been able to attend one in 17 years), where the jeans-and-sweatshirt uniform of a Saturday afternoon matches is replaced by those who’ve just rushed from the office, wearing a suit and an overcoat, the Evening Standard stuffed in a pocket.

So what have I gained from these years abroad? It’s a chronic cliché to say that travel broadens the mind, but living abroad - especially on "the continent” - has highlighted just how much of an island nation Britain can be. Europeans are different, but not in a physical way. When I first moved to Amsterdam I seemed to be under the impression I was relocating to a developing country lacking supermarkets, flushing toilets or breakfast cereal. I was instantly wrong. The Netherlands is one of the smartest, modern countries in the world, full of people who learn languages in seconds and enjoy a sense of contentment known locally as “gezelligheid”. It’s an almost-impossible word to define, but imagine very tall, healthy-looking people, sitting outside a café with a glass of rosé on a warm summer’s evening, looking smug, and you’ve come close to understanding what gezelligheid means.

© Simon Poulter 2016

And, then, France (I'll skip my two years in the US - a nation you probably know of too well). The opportunity to live and work in Paris was the fulfilment of a romantic ideal I’d coveted over many years, the result of watching too many Alain Delon films and The Day Of The Jackal, and seeing Paris as somewhere stuck resolutely, defiantly, nobly in the 1960s. I dreamed of living in a traditional Paris apartment, like Inspector Clouseau, with a view of the Eiffel Tower from my window. I achieved that, and then some. And the fact is, Paris is still stuck in the 1960s: I recently watched The Day Of The Jackal again and, now familiar with many of the locations (the hotel at the film’s denouement is right opposite a regular meeting point for a friend of mine and I), I saw how the city really doesn’t look any different 45 years on. And I love it for it. When I moved there I wrote a love letter to it (A Paris Love Affair) on my old blog. That love hasn’t dimmed. Yesterday - my last morning as a Parisian - I went out for breakfast and walked part of the way back in brilliant blue-sky sunshine, soaking up the Haussmann architecture near the Sorbonne. A modern, progressive city but one which hasn’t lost touch with its aesthetic charm. Or its passion.

On this I’m conflicted about London. Yes, there’s plenty of ‘the old’ in London to remind you of its history, even its pre-Roman history, but there’s almost too much of the new. 17 years ago I would take the bus to work across Waterloo Bridge and look east to a skyline dominated by St. Paul’s Cathedral. Now, the skyline is dominated by vast monuments to glass and steel, an architect’s wet dream, in which they compete to out-design each other. Over the next few years, it is reported, there will be as many as 250 new skyscrapers going up in central London. On the one hand, it’s a sign of the city’s vibrancy as a place to do business, and even post-Brexit, an indication that things will be fine, after all. But on the other hand, it reminds me of just how architectural conservatism in Paris has ensured the city remains both liveable and effective, but also eye-wateringly attractive every time you step outside the front door.

When I moved to Paris I was warned by lazy British tabloid tropes that my life was going to be blighted by stereotypes. My day would be brought to a crawling pace by slow and indifferent waiters; strikes would impede any form of travel; and I would drown under an ocean of bureaucracy. Well, the last one proved to be fact. France appears to exist purely to provide employment for office workers processing pieces of paper. But the rest? Not really.

© Simon Poulter 2016

There hasn't, even, been much of the legendary French militancy, the spirit of the Bastille and rioting students at the Sorbonne in '68. Apart from aggressive taxi drivers (and outbreaks of riots this summer), I've seen little of this aspect of French expression. With one exception: being a part of the "unity" march on January 11 last year, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings, was one of the most profound experiences of my life, a tidal wave of more than a million and half people setting off from Place de la Republique. If only it had had the desired effect in warning off those who believe in the Kalashnikov and the suicide vest as the only means of making a statement. Ten months later, I was dealing with the news that two wonderful friends had been caught up in the attack on Le Bataclan. Thankfully, they got out safely. But this was an attack on the freedom you enjoy in Paris. Ultimately, it was an attack on a lifestyle I enjoyed more than anything else in Paris - the cafés and music venues. I won't dwell further on it - there'll be plenty of that from the media next month when the anniversary comes up - but the era of terrorism (including 9/11 - when I was living in California - and indeed July 7, 2005 in London), has become one of the darker undercurrents of the years I've been abroad.

Paris and London are comparable in size and, to some extent, economic influence over the rest of the nation. But while I am overwhelmingly excited to be back in London, there are many things I’ll miss from the last few years in the French capital. Firstly, the people. I’ve made lifelong friends there, but the fact that the city is only two hours away by Eurostar (well, 13 hours, given the number of breakdowns it experiences…) means they will never be far at all. But secondly, the way of living. Small things that make a big difference, like getting to see gigs by Robert Plant, the Stone Roses, Richard Hawley, Johnny Marr, Paul Weller and many others in small, intimate theatres where you’re only a few feet from the stage, as opposed to the cavernous venues these same acts would play on British tours (tip to self: stay tuned to the Paris gig listings, especially given how easy it is to get from London to Paris).

Then there’s the relative ease of getting about. Yes, Paris is still a choked madhouse of drivers riding their car horns, but that’s for those who still insist on driving. Two years ago I sold my car (which had been stuck in a garage, unused, for the previous two years). Owning a car in Paris is an utter waste of time and money. When public transport is subsidised, and your employer pays for your €70, five-zone monthly Navigo card (compare this to the £212 it costs you to travel the same distance each week in London), and there’s a Métro train every two minutes, there’s every incentive to get rid of the wheels. Getting used to this - and things like shopping every couple of days at the local supermarket rather loading up a car once a week at some giant out-of-town aircraft hangar - has brought an enjoyable simplicity to city living, one which I will replicate readily in London by living close to the centre and not going back to car ownership. That sense of simplicity is one of the many things I’ve acquired living abroad. I grew up in London’s suburbs, where car ownership is a near-necessity, but also a status symbol. In the days when a new number plate letter appeared on August 1, net curtains really would rustle avariciously when a shiny new motor appeared on the driveway across the road. I can do without that. Plus, thanks to being a frequent car hire patron over my years abroad, it’s nice to get an upgrade to something fancy on the few occasions I need to rent one.

17 years, out of almost 49, is a large chunk of my life. For example, I’ve spent more time, since passing my driving test, living in countries where you drive on the right as opposed to driving on the left. For 13 years my salary has been paid in Euros, and I’ve loved being able to visit friends in Germany or go on holiday to Italy without having to go near a bureau de change. These are, though, merely material differences.

Over 17 years I’ve seen two nephews grow from children into successful adults, one with a wife and daughter, the other with a self-made career as a personal trainer. A third came along in 2002 and is now a teenager. I’ve seen my brother and sister-in-law become grandparents, and witnessed, periodically, my own parents go from retirees in their late sixties to proud, but increasingly frail pensioners in their mid-eighties, my dad gradually (though slowly) succumbing to that cruellest thief of dignity, Alzheimer’s.

I’ve never been all that far away from my family over the last 17 years, but now I’m going to be even closer. My visits will not be dictated to by the need to get to an airport, phone calls won’t be scheduled around time zones, spare rooms won’t need to be reserved, and Hertz at Heathrow won’t be seeing so much of me. Everything I love about London will be a Tube ride’s away - the museums, the culture, Covent Garden, gigs, HMV in Oxford Street, the theatre, the diversity, an energy matched (or even eclipsed) only by New York. Over the last three years I’ve spent more time for business reasons in London, during which time I came to feel that there was something I was missing out on. Couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it was there. One way or another I knew I’d be back, and through the good fortune of a job move, I am. I’m back. London, baby! Yeah.

Brown leaves and brown legs - au revoir August

Today, as the more alert amongst you in possession of calendars will know, is the last day of August. For those of us resident in Paris, this is the week when life returns to normal. Like that final scene in Jacques Tati's magnificent comedy Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, France's beaches have been abandoned, families have returned en masse from their four weeks (or more...) away, and office cleaners are already having to vacuum up small blizzards of peeled skin.

The city itself is in a similar state: piles of brown leaves are already growing high in gutters, discarded by trees either parched by last week's gonzo temperatures (38 degrees in the afternoon, no lower than 30 degrees at night...) or simply confused - as we all are - by what time of year it is thanks to climate change. Either way, there is an incongruously autumnal vibe to the place

People are notably a similar colour, and hemlines and shirt sleeves are that much shorter to show off that hard-earned tan. These are as much attempts to display some form of receipt for holidays received, of course, but beneath the first-week-back demeanour there is also a palpable sense of disappointment. Breakfasting on coffee and a croissant this morning in my local cafe - with people-watching still the pre-eminent spectator sport in Paris - I could readily see the reluctant gait of the relaxed and bronzed heading for the Métro with a palpable gloom hanging over them at the prospect of an inbox full of reply-all horrors.

I've blogged before about the joys of working through August in Paris, of having the office, cafes and even the dry cleaners almost to yourself. It is truly liberating when everyone disappears. Paris may be nicest in the springtime, as Francis Albert once sung, but it's even nicer when everyone's out. Your mornings don't begin abruptly with impatient drivers honking their horns in a pointless attempt to shift a parked delivery truck. There's a knowing civility about the place, as those left behind get on with their lives in the knowledge that they have a seat on the Métro while those who'd normally occupy it are sitting cheek-by-jowl on the Côte D'Azur, dodging the burkini police.

This has been my last August in Paris. By this time next year I'll be back in London, where the holiday season is marked only by a slight lightening of the Underground crush as families with their 2.4 children take off for the pre-requsite British fortnight. I, too, will be considering what I do for my summer holiday: perhaps, perversely, I should spend two weeks in Paris? At least it'll be quiet.

Blowin' a fuse: Bruce Springsteen at the AccorHotels Arena, Paris

Somebody recently asked me an impossible question: "what's your favourite gig of all time?". I was stumped. And for a number of reasons, too. I've been to many, many concerts over the last 36 years, some for fun, some for work, and in that time I've seen the stellar, the obscure, the legendary, the unfashionable, the overhyped and the just plain brilliant.

I've seen the Rolling Stones four times, and The Who and Prince twice; in seeing Robert Plant (twice in the space of a month) and Paul McCartney just the once I have at least experienced some linkage to two of the greatest bands of all time. Sadly, though, I only saw Bowie once, and that was on the awful Glass Spider Tour. Thank God for the live recordings.

My brief career as a music journalist began with the first and, possibly, last review of a Phil Collins gig in the NME. I was at the legendary Madstock festival which, so the apocryphal tale goes, was measured on the Richter Scale, such was the mass pogo triggered by Madness playing Baggy Trousers. At the same gig I finally got to see Ian Dury & The Blockheads, a long-held ambition and richly rewarded, and I also saw Morrissey get booed, which was harsh but funny. I've also enjoyed some of the most brilliant evenings of live music at the Montreux Jazz Festival, often ending up sitting next to the same performers at the remarkably informal Harry's Bar across the road (an encounter with Grace Jones unnerves me still - she was just so damned nice).

Gig-going has been intrinsic to my life here in Paris over the last five and a half years: it reunited me with my childhood friend Steven Wilson, having last seen him in 1974, and now a bona fide rock star, playing Le Bataclan; the city's smaller, intimate venues have brought me into close proximity with Johnny Marr, the Stone Roses, Paul Weller, Richard Hawley, The Church, Popa Chubby, Seasick Steve and the Kaiser Chiefs - to name a few, and not a bad haul either; and, perhaps most poignant of all, I was privileged to be at the emotional return to Paris by the Eagles Of Death Metal in February.

Still, though, there are plenty of gigs I regret missing out on, as well as plenty of gigs I regret going to at all (The Wedding Present at a sticky-floored college refectory comes to mind). On top of this, I really have no desire to attend any outdoor festivals, unless they're within a half mile of a Tube station and have paved footpaths. And I can very easily pass on the overhyped festival of Trench Foot, chlamydia and corporate hypocrisy that is Glastonbury, preferring to watch from my sofa with all the comfort, convenience and proximity to a fridge that implies.

© Simon Poulter 2016

However, nothing upon nothing compares on any scale to Bruce Springsteen. I've now seen him twice, and both occasions in Paris, too. Quite why it has taken me to just the last five years, living here, before seeing one of the greatest live acts in music history is hard to fathom, but I have no time for regrets, as these two concerts - Wednesday night at the AccorHotels Arena and three years ago at the Stade De France - will answer, unequivocally, that question I was asked.

2016 has been a year which has forced us to rethink our notions of mortality when it comes to our music icons. It's nothing new: for as long as rock stars have been dying prematurely - Hendrix, Joplin, Presley, Lennon...take your pick - we've reluctantly accepted that some candles burn brightly for only the shortest of time. With Bowie et al this year we've started coming to terms with the realisation that the heroes of the rock era are dwindling, along with the music that propelled them to hero status in the first place.

Springsteen, however, continues to defy rock's waning. At 66 he's as energetic, engaging and as downright brilliant as any legend past or present. What he takes from his audiences he gives back in spades. The frequent trips throughout the show into the crowd might be viewed as schtick, but Springsteen never overplays it. He is for his people, and of his people. It's an unbreakable bond.

© Simon Poulter 2016

The Stones and The Who, to some extent, might still come close, and though both still excellent entertainment, the former are now something of a high-end vaudeville act and the latter are largely now trading off heritage as they consciously wind down their touring career. Springsteen, on the other hand, is still producing albums of some vitality. They may not be as ground breaking as Born To Run, Nebraska or The River which, in its entirety, forms the main act of this latest tour, but it is patently clear that The Boss has lost none of his unique ability to tell a story. Or to do so live.

Because that is what sits at the very core of the Springsteen brand. Whatever the scale of his epic, three-hour shows, or of the superlative bombast of his and the E-Street Band's sound, Springsteen at his best is the blue collar barfly, regaling you over a brew with a story about the mundanities of life. Not even Dylan can romanticise about crossing county lines, screen doors slamming and steaming engine blocks and still be as authentic or as heartworn. You may be looking at a multimillionaire rock star, but you are also looking at working class New Jersey. You are still listening to songs forged in 1950s imagery of girls in their finery at the Saturday night dance, of unrequited love affairs, marriages and the dawning of dissatisfaction and claustrophobic relationships.

Sitting in an arena just a stone's throw from the French government offices of Bercy may have been an incongruity from the 'real' America Springsteen evokes, but somehow, amongst 16,000 rapturous [mostly] French people, we were in that bar, that autoshop, that high school dance hall. To get there, though, you must allow yourself to penetrate the stagecraft of the E-Street Band - Steve Van Zandt's endearingly entertaining hamming; Nils Lofgren's guitar virtuosity; Roy Bittan's delicate touch on piano; the 65-year-old Max Weinberg's breathless, virtually uninterrupted drumming; and Jake Clemons' deft sax playing, keeping his uncle, Clarence's flame alive. Cut through that and you listen to Springsteen's words and music, in that order, absorbing and contributing to the energy of the band and of the crowd, and the overwhelming sense of being a part of something that, even 41 years since his breakthrough, is still growing.

© Simon Poulter 2016

While this magical show was devoted to The River album, it opened with an obscurity, Iceman, recorded in 1977 for the The Darkness On The Edge Of Town sessions and then forgotten about. It eventually surfaced on the absorbing Tracks box set. Tonight was, evidently, the first time Springsteen and his band had played it on this tour, and it - followed by Lucky Town - worked brilliantly in getting everyone's eye in, like tennis players 'knocking up' before a match.

These were, however, just a prelude. The main premise of the evening and the entire tour is The River. Springsteen's albums are never conceptual as such, but they are certainly reflective of the times. The River, released in October 1980, held a mirror up to an America in recession, on the cusp of electing an archly-conservative president a month later, and still bearing scars of Vietnam in its heartlands, in need of both togetherness and contemplation alone. As a result, Springsteen deliberately sequenced the 20-track double album to offer shade and light, with tracks as bold and as classically Spectorish as The Ties That Bind interspersed with more frivolous material like Sherry Darling and the hit Hungry Heart (during which Springsteen conducts a full-on stage dive in this show), the pathos of Point Blank leading to the hoedown gaiety of Cadillac Ranch (complete with Patti Scialfa stand-in Soozie Tyrell going full "yee-hah!" with a fiddle solo).

But where, on the original album, The River could be accused of being a little uneven, 36 years on, with an E-Street Band as finely tuned as the smoothest-running German car engine you could imagine, there is a power to all of the album's songs in the live setting, even the quiet numbers, like Drive All Night, engineered by Weinberg's simple slowbeat, building to a compelling crescendo.

As The River's stories unfold, so does your appreciation of the palette Springsteen applied to the album's storytelling. You end up with no other conclusion that you have heard a unique canon of songs, performed by a unique collection of musicians. Yes, it may be Springsteen's music, but he never lets it be forgotten that Springsteen and the E-Street Band - a genuine band of brothers (several of them postponed personal music projects to jump on The River Tour, jumping at the opportunity to tour again for a last time before Springsteen concentrates on solo projects) - are one and the same.

© Simon Poulter 2016

It may not be fashionable anymore to sit down and listen to an album all the way through, from track-first to track-last, but the trend of touring entire records means that artists have a captive audience to hear the sequencing as intended. I'm sure the streaming era is creating a generation of dilettante music fans, missing out on the narrative of the musical novels that albums like The River are. This show is, however, a reminder of just how fulsome The River is, but even taking into account Springsteen's legend for lengthy shows, the momentum is relentless.

Anyone dropping off will have been woken back to full consciousness by Ramrod, the explosive rocker which, on Monday night, literally blew a fuse at the Paris venue. Tonight, no such worries, as it took the show into The River's fourth and final side, in old vinyl terms, a side with two of the album's many nods to automotive iconography, concluding with Wreck On The Highway.

By this stage, however, the only wrecks are us - sweaty but carefree. Springsteen and his band have no intention of stopping, or even basking in the glory of having breathlessly played through an entire 83-minute album from start to finish. Almost without pause we're into the mighty Badlands, opening what turns out to be almost another hour of extra music, and is quickly followed by a cover of Patti Smith's Because The Night, which Springsteen originally wrote before handing it over to Smith.

The hits tumbled out - The Rising (inspired by 9/11 and as poignant in France now as it would be looking across to New York City from Springsteen's New Jersey home), the ironically patriotic Born In The USA, an outstanding Born To Run, Dancing In The Dark and then Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, replete with dutiful on-screen tributes to the "the big man", the late Clarence Clemons, and original E-Street keyboard player Danny Federici, who died three years before the sax giant in 2008.

This second, hit-sprayed part ends with Shout, the Isleys' party favourite (some might think of Lulu, others, simply, "Toga!!!"), which ensures that all but the dullest, smartphone-hogging dullard (the Jeff Lynne-lookalike perched on the steps in front of me, for example) is on their feet and having, simply, the best of times.

And it is. If I never see another concert again I can and will have the satisfaction of experiencing something profound, something untouchable, akin to the Dutch notion of "total football", albeit with a travelling band of musicians who perform and behave more like a family than jobbing artists. What binds it all, of course, is Springsteen's songwriting. And thus, it is celebrated, fittingly, by the man himself, reappearing after his comrades have disappeared, with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, strumming the opening chords of Thunder Road.

"The screen door slams, Mary's dress waves, like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays Roy Orbison singing for the lonely," he sings. We are enraptured: all of the joy, all of the emotion, all of the fist-pumping energy of the previous three hours condensed into this most beautiful of ballads.

"Well, I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk". Damn right he did.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Après nous le déluge

© Simon Poulter 2016

When I first moved to Paris, five and a half years ago, I published a post romanticising about this city. It contained all the usual stuff about the timeless Parisian beauty, its overwhelming architecture and bountiful culture - basically all the things that you usually read about the place and, indeed, France in general. If they weren't so damned valid they would be bona fide, nailed-on clichés.

In the years since, though, I have managed to avoid  - quite deliberately - any of the lame old tropes that those, especially from my home island, trot out about France. You know, the lengthy lunches, the streets of Paris being minefields of canine excrement and impatient, horn-handy drivers, moody waiters, and an apparent national tendency to down tools at the slightest industrial provocation. And so on and so on.

As with any collection of national sterotypes, some fit and some don't. France - and Paris in particular - is no different. The 'Allo 'Allo generalisations are what they should be - mildly racist but mostly harmless comic motifs (although I must confess to yesterday seeing a man wearing a beret at a cafe, a first in almost 40 years as either schoolboy visitor or, now, resident). That said, the reputation for doggy poo, drivers and waiters in Paris, in no special order, appears to be enthusiastically upheld.

But there's more. When I first declared that I'd be moving to France, I was helpfully counselled by mostly fellow Brits that I would find it impossible to get anything done. Because, I was told, the French were always on strike, that their farmers burned sheep on motorways in protest, that their trawlermen blockaded the Channel ports over EU subsidies, and that old perennial, the air traffic controllers went on strike during the school holidays. This would maintain the popular belief that France remained the angry militant of Europe, long after such behaviour seemed relevant in the modern world.

So, for the most part of my five and a half years here I've hardly seen any such mardeyness. Until now. In recent weeks we've had a full-on, wintry blast of angry action. None of your uppity taxi protests here, or mildly aggravating work-to-rules by street cleaners. No, proper, crippling industrial chaos and tear gas-inducing street protests over President François Hollande's plans for reforms to the country's arcane labour laws. Flash riots in parts of Paris, strikes by oil refinery workers cutting fuel supplies, stoppages at water treatment plants, and then last week a strike by employees of the SNCF, the national rail company which halved the number of trains in and out of the capital (and is still in place today), with staff on the Paris Métro also staging sporadic walkouts.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Add to all this the dramatic flooding that saw the Seine break its banks in central Paris, threatening precious exhibits at the Louvre and the Museum de Orsay, as well as blighting homes in the southern Parisian suburbs, and you end up with a feeling that France is heading to hell in a handcart, even if the floods were a natural disaster. It's just that they were yet another disaster to affect this seemingly hapless country.

This week Euro 2016 gets under way in France, with the country hosting the first European football championships with an expanded format of 24 teams competing in ten city venues. With France clearly in the crosshairs of Islamic terrorism, the sense of national nervousness is palpable. Throw in an all-out, four-day strike planned by Air France pilots next weekend, more strikes on the railways and unions in other sectors appearing to dig in - as is the government in maintaining the need to drive reforms to employment laws - and the possibility of an utterly chaotic tournament has become very real.

Of course, we shouldn't get too carried away. The games will go ahead, the strikes won't achieve anywhere near their ambition of impacting infrastructure, and security will be tighter than ever at the games. But that won't improve the mood. The Charlie Hebdo attacks last year, and then the attrocities in Paris last November - compounded by the closely related events in Brussels - have inevitably led to an undercurrent of fear. The sight of properly tooled-up soldiers on residential streets have both reassured and reminded residents of the real risks France faces in equal measure.

From abroad, France is increasingly looking like a nation under siege from within. The stereotypes will no doubt be hardening. The strikes, the terror threat - even the floods - have given the impression of a country in trouble, led by a president and government unable to take control of that trouble and unable to bring about reforms intended to modernise the local labour market amid continuing macro-economic challenges for French companies.

The government's proposed changes to labour laws would make it easier for employers to hire and fire, but the unions claim that this will merely enable employers to bypass workers' rights on pay and working hours. These are all issues which historically contribute to the national reputation. True, there is a 35-hour week in place, but in Paris at least, the volume of people on the Paris Métro at 7am and again at 7pm would suggest that metropolitan working hours are a long way from the proscribed norm. And as for the apparent culture of endless lunches, I haven't seen that either. Occasionally you will see someone disappear for a couple of hours of gossipping, but en masse, most people are in and out of the works canteen within an hour and that's it.

Working hours and retirement age notwithstanding, the bigger issue at stake is the ability to staff up and staff down: the belief pushed by the government is that greater flexibility will in turn make employers more flexible to hire in the first place. But despite the wave of strikes and riots in recent weeks, and prevailing defiance from the militant CGT union, popular opinion is changing. An opinion poll published over the weekend revealed that a majority of French people are now opposed to the anti-reform protests and strikes, possibly as a result of the damage to the country's image that they've caused as it prepares to host one of the world's most prestigious sporting events.

Meanwhile, Hollande and his government remain equally defiant on the need to push through the reforms. "I fully accept that this law could be unpopular," Manuel Valls, the swaggering Spanish-born French prime minister told foreign journalists in a briefing last week. "Public opinion is worried. But we are at a key moment. Stars are aligned, with the economic recovery and the reformism that my government embodies," he outlined. "The question is how we reform this country," he went on. "Can a minority union block a law? If we were to retreat, it would mean paralysis . . . The French have gotten used too much to the fact it was enough to protest in the streets to block reforms."

Whether the government, or the unions, prevail, something has to give. France’s jobless rate currently stands stubbornly at 10%, the highest in a generation. Worse still is youth unemployment, which is currently at 24%, blighting a substantial proportion of the very electoral base that President Hollande had promised to address. Notably, some of the strongest protests in recent weeks have been amongst the student community in France - a stereotypical echo of the 1960s riots, perhaps, but an indication that the country's youth is feeling increasingly abandoned. In some communities, that has the potential to light some exceedingly dangerous fuses indeed. And may have done so already.

It would be wholly wrong to cast France as an unlivable, unworkable basketcase. And from my Parisian eyrie it would be wrong, too, to generalise an entire nation (as is often remarked, France is two countries - Paris, and the rest of the nation). But beneath the romantic veneer that drew me here - and has drawn all the other romantics, writers, artists, philosophers and dreamers throughout history - lurks a country that is not exactly dysfunctional, but on the other hand, doesn't help itself. I truly hope that Euro 2016 is a success, and that it passes without incident. I also truly hope that, one way or another, the country will find the path to the prosperity that other European giants mostly enjoy.

But, as the Paris floodwaters gradually recede, one can't help feeling all that positive about any true return to normality, because that normality seems to be - for the first time since I've been here - somewhat chaotic, and as ugly as Paris is an aesthetic treat. Après nous le déluge...?

© Simon Poulter 2016