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.

Tales from Thunder Road: Bruce Springsteen's autobiography Born To Run

There was no Damascene moment. I wasn't blinded by the light, to borrow a phrase. No sudden realisation. And it was hardly a conversion, either. But my becoming a Bruce Springsteen fan, as opposed to merely knowing his songs, came relatively late in my life, and relatively late in his career. The summer of 2002, to be precise. The reason why will sound somewhat corny, but bear with me.

The terror attacks on September 11, 2001, affected me more deeply than perhaps I realised on the day. Then, I was living in California, and like so many other people in America - and indeed around the world - it all seemed to happen in vivid, searing real-time. Like everyone else, I'd consumed the news coverage of the Twin Towers being attacked and destroyed. Afterwards it was hard to focus on anything, such was the collective fear that the attacks were only just the beginning of a more sustained onslaught. Over the following weeks and months I was restless. Concentrating at work was a struggle as I fought with a constant need to go to online to see what new developments there were in the aftermath of the single-biggest terrorist mass murder in history.

The hijackings and their attacks on New York and the Pentagon, plus, we presume, the targeting of Washington DC, cast a pall over me. A medical professional might have even called it a form of depression. There had been something so brutal and violent about the taking of those 2,977 lives, most in a city I loved to visit for its relentless energy and verve. I was struggling to properly process what had happened. But then, right smack in the middle of the following July, I heard the song The Rising for the first time, and was moved. An anthemic song, majestic, and yet conversely concerned with a theme so dark and somewhat surreal, that of a doomed New York firefighter entering the World Trade Center just after the hijacked planes had come slamming in. And, yet, I felt uplifted by the song, released, even, from the gloom that had descended upon me ever since that grim Tuesday morning the September before.

I bought the album The Rising on the day it came out at the end of July. I soon discovered the 9/11 narrative within it. It became the catharsis I’d been lacking. Its title song, along with Lonesome Day, You’re Missing and My City In Ruins provided tangible expression of what the world had so brutally witnessed collectively. And in doing so, these songs opened the curtains wide on what it was that had propelled Bruce Springsteen to his exalted status as America’s greatest rock star.

The starting point was Springsteen's authenticity. His home in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey, close to the Jersey Shore where he grew up, is not much more than 30 miles, as the crow flies, from where the old World Trade Center stood. Like so many residents of the Greater New York area, Springsteen watched from his kitchen window as the towers burned before crumbling into a toxic pile of rubble and dust. He spoke for the victims, many of whom came from the New York hinterland that sprawls out into New Jersey. He was New Jersey - working class Jersey. Of all the celebrities who came out to support of the 9/11 victims, Springsteen was unequivocally one of them. His words resonated.

So, suddenly, my eyes - more pertinently, my ears - were open. I was no newcomer to Springsteen - the radio hits like Born In The USA, Dancing In The Dark, Born To Run, Cover Me and Brilliant Disguise, had just been that, radio hits. Like everyone else, I’d gone with Born In The USA as simplistic, fist-pumping patriotism without giving too much thought to its real meaning about a Vietnam veteran struggling for acceptance. And Born To Run - unexpectedly popularised by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, of all bands - was simply a rollicking good rock song. It was only later that I started to place that song into a wider context about Springsteen’s songwriting. That came when I belatedly got around to seeing Cop Land, the superb crime thriller starring Sylvester Stallone as a partially deaf local sheriff living amongst a nest of corrupt New York cops (De Niro, Keitel, Liotta et al) in the small New Jersey community he also polices. The local connection with Springsteen was made by the inclusion of Drive All Night and Stolen Car from Springsteen’s album The River. This prompted me to buy The River itself, along with Born To Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Nebraska and Springsteen’s debut Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. The river, so to speak, had burst its banks.

Vicariously, I had began to immerse myself in an America I’d hitherto not been exposed to. My first visits to the country had been to California and the golden West, not the industrial, grey-skied badlands of the north-east. I have since driven up Highway 9 in New Jersey, heading north from Springsteen's hometown of Freehold to the outer suburbs of Newark. Hardly a last-chance power drive, but it seemed to fall into place with the oil-stained, denim-clad ordinality of Springsteen’s music.

Like many of America’s greatest songwriters, Springsteen can conjure romance out of the most mundane. Freeways, diners and dance halls possess a thrill and zeal that British motorways, greasy-spoon cafés and provincial discos do not. Cadillacs and Chevys, Lincolns and Fords, already immortalised in the classics of rock and roll, were part of the furniture of the ‘real’ America Springsteen wrote about. His cast of characters were the downtrodden and the poor, the dreamers and the ill-fated lovers.

Springsteen’s music is nothing new and never has been. A song like Brilliant Disguise is pure Roy Orbison, and of course his signature sound was cast with the Born To Run album and its unashamed purloining of Phil Spector. But then rock’n’roll has ever been thus. More or less any artist you like can point to Elvis Presley as the source, Chuck Berry and Little Richard as the catalyst, and The Beatles as the perfect application of the art. Even The Clash and the Sex Pistols can hold their hands up and agree that Presley influenced their look and Berry influenced their guitar solos. The Beatles' Helter Skelter even provided the blueprint for most punk songs.

Picture: Vanity Fair/Annie Leibowitz

Springsteen isn’t, however, merely someone who has aggregated these influences, thrown in Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger for rustic authenticity and arrived at being the heart and soul of salt-of-the-earth America. But he has taken Americana as his canvass and then musically and lyrically fused the 1950s of his childhood with his adulthood and beyond. The screen doors slamming and motorbikes tearing up highways haven’t just been dutiful nods to the age of chrome fenders and billowing gathered skirts, but characters in mini operettas created around small town romances and economic reality. These were themes that I’d never paid much attention to previously, even listening to blues music, which is mostly only about such topics. There was another aspect, too, to the all-enveloping nature of Springsteen’s music: that they offered an incredible soundscape, the so-called “heartland rock” of the E-Street Band - Clarence’s sax, Roy Bittan’s chiming piano and the jangling guitars of The Boss himself. Having always been drawn to more introspective or, perhaps, more complicated, layered music, I had to change up a gear to appreciate Springsteen's music at its fullest.

In doing so, however, I came to see beyond the radio-friendly MTV star, bopping away with a young Courteney Cox in that still-excruciating Dancing In The Dark video. All of a sudden I realised that musically, Springsteen was every bit as compelling as those ‘classic’ British bands I’d considered without-question to be the greatest. There were parallels, I found, between Springsteen and, say, The Who. The British group’s music might have been tighter, even more intense, but to both there was a reflection on what it is to live in the real world. Punk, they say, was the embodiment of this spirit too.

I have a habit of coming to bands late. It’s partly the result of a stubborn blindspot I have which shuts out hype. Once the cognoscenti endorses something, I succumb to immediate suspicion and cast it to one side. The Springsteen myth - all that talk of legendary, four-hour concerts and blue-collar authenticity - had previously had a reverse effect on me and my cynicism. But with The Rising, its predecessors and its successors, I took to consuming Springsteen old and new at any opportunity. Live albums, albums with and without the E-Street Band, offshoots, box sets - you name it, I’ve come to absorb everything the man produces, musically and, perhaps more importantly, lyrically.

Inevitably, Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen’s long-awaited autobiography, out today, has taken me in too, but then I’m a sucker for a music memoir. And there’s always plenty to choose from - Keith Richards’ Life and Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace stand out as particular highlights of the genre, and there have been more recent entries by Chrissie Hynde, Linda Rondstadt, Donald Fagen and Graham Nash. Even Phil Collins and Johnny Marr are getting in on the act with their respective Not Dead Yet and Set The Boy Free tomes coming up in time for Christmas. And, of course, no shortage of weighty books about The Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Bowie and many more, many of which are still piled high on my dining table awaiting their turn.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Born To Run - which has taken Springsteen the better part of seven years to write - is exhaustive. And it unlocks something about this self-effacing and seemingly open rock star, who almost lives like we do (albeit on a 340-acre New Jersey farm and homes in gated communities in Florida and California...). In an era when celebrity can be created out of nothing (i.e. "starring" in reality television), someone of Springsteen's stature probably doesn't need to commit himself to an unexpurgated memoir. But the seed was planted in 2009, after Springsteen and the E-Street Band had played at that year's Super Bowl, and he wrote a blog post for his website about his experience of playing during the half-time show. Over the following months, he found himself keeping a diary of sorts, enjoyed writing it, and enjoyed the voice that it gave him. The writing process snowballed further, resulting in the book. Written entirely by Springsteen himself. No ghost writers.

A first glimpse of Springsteen's expanded writing "voice" came in March 2012 at South By Southwest in Austin, when he gave a mesmerising keynote speech - perhaps the ultimate essay on rock and roll. "In the beginning, every musician has their genesis moment," he outlined. "For you, it might have been the Sex Pistols, or Madonna, or Public Enemy. It's whatever initially inspires you to action. Mine was 1956, Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was the evening I realized a white man could make magic, that you did not have to be constrained by your upbringing, by the way you looked, or by the social context that oppressed you. You could call upon your own powers of imagination, and you could create a transformative self."

These are themes Springsteen comes back on in the book in large dollops. In particular, about not being constrained by upbringing and his background. "I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I," he writes in the foreword. "By 20, no race car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who 'lie' in service of the truth...artists with a small 'a'. But I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell."

At this point, in many a rock memoir, the author would talk about chord shapes and grand visions for changing the world. But in trying to pick the lock of how he ended up "face-to-face with eighty thousand (or eighty) screaming rock'n'roll fans who are waiting for you to do your magic trick", Springsteen starts at the very beginning - the working class New Jersey family into which he was born, and the strained relationship he endured with his often violent and often unemployed father. Douglas Springsteen was of Dutch-Irish ancestry, while Bruce’s mother, Adele, was of Italian-American background. You probably couldn’t find a more atypical north-eastern American cocktail. Douglas worked different jobs, including driving buses and more often than not, no job at all. Adele worked as a legal secretary, and was invariably the family breadwinner. No surprise, then, that through this childhood in the town of Freehold, New Jersey, that the young Bruce - captivated by the music of Elvis and The Beatles - was drawn to “poetry, danger and darkness” to drive his imagination. Throughout his songbook, Springsteen comes back to paternal relationships, and in the book, he expounds on his own at some length. "I had to find the roots of my own troubles and issues," he recently told Vanity Fair while publicising the book, "and the joyful things that have allowed me to put on the kind of shows that we put on."

The catalyst of how Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen, born September 23, 1949, became Bruce Springsteen: The Boss is well explored in Born To Run. He describes his first guitar (bought for him by his mother) and, after his parents virtually abandoned him as they moved to California, the late-teenage Bruce taught himself piano and the harmonica, and joined his first bands playing the seaside towns along the Jersey Shore. Those who see pop stardom as only a few X-Factor appearances away might do well to read this book, to see how it should be done, and the rags-to-riches graft - I offer no apology for the cliche - that took him from eeking out a living in doo-wop bar bands to being, arguably, the greatest live performer in business today.

Even just four years before Time magazine put him on the cover declaring him in three simple words “Rock’s New Sensation”, Springsteen was still in the throes of poverty. Even once signed to Columbia Records, he didn’t have the single dollar needed to drive through the Holland tunnel to collect his record company advance. He had just 99 cents in loose change. Depression is another theme that Springsteen covers in depth in the book. It’s an affliction plenty of artists succumb to and have succumbed to - some almost as a badge of honour for their art - but in Springsteen’s case he talks about his occasional struggles with depression as a consequence of his family origins, and a need for control (for that, see my blog post from August last year on the 40th anniversary of the album Born To Run being released). The collapse of his first marriage, to actress Julianne Phillips, led to him “…sliding back toward the chasm where rage, fear, distrust, insecurity and family-patented misogyny made war with my better angels.” Armchair Freudians will no doubt want to study this section in detail.

One of the joys of Keith Richards’ Life was that it wasn’t just about - in fact it hardly was at all - ribald tales of life on the road as one of rock music’s greatest hell-raisers. In fact, there was more about life as a Stone in Ronnie Wood’s autobiography, Ronnie. Richards cast deep into his family origins, his upbringing in post-war, lower-middle class Dartford, of how an extended family was both a blessing and a curse. Born To Run covers very similar ground, in fact, in very similar geography. Like so many of that generation, rock music - especially Elvis - led them out of the darkness of austerity and 1950s strictness. Music became a beacon, a torch, and it’s no wonder that so much of that experience has been worked into Springsteen’s music. Most of it, he now admits, has been autobiographical (Rosalita, for example, is the account of losing his virginity), but there’s clearly been more to come forth, and that’s where the book Born To Run plays its part.

Funny in places, dark in others - especially when facing up to the bouts of depression that have come at him over the years, it transposes the man I saw on July 13 this year, bouncing about for almost four hours on stage in Paris, into someone you may never get to know personally, and yet will feel like you have done by the end of reading it. It will shed light on your own families, your own relationships with your own family. But most of all, in era when the people we most admire are tweeting what they have for breakfast, Born To Run goes some way to break down barriers between us and someone who can rightfully be described as one of the greatest rock stars in the history of rock stardom.

Is this all just a little bit of history repeating?

David Price/Arsenal FC via Getty Images

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Regular readers of my previous blog, What Would David Bowie Do? (retired on compassionate grounds in January), may have grown used to a recurring feature during the final third of last year: the Monday Moan.

This wasn't, I hasten to point out, some general-purpose weekly soapbox, but a cathartic outpouring in response to the increasing frustration of watching Chelsea defend their 2014-2015 Premier League title. Because, as you might remember, despite winning the thing on May 3 with three games to spare (and having effectively taken the title by the previous Christmas), just three months later they played Swansea at Stamford Bridge, and things went steadily downhill from there until José Mourinho ran out of excuses at the same time as he ran out of chances to turn it around. By the time he went "by mutual consent" on December 17, Chelsea were relegation zone-threatening deadbeats. Enter, once more, Uncle Guus to steady the ship. At that point I lost interest. Not in the club or its results - some things are ingrained genetically - but in caring.

Chelsea's worryingly demonstrable decline before our very eyes in a matter of weeks unmasked the truth that the club really wasn't equipped to move itself on, to progress and evolve. Mourinho was as stubborn as ever in sticking to his PowerPoint presentations and the opposition sussed Chelsea out in the knowledge that there was no Plan B. The club itself had abjectly failed to come up with the one or two marquee signings who can sometimes make all the difference. Thus, a squad already demoralised by the way their team doctor had been treated publicly by the coach descended into self-disbelief, lapsed concentration, capitulation and either an inability to kill games off on their own terms, or worse, prevent being killed off themselves.

So what has changed this season, and why the resurrection of the Monday Moan, if only for just this week? Because nothing has changed. Saturday's performance against Arsenal - a fixture in which Chelsea had been able to frustrate the opponent quite satisfyingly for seveal seasons - as well as that against Liverpool two Fridays before, demonstrated a team still lacking the mental strength to turn things around when under duress. That a club should look all at sea without a 35-year-old player is the biggest worry, given that they were actually prepared to lose John Terry permanently until the final hours of last season when, presumably, Chelsea capitulated and gave him a new contract.

But with JT out injured, it is frightening to see how disorganised at the back and toothless at the front they become. Branislav Ivanovic - no doubt a loyal servant - is still incredibly vulnerable (as he was a year ago), César Azpilicueta is still only a makeshift solution at left back (as he was a year ago), Gary Cahill looks clueless (as he has been since returning from England's disaster against Iceland...and indeed, as he was a year ago...) and David Luiz is... Well, let's just say that all the concerns about David Luiz have so far been borne out. Not for nothing, one wag on Twitter wrote on Saturday: "Gary Cahill and David Luiz is the worst central defence partnership since...Gary Cahill and David Luiz". Thibaut Courtois has, since usurping Petr Čech looked less convincing, and his clear angling last week for a move back to Madrid at the end of his current Chelsea contract will not - and has not - endear him to fans, especially those who haven't exactly seen an organising colossus in the Belgian. Personally, I think Asmir Begovic is as good and without the hype.

In front of this culendar of a defence should be sitting at least one glimmer of hope, N'Golo Kante. One of two summer signings to get excited about (Michy Batshuayi being the other), Kante has yet to fully demonstrate why his transfer from Leicester was the wrench Claudio Ranieri professed it to be. It is all about systems, of course, but with Antonio Conte not yet confident enough to adopt the preferred formations he honed in Italy, Kante has been shoe-horned into a Chelsea team which is, to all intents and purposes, that which kicked off the 2014-15 season, albeit with Nemanja Matic looking as ineffective now as he was highly effective then.

Defence is the obvious pain-point for Chelsea. Without Terry they look disorganised and frightened to get stuck in, and Cahill in particular, lost. Courtois' lack of communication doesn't help, either. Down the front, things are somewhat better, but only just. If Pedro being brought on is the solution to replace Hazard or Willian, then you know Chelsea are in trouble (though Hazard's lack of tracking back against Walcott on Saturday cruelly exposed Aspiliqueta). And Diego Costa's relentless pursuit of free kicks and yellow cards for opponents from disinterested referees is just boring and tiring to watch. Please, Antonio, get Diego goal-hanging and work on the supply. He's at least prepared to toil, so the goals will come.

Much of this angst is the result of things that could have been corrected. For two summer transfer windows in a row, Marina Granovskaia and Michael Emenalo have failed to deliver the transfer targets of either Mourinho and Conte (Kante was a make-do subsitute for players in Italy, while Luiz was an outright panic buy), and yet somehow the club can afford to loan out 39 - 39!!! - players deemed surplus to immediate needs. Presumably they know what they're doing: it's just a pity no one at Chelsea Football Club is prepared to talk to the media about what they're doing, so that the press, and therefore us fans (especially those paying to watch the team) can understand the philosophy and, if one exists, the strategy.

Antonio Conte, being the new boy and, notably, not Mourinho, has kept a tight lip over the inadequacies of what he's got to play with, but it's pretty clear what they are. Watching vast swathes of Chelsea defensive territory opened up by Arsenal was painful enough, but then watching Keystone Cops-like moments in the goalmouth against Leicester City and Liverpool was even worse. Whatever Conte does now, he needs to be decisive, and perhaps more than he's been. Chelsea are at present a system looking for a team. OK, so the players Conte wanted aren't there, but on paper, at least, this is a squad that should be putting up a fight, at least more than they did in that squalid 90 minutes on Saturday against Arsenal.

Future legend: David Bowie's Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976)

As I would hope is well recognised, few bend at the knee more to the greatness of David Bowie than I. But there are some limits: the eye-watering Eur 266.99 being asked at my local record emporium for Where Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), the admittedly sumptuous second box set released today and covering The Dame's pre-Berlin, mid-Seventies career, which produced the studio albums Diamond Dogs, Young Americans and Station To Station.

To be fair, that Eur 266 does buy you 13 180g audiophile-quality vinyl discs, including these three albums plus The Gouster - the previously unreleased album that became Young Americans, TWO versions of the double album David Live (the 2005 reissue runs to three-discs) and the double Live Nassau Coliseum '76, plus another collection of rarities, Re:Call 2. For the digitally-minded (and those with smaller budgets) the collection is also available as a 12-CD package at a more modest Eur 129.99. Still, an expensive fortnight, following the release last week of Led Zeppelin's Complete BBC Sessions.

Of course, we're appealing to the über consumer here. Most self-respecting Bowie fans - and even those with only a casual interest - will have the three studio albums already. But, inevitably, interest in The Dame has piqued with his death, and if that brings new appreciation for his canon via these luxury re-releases, so much the better.

What makes this particular box set interesting is where Bowie was in this period. It began with his move, first to New York and then Los Angeles, to make America his base of operations. This, as Paul Tryka detailed in his excellent Starman biography, saw Bowie consumed by compulsive behaviour, including wild spending, Olympic cocaine consumption and numerous obsessions with people (Mick Jagger) and themes (post-apocalyptic dystopia). Diamond Dogs was the first manifestation of the latter: his eighth album, it was built on a fascination with George Orwell's 1984 and the bleak vision of the (then) future it depicted. 

Diamond Dogs also appeared after Bowie had theatrically 'retired' the Ziggy Stardust character, but in doing so he merely moved on to a new guise, the whey-faced Thin White Duke, eschewing the glam rock that Bowie had pursued in the previous two years. Though recorded at London's Olympic Studios (as well as some work at Ludolph Studios in Nederhorst den Berg, a tiny village in the rural Amsterdam hinterland...and just down the road from where I used to live), Diamond Dogs had a noticeably looser sound, pointing towards the 'Americanization' that would evolve further with Young Americans and its notable shift towards soul and funk.

For some of Bowie's earlier cheerleaders, the Diamond Dogs era marked a less welcome change. John Peel, who'd been one of the strongest champions at the outset of Bowie's career, remarked that Bowie's cover of the Eddie Floyd soul classic Knock On Wood, and released as a single off David Live, was "lazy, arrogant and impertinent". But it was on the tour that produced David Live that Bowie appeared in one of the most fascinating - and disturbing - documentaries ever made about a rock musician: Alan Yentob's Cracked Actor. 

Made for the BBC's Omnibus arts magazine, Yentob captured an emaciated Bowie, deep in the grip of cocaine addition, on tour in California, with semi-lucid interviews in the back of limousines interspersed with footage of Bowie performing the Diamond Dogs title track along with earlier entries from the canon like Space Oddity, Aladdin Sane and John, I'm Only Dancing (Again). Sadly, Cracked Actor has never been released on home media, although some dodgy bootlegs - recorded off the last BBC screening - lurk online. See it if you can, but be prepared to see a Bowie in a very different space to the jovial, blokey star of chat shows in the late 1990s.

Who Can I Be Now? could very easily have been called something like 'The American Years'. His desire to explore contemporary American music stretches back to the demise of Ziggy Stardust, when the singer was already looking for a new vehicle. Who Can I Be Now? is one of the tracks on The Gouster, the album that Bowie worked on immediately after the Dogs tour, and is a title reflecting his need to reinvent himself. The album took him to Philadelphia's Sigma Sound studio to immerse in the local music culture with producer Tony Visconti, with whom he had reunited to work with on the David Live release. Though The Gouster was never released, it contained early versions of Right, Can You Hear Me and Somebody Up There Likes Me, along with a reworking of John, I'm Only Dancing (Again) and an early version of Young Americans.

It would be a stretch to say that The Gouster alone warrants buying the Who Can I Be Now? package, but for Bowie completists it marks a curious bridging point between Diamond Dogs and Young Americans. It was, according to Visconti, an attempt at soul - "plastic soul", as Bowie would later waspishly brand it - and even its title (a reference to African-American fashion in the 1960s) was meant to represent a statement of attitude. 

It's eventual release is more, though, than a work in progress, but the reason why it didn't appear in its originally recorded form was partly down to Bowie recording too many longer songs to fit a single album, and also to the capricious state Bowie was in at the time. Some of the songs recorded for The Gouster were taken into a New York studio with John Lennon, who gave the prototypes outright Philly soul sound (which included guitar work from Carlos Alomar and then-unknown singer Luther Vandross) more of a pop feel. But given how much we still don't know about Bowie, even the presence of a few previously unreleased tracks interpolates gaps in the fan's understanding of the musical - and physical - state Bowie was in between 1974 and 1976.

The cocaine that Bowie was hoovering up at this point in his life may have affected his increasingly paranoid personality, but not necessarily his creativity. After Young Americans came Station To Station. Lasting only six tracks and running for just under 38 minutes, it is both a demonstration of  Bowie's impatience to release new material, but also the inventiveness with which he was still streets ahead of any of his peers at the time. Golden Years still sounds, 40 years later, box-fresh, while TVC 15 stands out for its funk and pace, and remains one of my favourite Bowie songs of all time. And his cover of Nina Simone's Wild Is The Wind became so distinct it's now hard to think of how Simone recorded it to begin with (a live version on the Bowie At The Beeb limited edition three-CD set in 2000 saw Bowie - accompanied by his brilliant band of the time - teetering between torch song and rock epic).

Thematically, Station To Station found Bowie toying obsessively with yet new literary inspiration, namely the works of Aleister Crowley and Friedrich Nietzsche, and reflects a state of mind in some degree of turmoil. It's hard not to wonder how much of that was the result of the cocaine. But the album - which precedes the Berlin trilogy and its starker sound and vision (sorry...) - also evolves the funk that had been the hallmark of Diamond Dogs and Young Americans. Ever the magpie, Bowie had become interested in German industrial rock and the synths and rhythms of Kraftwerk, the influence of which can be heard in spirit on Station To Station. However, even Bowie admitted that the album was also a statement of detachment. 

Towards the end of the album's tour (from which the Live Nassau Coliseum 76 release was culled), Bowie arrived at London's Victoria Station in an open-topped Mercedes and was photographed giving what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Having previously been questioned by police for possession of Nazi memorabilia as well as being quoted saying that the UK "...could benefit from a Fascist leader", many felt that, along with his somewhat stark, black and white stage aesthetic, Bowie was indeed leaning to the extreme right. Not long after, a drunk Eric Clapton gave his support to Enoch Powell's notorious comments on immigration, leading to the formation of the Rock Against Racism movement. The popular perception became that Britain's rock elite were not as cool as their fans had expected them to be.

Bowie would later dismiss the Victoria Station episode as a case of a photographer catching him at an unfortunate angle. Others would simply put it all down to a rock star's descent into cocaine-induced mania (and portrayed, inadvertently, by Bob Geldof's 'Pink' in Alan Parker's film version of Pink Floyd's The Wall). No wonder, then, that Bowie's next move would be to decamp with Iggy Pop to Berlin - then Europe's drug gateway - though to sober up, both chemically but also creatively.

It's hard, then, not to view the music contained on the numerous discs of Who Can I Be Now? as the result of a rock star in stereotypical drug-addled exploration. But whereas the mountains of coke being taken by the rock music community in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s led to some of music's blandest output, the reason why Bowie continues to be deservedly exalted is loud and clear in this collection. Whatever his state, whatever his application of outside influences, he was, between '74 and '76, still the most unique performer in rock and roll, then or since.

Still dazed, but not confused: Led Zeppelin - The Complete BBC Sessions

There are many things to love about the BBC. I do, willingly, admit a bias on this, since dear old Auntie put a roof over my head from birth (my dad was a BBC studio cameraman at the time and remained with the Beeb until his retirement). I therefore have a close affinity with the organisation, as distinguished and grand a public institution as the National Health Service, and probably equally as flawed.

But despite all the things about the BBC you could probably fill an entire edition of the Daily Mail with (which they do), one of its finest traditions has been the curation of music, from pop to the Proms and all stops in between, recorded in its own studios and theatres, and during in-show sessions for programmes like John Peel's suspiciously titled Top Gear (nothing to do with motoring, folks...), Radio 1’s landmark In Concert broadcasts, and other specials over the last half century or more.

This incredible wealth of music history lying in the BBC's vaults writes the history of pop and rock, and many of the recordings have found themselves released by the bands themselves, often providing fascinating snapshots of bands in development. The two Beatles' Live At The BBC compilations, recorded in the early 60s for the BBC Light Programme (Radio 1's forerunner) are wonderfully reverent captures of a band in the initial throes of superstardom, while Bowie At The Beeb covers The Dame's emergence in the late 1960s, as he trod a line between progressive rock and the vaudeville of his Anthony Newley/Jacques Brel phase (it also includes brief but fascinating exchanges between Bowie and Peel, for example, introducing his "new" guitarist "Michael Ronson"). The recently released Yardbirds Live At The BBC double CD captures the raw energy of the band as it launched the British R&B boom, along with the careers of three Surrey guitarists - Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Amusingly, it includes interviews between the BBC's plummy-voiced Brian Matthew - whose corny questions and use of phrases like "hit parade" became ironically parodied years later by Smash Hits magazine - and Page, sporting a slightly Epsom-posh, high-pitched voice.

By the time he played at the BBC with The Yardbirds in 1967, Page was already a seasoned 23-year-old session guitarist, having recorded with The Who (augmenting Pete Townshend on their first single, I Can't Explain) and The Kinks, played on Van Morrison/Them's Baby Please Don't Go and Here Comes the Night, and on Petula Clark's Downtown. In 1968, The Yardbirds' Keith Relf and Jim McCarty left, leaving Page to recruit replacements for a tour of Scandinavia. The musicians he brought in were vocalist Robert Plant, drummer John Bonham and another prolific session musician. John Paul Jones. And thus was born "the New Yardbirds", until a Keith Moon quip about a "lead Zeppelin" brought about another change of name: Led Zeppelin.

Ten years after Zeppelin formally broke up in the wake of Bonham's death, Page took on the role of band curator, overseeing a series of CD remasters of the original studio recordings. However, despite being one of the greatest stage acts in rock history, there had been a paucity of official Led Zeppelin live recordings to work on, despite the 1970s vogue for live albums. The one exception had been the soundtrack for The Song Remains The Same, the critically flawed concert film recorded over three nights at Madison Square Garden, and added to with bizarre fantasy sequences, such as Plant in soft focus rescuing a castle-bound maiden while in search of the Holy Grail. No, me neither.

For the rest, however, Zeppelin fans had to make do with myriad bootlegs, many of which had been poorly recorded on dictaphones smuggled into venues. This has long irked Jimmy Page, believing that fans have been denied access to the full power of the band live. So, on November 11, 1997 (coincidentally, my 30th birthday folks...), Led Zeppelin released BBC Sessions, a CD package containing BBC recordings from 1969 for the likes of Peel and Alexis Korner's Rhythm And Blues show, as well as exclusive BBC gigs between 1969 and 1971 during which early versions of Dazed And Confused (which Page had first performed with The Yardbirds), Communication Breakdown and the Whole Lotta Love medley, a staple of their later tours, were premiered.

The BBC Sessions package - which included a limited edition version containing band interviews - was a masterpiece. Coming more than 20 years after The Song Remains The Same, it gave fans a chance to hear Zeppelin in their raw state, capturing in sessions often recorded in small radio studios the energy that would later expand into the arenas that became their domain in the 1970s. Of note, however, was the quality of the recordings: in 1997 the CD was still in its infancy, along with digital media in general, but fans were amazed by the detail in the recordings, such as the squeak of Bonham's hi-hat levers going up and down on one of the Dazed And Confused performances.

"The BBC really had very well trained engineers who would have done orchestral sessions, jazz sessions, folk, rock - even skiffle at one point," Page told Johnny Walker last week during a Facebook Live interview to promote the reissue of the BBC recordings - The Complete BBC Sessions, which was released on Friday. "These engineers did a terrific job, considering [most sessions] were recorded for just one broadcast. But to go in with something this avant garde for them to listen to...we were absolutely fearless!".

BBC engineers were products of highly respected training centres, such as the BBC technical college at Wood Norton, near Evesham in Worcestershire. For Page - who, on top of his experience as a session musician, was already a skilled hand in the studio - the BBC's staff responded to the challenge of Led Zeppelin's loud, raucous blues. "[The BBC] didn't know what they were going to be confronted with. For instance, with the Dazed And Confused recording we went in with that and the shorter Communication Breakdown to give two sides of the coin of what we were doing. But there were also usually three, maybe four, songs on the session, but we also used to make up songs on the go, like Sunshine Woman, The Girl I Love and Travelling Riverside Blues. We were creating music so freely and these songs were just in the moment."

Some of those 'made-up' songs didn't appear on the original BBC Sessions CD package, something Zeppelin fans have been known to growl about, feeling that they'd missed out on unheard songs from the canon. "20 years ago a lot got left off because of the amount of space you get on a CD," Page explained to Walker. To this end, the 'new' BBC set contains all 20 tracks from the 1997 release along with nine previously unheard performances from a 'lost' session. These include two more versions of Communication Breakdown and What It Is And What Should Never Be, another version of Dazed And Confused, the semi-improvised Sunshine Woman, and the instrumental White Summer (which appeared as a track extra on the 1990 CD reissue of Coda).

For those who missed the 1997 release, The Complete BBC Sessions is a terrific and thoroughly worthy indulgence - available in three options: an eight-disc (five vinyl and three CD) package containing a 48-page book, an individually-numbered, limited edition luxury print and access to high-definition digital downloads. A five-disc 180g vinyl package is also available, along with a CD-only version containing all 33 tracks on three discs. And, as if that wasn't enough, all versions come with comprehensive sleeve notes by Dave Lewis, editor of the long-running Led Zeppelin magazine and the fan site Tight But Loose, as well as author of several highly informative books about the band.

That The Complete BBC Sesssions just covers the period between 1969 and 1971 shouldn't mean that fans should clamour for more. The 1971 recordings were their last for the BBC, perhaps marking the moment that, with their fourth album, they were propelled into the superstar period of their career, spending the next nine years as their original line-up marauding across the world - and especially North America. Some will say, with some justification, that Led Zeppelin became the perfect example of bloated stadium rock (I will always disagree), but the thing that makes The Complete BBC Sessions so engaging is where the band were, musically, at the outset of their journey.

This was the dawning of the rock era and Led Zeppelin were, arguably, the vanguard, bridging that period between pop's maturing and British rock's transatlantic dominance. By 1969, Page had, in just a few years, gone from suburban Epsom to playing on Petula Clark and Tom Jones as a teenager, and then on to founding one of the most notable - and notorious - bands. At the BBC, though, you can hear Led Zeppelin, as a collective, playing with, toying with the blues and finding the voice that would eventually be branded "heavy rock". Most amusingly, however, is the idea that BBC engineers - whom, it seemed from my visits to Television Centre with my dad, were mostly called Brian and wore cardigans - were studiously, scientifically even, recording Robert Plant's overtly sexual singing, Bonzo's simply enormous drumming, Jonesy's measured, cultured bass and keyboards, and Page's incredible guitar work for posterity.

On this new collection there are also lighter moments - the Isleys' It's Your Thing as a bolt-on to Communication Breakdown, for example, plus a far greater array of experimentation than Zeppelin usually gets credit for. There is little wastage, either. "John Paul Jones and I had both been session musicians ourselves so we were used to working under very controlled conditions, where every second is literally costing money," explained Page in the Facebook Live session. "We were always very efficient - ruthlessly efficient."

Without getting into the marketing economics of the Led Zeppelin reissues - with middle aged, credit card-burning fans like me clearly the target demographic - they are clearly a labour of love for Page, and his earnestness at curating the Zeppelin legacy shines through. "With the renaissance of vinyl it was crying out to do this, and to put it in context of the reissues of the studio albums," Page explained to Walker. "This is a historical document. There wasn't anywhere else in the world that was like the BBC. It's a great time capsule. You can hear the band progressing from 1969 to 1971 - only two years!"

The process has also been rewarding, but highly time-consuming for Page: "The BBC Sessions are 'complete' as the name of the package says! I've been doing this a long time - you have to listen to everything in real-time. There are no short cuts," to which he added "Now it's time to dust down the guitar!", pointing to his eagerness to get on with a new project - with, or probably, without Plant.

Baroque and roll - The Divine Comedy's Foreverland

Let's face it, there is no one in pop, rock or any other genre who writes a lyric like "Who pulls the strings? Who makes all the deals? Five-foot-three in Cuban heels" and gets away with it quite like Neil Hannon. Or, indeed, anyone who would, to begin with, write a song like Napoleon Complex, one of the many delights on Foreverland, the first album in six years from The Divine Comedy, and an enduring treat to boot.

Six years after Bang Goes The Knighthood, Hannon is back with a wry romp through history, further demonstrating that popular music needn't be some autotuned, Simon Cowell-curated homogeneity. There are strings, harpsichords and brass - all vintage Divine Comedy sounds - and a playful landscape that is part 1960s musical and part ironic rock, with the occasional nod to spy film soundtacks (A Desperate Man especially).

Hannon's lyrical and stylistic dexterity reminds me of Ian Dury at his sharpest, even Bowie in his Tony Newley phase, but with the added twist of applying it to songs about the French Foreign Legion and even Catherine The Great (a history device, as it's actually about his partner and collaborator Cathy Davey and is, according to Hannon, "the kind of love song you write if you have been watching too much BBC4").

Coming from the man who wrote a Top Ten hit single about Britain's leading intercity bus company, Foreverland cuts a fine line - as so often is the case with The Divine Comedy - between irony, novelty and earnest musoness. It rarely fails, however. If at all. It is clever, as all of Hannon's work is, but never disappears up itself. After all, who else could write a song entitled How Can You Leave Me On My Own containing a line like "When you leave I become a bad-smelling, couch-dwelling dickhead"? Exactly.

Humour is always there with The Divine Comedy, with Hannon pitching lyrics somewhere between the words of Spike Milligan and even Noël Coward (viz Funny Peculiar - "You’re strangely attractive/You’re oddly adorable"). Amid the baroque and the theatrical there is real romantic warmth: "Finding the one who’s got it - who is with you besotted is like finding the lesser spotted Dodo in Soho - so rare," Hannon confesses on The One Who Loves You with a flourish of Lewis Carroll. Even To The Rescue's line about "Got a vigilante sleeping in my bed/I looked for Marilyn, I got Che instead" pays a clever compliment to Davey.

Listened to on a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon, crossing London by train, Forverland was the perfect soundtrack, It's also a rare pop album - one combining wit with the heartfelt, quirkiness with familiarity. What an absolute pleasure.

15 years

© Simon Poulter 2016

15 years. 15 years ago since our world changed forever. 15 years since four planes caused the deaths of 2,977 innocent people. 15 years since the world descended into a seemingly perpetual state of war in and with the Middle East. 15 years since our travel liberties were curtailed. 15 years since we were, as a society, rendered anxious by threat, suspicion and anger.

There were acts of terror and mass murder in the name of ideology before 9/11. There have been such acts since, and sadly, there will be more in the future. London, Paris, Madrid, Bali, Istanbul, Brussels, and Baghdad, Kabul, Mosul and plenty of others on a pretty much daily basis.

You can't and you shouldn't judge the magnitude of 9/11 in comparison with other attacks. But 9/11 was and still is, 15 years on, a day and an act of such singular brutality, of murder on a scale that even now seems hard to fully appreciate. But we will have to, as, today, once more, we again see the footage of the Twin Towers coming down; pictures of United Airlines flight 175 slamming into the South Tower of New York's World Trade Center between floors 77 and 85 at 9.03am, 17 minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into floors 93 to 99 of the North Tower; of the aftermath at the Pentagon after American Airlines flight 77 had smashed into it like a guided missile; and of the words "roll it" as passengers bravely attempted to seize back control of United Airlines flight 93 before it crashed into field in empty field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

We will see and hear these visceral reminders of that sunny September day in 2001 and we will reflect, I hope, on the evil minds that dreamed up the "planes operation", and the 19 who carried it out, whose ideals deemed it necessary to murder almost 3000 people who were just doing their jobs - travelling for business, working at their desks, responding to an emergency.

I've blogged before about my own experiences that Tuesday, of the helplessness of watching events unfold early in the morning as I was waking in California. I won't retread old ground, save to say that 9/11 haunts me still. Many have said it was "their JFK". Others, of my parents' generation, have said that, while awful, 9/11 fails to compare to living through a world war, and I can see that. But that doesn't ease the discomfort of knowing that the families of 1,113 of the 2,753 who died at the World Trade Center still have no biological confirmation of their relatives' deaths. Or that 33,000 who were around New York that morning are being treated currently for serious illnesses and cancers linked to the attacks (in fact, US government figures show that there are nearly 75,000 people being monitored for 9/11-linked illnesses). For them, there is no closure, no talk of the 9/11 legacy, no complaints about removing belts and shoes and liquids at security checks, and certainly no remorse about the death of 9/11's chief architect.

Over the last five years I've visited New York and its New Jersey hinterland regularly for work. Every time I've flown in to JFK or Newark airports, and have seen Lower Manhattan, I've been reminded of 9/11, but not just of the act itself, but of the impact it had on the greater New York area. Driving through the small communities of rural New Jersey, you will still occasionally see a yellow ribbon commemorating a fireman, a police officer or a medic who lost their lives that day, 15 years ago. And behind many front doors live those who lived through the event, only to be scarred for life, mentally, as well as physically. Again, just for going to work one sunny Tuesday morning. Astonishing heroes, all of them.

Today's anniversary will inevitably come with questioning as to why we put ourselves through this pain every year. It's no different, however, from commemorating the Somme or D-Day or any other such pivotal event in history. And it's not about lessons learned, either. America learned from 9/11, as the 567 pages of the 9/11 Commission Report outlined. The world learned not to take aviation security for granted ever again. But those are things that get fixed, after the fact.

In a recent op-ed for USA Today, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, respectively chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, wrote that since 9/11, global terrorism has "intensified", citing the Global Terrorism Index, to reveal that terrorist activity reached its highest recorded level in 2014, the last year with available data, with 32,685 terrorist-caused deaths. In 2001, that number didn't go higher than 5,000.

"Our focus cannot solely be on our own homeland," Kean and Hamilton wrote. "Terrorism might not pose an existential challenge to the United States, but it is a spreading disease eating away at the foundation of the free, open and lawful international system and the alliances that the US depends on for its prosperity and security."

"That day changed all of us. It changed America. And it changed the world." So said, recently to NBC News, Andrew Card, George W. Bush's chief of staff who infamously interrupted the president during a September 11, 2001 visit to a Florida infants school to whisper: "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."

15 years ago today, America was under attack, but so was the rest of the world. And still is - and will continue to be all the time ideological hatred is allowed to manifest. Wherever it manifests itself.

A little touch of Wilco - Schmilco

It's perhaps ironic that the band once tagged 'the American Radiohead' should have pulled off something of a Radiohead with this, their tenth album. Not that Wilco have gone all Kid A on us with Schmilco, but in producing a record as muted and apparently reticent, they've (presumably) inadvertently mirrored the similarly understated mood of their supposed British counterparts' swoonfully good Moon Shaped Pool from earlier this year.

For some, these things are a big deal. Jeff Tweedy and friends' breakthrough in the mid-90s, a period culminating in the landmark Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, pitched Wilco as an eclectic alt-rock band, pointing in interesting directions ranging from The Beatles to the American New Wave. Last year's streamed album Star Wars returned to these contrarian origins, but Schmilco, recorded in the same sessions, ploughs a more conventional furrow, rarely straying from the softly-strummed and contemplative. Not that there is anything bad about that.

Indeed, Schmilco comes across as the intentional comedown after Star Wars, and none more so than the backdoor jam of Normal American Kids, which sets the tone for the 12-track collection with Tweedy's mockingly self-resentful quips about simply not fitting in. Continuing the theme of childhood acceptance, If I Ever Was A Child romps briskly through its two minutes and 56 seconds with a countrified jaunt that has overtones of the legendary Harry Nilsson, whose album titles Schmilco doffs its cap to. The pace picks up further with Cry All Day, threatening to get rockier still, but maintaining restraint, despite seemingly releasing pent-up irritation at someone with lines like "I'm sick of your affliction, but you're just a smart ass and blind".

If Wilco have endured comparisons over the years with The Beatles, they should have no complaint about this coming up again with Nope. Their case isn't helped by the uncanny similarity between Tweedy's voice and John Lennon's, and the sort of scratchy blues the Fabs' regularly explored in their latter years. And, at a pinch, you can hear traces of Come Together, and again, I'm not complaining - far from it. Someone to Lose, with its wiggy guitars and laid-back rock, has similar Beatley moments, as does the wry Happiness, with the slap-back treatment of vocals and drums bringing Tweedy closer to Lennon than ever. It might sound lazy to make such a comparison, but given how much we've been deprived by both the Beatles' truncated career as a band, and Lennon's tragically truncated life, it's actually a joy to have a band as subtly inventive as Wilco pick up the baton.

The tracks are mostly short and sweet - Quarters is mostly instrumental - as if the result of improvised jams. With some bands that might leave the impression that the album is a collection of unfinished songs, but most carry a sense of delivery and completion, Locator the one exception, with its slightly unfulfilled fade out.

It's understandable, then, how some reviewers have regarded Schmilco as an interim entry in the Wilco canon (a "minor addition", wrote London's Evening Standard). But even if this 36-minute collection is a relative novella in the overall Wilco library, it's as satisfying, as warm and as complete as any in the ten albums they've released.

Boldly going, etc, etc, on this day of days

It is September 8: a fantastic day to be alive if you're the actor Martin Freeman, as it's his birthday, a not so fantastic day for the late Peter Sellers, whose birthday it would have been. September the 8th also marks two very important anniversaries - one for me personally, and the other, that of a TV show which made its debut on this day 50 years ago and, while lasting only three series in its original form, launched one of the most enduring domains of popular culture.

But, first, let's get my anniversary out of the way: 30 years ago today I began working for a living. On September 8, 1986, I walked through the front door of 47 Gravel Hill in Ludlow, the quaint, Tudor-timbered Shropshire market town to start out as a staff writer on the short-lived but [briefly] much-loved LM magazine. It was the brainchild of the publishing company Newsfield, who, having made huge success in the nascent video games industry with the magazines Crash, Zzap! 64 and Amtix!, turned its attention to the 'men's lifestyle segment'. Somewhat blokeish, LM targeted young men with features on music, films, fashion and, as I recall, gravy. In fact, a lot of gravy, an in-joke born of the many Ludlow-based LM staffers who had, at some point, passed through a local guest house where boatloads of gravy gushed over most meals.

Not the Star Trek cast - the LM staff: yours truly second from right at the back

As a precocious 18-year-old, fresh from A-levels and at the southern end of LM's 18-30 demographic, I was tasked with writing news stories and reviews of new albums as well as - remember this? - the latest VHS releases. Not long into the job I was bundled off to Birmingham to gather in material for the first edition of a monthly feature called Man In A Suitcase, named after a classic '60s detective show then in afternoon reruns on the BBC. The idea was that each month I'd visit a city - Birmingham and, subsequently, Manchester, Newcastle and Brighton - to soak up its youth culture. This meant talking to local celebrities like Factory's Tony Wilson, Mick Hucknall and a young Eammon Holmes (then co-presenting a daytime TV show...much like today...) and hanging out at the legendary Haçienda in Manchester, interviewing bands like Shakespeare's Sister and Swingout Sister (bands without "sister" in their name were also available), and getting to spend quality time in Newcastle with Jools Holland, producer Malcolm Gerrie and the crew behind The Tube, then bucking trends by having A-list rock bands come up to the north-east on a Friday evening for that seminal music TV show.

Sadly, LM only lasted five issues, closing in the May of 1987, but it was enough to see me started in journalism, leading to work at Smash Hits, Record Mirror and others. I was hardly Lester Bangs and LM was no Rolling Stone, but those nine months in Shropshire were my grounding. The magazine itself was something of a precursor to Loaded but, contrary to some opinions, never a lascivious lads magazine (even though many assumed that was what the name stood for). LM even broke ground, introducing the world to the Rough Guides and founders Mark Ellingham and Martin Dunford, and running a substantial feature on HIV/AIDS at a time when there was considerable ignorance on the subject amongst the magazine's core readership. With grim public information films on television and in cinemas narrated by John Hurt intoning "don't die of ignorance", I contributed to the feature by spending a Saturday in Hereford vox-popping at some considerable risk to my own wellbeing (Me: "Are you aware of AIDS? Do you practice safe sex?" Hereford people: "Do you want a smack in the head?").

One of LM's lighter subjects was the subject of today's second major anniversary - Star Trek, which made its debut on American television 50 years ago tonight. LM ran a substantial cover feature in its April 1987 edition, incredibly just 20 years after the original TV series had begun, and somewhat presciently only a few months before its first spinoff, Star Trek - The Next Generation made its own debut on American television.

As this blog has reflected several times in recent months, 1966 was an incredible year for pop culture, with The Beatles releasing Revolver and The Beach Boys bringing out Pet Sounds, artists of all kinds reflecting on the developing war in Vietnam, Time magazine declaring London "The Swinging City", racial tensions brewing throughout the US and England winning the World Cup. Yes, kids, it did happen once.

Star Trek was something of a product of the hippy ideals emerging at the time: tasked by the studio MGM to come up with a hit new primetime TV show, former bomber pilot Gene Roddenberry had the idea of a sci-fi show which captured the mood of the space race, then in full flow, and was infused with the pioneer spirit of classic Western series. The concept he arrived at, a "Wagon Train to the stars", was pitched to Lucille Ball's production company Desilu (Ball herself reportedly thought that the idea of Star Trek, given its name, was a reality show in which celebrities visited American troops overseas).

With work beginning in the summer of 1964 on a pilot script, two lasting milestones were reached that November: the first was the early design of the USS Enterprise, the 'wagon' that would propel Roddenberry's band of pioneers on their five-year journey into "space, the final frontier". The second was the casting of Leonard Nimoy as a half-human, half-alien member of the Enterprise crew - Mr. Spock.

In the pilot, which began shooting in December 1964, Spock was a red-skinned Martian with the pointy ears. This, NBC, the network which commissioned the show, concluded made him look too much like the Devil. On reflection, the eventual look Nimoy adopted became as much an icon of the show, and indeed the franchise, as anything else. The pilot starred Jeffrey Hunter as the smooth but somewhat anodyne Captain Pike, John Hoyt as the doctor, Boyce, Peter Duryea as Tyler, the navigator, and Majel Barrett (who would later become Roddenberry's wife as well as Nurse Christine Chapel in the series) as the Enterprise's straight-laced First Officer. NBC rejected pilot, but persistence took over and new scripts were produced, leading to a new pilot - Where No Man Has Gone Before - being chosen to go into production the following July.

Casting for the new pilot became the next lasting milestone. Pike was replaced by Captain James Tiberius Kirk, with the handsome, classically-trained 34-year-old Canadian character actor William Shatner hired for the role. There were other significant decisions made: a design brief to build a 'physical' shuttle craft started to take too long, so Roddenberry's team came up with the idea of a 'transporter beam' to get the Enterprise crew from the ship onto the new worlds and civilisations that were the premise of their five-year mission. And in devices like the phasers, tricorders and communicators - the latter of which presciently envisaged the design of modern flip-phones - Star Trek was to later establish a lucrative line of toys and merchandising.

After what seemed like lengthy deliberation of the second pilot, NBC gave the green light for a 16-episode series of Star Trek in February 1966, and over the following three months episodes were intensely shot back-to-back. Further, lasting casting decisions were made, with craggy-faced De Forrest Kelly brought in as Doctor 'Bones' McCoy, another Canadian, Jimmy Doohan as Caledonian chief engineer Scott, and, for reasons that would later become highly significant socially, actress and singer Nichelle Nichols was given the role of communications officer Lieutenant Uhura.

At 8.30pm on September 8, the first episode of Star Trek went out on American television. For the first time, audiences heard the famous intro "Space - the final frontier...". Initial reactions were positive, though not overwhelming. But this was enough for NBC to commission a further 13 episodes of the first season. Amongst audiences there was much admiration for the quality of the show. This still being 1966, the special effects, the aliens and planet sets - could be politely described as 'of their time', but there was much more going on besides a lot of polystyrene boulders. In particular, there was the diversity of the cast, and a valid attempt to embrace the space age with a show more about exploration than confrontation, though there was still plenty of that.

Star Trek was, however, something of a brave show, even in the changing times of the 1960s. It's racial diversity - even the first interacial kiss on prime time TV, between Kirk and Uhura - was a landmark. But the ratings didn't seem to match the magnitude, and after its third season in 1969, the plug was pulled. That might have easily been the end of Star Trek: like The Prisoner (which started on British television only a few days beforehand), consigned to a brief experiment with fantasy on television before returning to the usual weekly diet of cop shows and medical dramas.

However, after it's network cancellation, Star Trek entered syndication, and the show began to pick up what would now be called a cult audience. In 1973, Paramount launched a 22-episode animated series, aimed at the Saturday morning children's audience, but featuring the voices of Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, Doohan, Nichols, Barrett and George Takei, who'd joined the live action show as helmsman Mr. Sulu in Star Trek's second season. Between these two platforms, Star Trek grew its global audience (my first experience of colour TV was seeing Star Trek at a childhood friend's house and being amazed by the different coloured uniforms of the cast).

There is much, much more to say about Star Trek - the 13 movies and five spinoff series (including the new one, Star Trek: Discovery due next year) that have followed. The most recent, JJ Abrams-directed and produced reboots have been excellent entertainment, whether you've been into the canon before or not. And even if the original TV series didn't exactly initially set the world alight, think back to that evening, 50 years ago today, when audiences were first introduced to a show that went boldly going where no TV show had gone before. 1966 - what a year.

Kirk out.