Michele Stodart's torch songs

© Simon Poulter 2023

I seem to have a habit of only venturing north of the Thames to hear music you can’t boogie to when it is freezing cold. I also seem to have a habit of hearing said music inside churches that are marginally less cold than on the outside, but that may be just be a reflection of the kind of music that appeals to me.  

One year ago this week I squeezed into my parka and then squeezed into a pew at the Union Chapel in Islington to see Matt Deighton and friends (and family) charm the pants off all and sundry, as he tends to do. So, almost 12 months later, on the final evening of November, I’m a couple of miles down the road in in St. Pancras, in a church, and I’m wearing the parka again. However, for some inexplicable reason, it’s a little smaller than I remember.

The place of worship in question is the delightful St. Pancras Old Church, which dates back to the fourth century, and I’m here for an equally bewitching evening with Michele Stodart. The bassist in festival favourites The Magic Numbers (along with her brother Romeo and fellow siblings and former neighbours Sean and Angela Gannon) has dialled down their indie verve on her solo outings to pursue a flavour of Americana in songs drawn from the personal and the confessional. 

The latest, Invitation, released in September (and now nominated for Album Of The Year in the UK Americana Awards), appeared in the wake of what Stodart described as “life-changing personal circumstances”, without elaborating on the specifics. That said, she has talked of the album coming from “a place of inviting in the darkness, the hard times, the sadness, anger, loss, love and grief...all of the unknown feelings that get woken up inside you.” Which, it must be said, suitably sets expectations the record duly fulfils.

There are certainly a few emotional yards being trod on this album, which at the Old Church, Stodart performs in its entirety, a seven-piece band behind her, including pedal steel guitarist Holly Carter, a violin player and a harpist. They fill out the small stage, set in front of the church’s apse, cohesively providing a bed for Stodart’s smoky voice (she sounds a lot like her brother but in a higher register) and an engaging, enchanting energy. Between songs, Stodart - one of the friendliest, huggiest performers I have ever met - speaks proudly of the women in her life: her teenage daughter Maisie, her Portuguese opera singer mother and her partner Immy, all of whom are amongst the 100 or so folk in attendance. But she is also diffident, hinting at the childhood shyness that she has spoken of (a trait seemingly at odds with being the bass player of a band that has rightly become a Glasto staple).

© Simon Poulter 2023

The inspirations for Invitation are briefly alluded to in her introductions, but there is more depth online, as she descrbed the album as reflecting years of “change, growth and transformation”. It is, she reveals, an “intimate, personal record, with songs that touch on themes of motherhood, relationships, mental health, transformation, endings and new beginnings.”  

That couldn’t be more obvious than from the opening track, Tell Me, which unrolls a conversation between lovers near the bottom of the downslope of a relationship (although not actually written directly from personal experience), one that most of us have experienced at some point in time, and usually late at night. The line “Are there any of the other sides to me that you couldn’t love?” is loaded with jaded ambiguity. 

The seven tracks that follow continue in this vein, to a greater or lesser degree, touching at both the uplifting aspects of romantic entanglement and the bleak. Stodart’s vocals breathe like Patsy Cline through the torch songs Push And Pull and Undone, while the warming, jazzy vibes of The House wrap a proverbial blanket around the ears. 

These Bones speaks of the emotional wear-and-tear of a strained relationship - “I ain’t hanging round to die,” she tells her antagonist, while The Good Fight appears to be moving things on with the opening line: “You took back the key and you closed the door,” while remaining regretful of a love that could have been. 

Drowning brings the album to an end with perhaps Stodart’s bleakest statement of the album: “I lay here surrounded by these four walls of nothingness inside of my mind, getting smaller and smaller this space I’m sinking in”. On paper, depressing (and, even, possibly a statement of depression), it comes wrapped in a shimmer of reverb reminiscent of Richard Hawley, generating something of a dream state to close the record. If all this sounds a little too melancholy to the upbeat crowd lapping it up in this elderly church, sat within the environs of Victorian railway infrastructure and concrete modernism , it’s a euphoric full stop to the first half of the evening. 

Resuming after the interval, Stodart and her band deliver a set of as-yet unreleased new songs that suggest that the pre-Covid burst of creativity that produced Invitation is continuing to bear new fruit. The new material builds out the second half until it reaches a finale to savour. This was the third time I’ve seen Stodart live as a solo artist, and on each occasion there has been a demonstrable outpouring of love and professional respect from her peers (she regularly participates in songwriting workshops and is building up a reputation as a producer). 

Some of that love is in the church, as friends present include acclaimed singer-songwriters Kathryn Williams, Hannah White and Daisy Chute, who are invited up on stage with Romeo Stodart for a seemingly unscheduled (and unrehearsed) but rousing finale of The Band’s Bob Dylan-written I Shall Be Released. It’s the song that also ends The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s film of the group’s all-star final concert. While that included special guests like Dylan, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Ringo Starr, the space in front of the Old Church’s altar is filled with no less a celebration of music by Stodart and her friends. It may not have been San Francisco’s Winterland, but its intimacy is just what Stodart’s music is made for.

Peter Gabriel’s i/o - slow train coming

Peter Gabriel has rarely, if ever, done things by convention. He left Genesis in 1975 just as they were filling larger venues and selling records in places other than just Belgium and Italy. When he launched his solo career in 1977 he abandoned the dull custom of titling albums by naming his first four ‘Peter Gabriel’, much to the consternation of his American record company. On the third of those albums he instructed Phil Collins to not use cymbals, purely to disrupt the drummer’s natural inclination to punctuate rhythms with them. 

For the 56 years Gabriel has been making music for a living he has seemingly trodden his own path - and at his own pace. Which, invariably, has been glacial. Those first solo albums came along at a clip – all four released in the space of five years - and even the gap between the fourth and the commercial triumph that was So was just four years. 

But then things started to slow, as a heightened celebrity took Gabriel off in different directions, and not always actually involving making music. The ‘divorce album’ Us appeared in 1992, and its successor Up in 2002, but since then Gabriel has been tinkering at this and that, side projects such as co-founding The Elders with Richard Branson and the late Nelson Mandela, and involving himself in the human rights foundation Witness. There were wildly esoteric ventures, such as Gabriel at his most Brian Pern-like, making music with bonobo apes at an ape language laboratory (apparently, they’re a thing). 

Occasionally scraps of music have been thrown out there - offcuts, apparently, gifted to soundtracks (and compiled into the wittily-titled compilation Rated PG in 2019). There have been more substantive ventures, such as Scratch My Back…, an album of cover versions twinned with responses from their originators, …And I’ll Scratch Yours, featuring creditable versions of Gabriel songs by Paul Simon, Lou Reed, David Byrne, Elbow, Arcade Fire and others. The New Blood album presented orchestral retreads of old Gabriel songs, while there has been the occasional tour, such as the surprise ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors co-headline trundle around North America with Sting. But for the most part, those who have stuck with Gabriel throughout his extended silences and dalliances with whatever-takes-his-fancy causes, there’s been nothing net-new to get stuck into. Until today. Well, until January this year, and every month since.

Picture: Instagram/@itspetergabriel

Let me explain: in October 2021 an Instagram post revealed that Gabriel has been recording at his Real World Studios complex with “a few familiar faces” - long-serving bassist Tony Levin, guitarist David Rhodes and drummer Manu Katché. And then nothing. Until last December when Gabriel’s revived ‘Full Moon Club’ digital newsletter turned up with a link to a brief video in which he declared: “I’m now surrounded by a whole tonne of new material. I’ve pretty much got an album ready, and it’s been a lot of fun playing with the band again.” 

Expectations raised, on 6 January this year Gabriel released Panopticom, the lead-in single from a new album that would be called i/o. In February came The Court, and then Playing For Time in March, but still no complete album. However, it what can be considered peak Gabriel, the releases were being timed to coincide with the lunar cycle, accompanied by an individual piece of bespoke art to add an extra dimension to the release. 

Before long it dawned on most that Gabriel was indulging in mischief. The lunar video updates, announcing the latest release were all part of a plan to put i/o out track by track, full moon by full moon (which meant that, bizarrely, there were two releases in August) - and for free.

Gabriel announces i/o on YouTube, December 2022

To add to the giveaway, each track was released in two versions - a ‘Dark Side’ mix by Tchad Blake and then later a ‘Bright Side’ mix by Mark ‘Spike’ Stent. In his last instalment Gabriel revealed that this drip-feed had been an “experiment”. Like his friend Brian Eno (who appears on the album), the studio is his laboratory, much as a real laboratory was the creative workshop for his late inventor father, Ralph. It’s where the album - named after the ‘input’ and ‘output’ connections on electrical equipment - explores the interconnectivity of everything, and the perils, pitfalls and benefits of the bigger questions being asked about technology’s future. 

Thus, i/o’s release today is something of a literal anti-climax, but there is logic to its approach. “There’s not a huge income from the streaming services,” he said of technology’s present in an interview with Mojo’s Mark Blake. “Some of the themes [on i/o] are about connecting with nature, so it felt appropriate to do something on every new moon, as our ancestors used to.” But while monthly releases via streaming platforms might be uber meta, some musical traditions haven’t been completely jettisoned: “We’re storytellers and we love stories. And there’s more of a story on an album than there is on a single track. But the world is moving in the direction of shorter, faster, and when the tide goes one way it’s attractive to go in the opposite direction. The slower, longer thing has its place, and I’m notoriously slow.” 

Listened to as a whole, Gabriel’s distinction between new and tradition makes sense. In both single and complete forms, the new music bears testament to his penchant for fastidious production, intricate layering and disparate instrumentation but, 21 years on since Up, there is a notable maturity to i/o, both in terms of the 73-year-old’s growing sense of mortality, but also his enduring fascination with a world continuing to evolve.

The ‘Dark Side’ and ‘Bright Side’ mixes of i/o

Panopticom directs that from the outset, in Gabriel’s own words positing an “infinitely expandable accessible data globe”, ‘The Panopticom’, which connects like-minded people to “see what’s going on” in order to make the world understand itself better, a notion inspired by the work of groups like Forensic Architecture, Bellingcat and the aforementioned Witness. With a similar bass riff to Digging In The Dirt, Gabriel’s confessional about marital breakdown, it combines grandeur with a singalonga chorus (though the line “Panopticom - let’s find out what’s going on” only just sits on the right side of dodgy…). As the first single off the first new album in 21 years, it sent up a bright red flare that Gabriel had not lost his mojo in terms of writing with meaning, purpose and intrigue. In fact, it’s a hallmark of the entire album, which paints alternating strokes of mood, energy and substance. 

The Court tackles the online age with a Cuban rhythm interspersed with the staccato refrain of “And the court will rise”, an acerbic reflection perhaps on the tendency for Internet platforms to be judge, jury and executioner on public discourse, and leads well into the i/o’s title track, which drives one of the album’s core themes, the philosophical consideration of human progress. The track i/o has a genuinely uplifting quality that on repeated hearings suggests an overwhelmingly optimistic view of “the interconnectedness of everything”.

Four Kinds Of Horses is one of the album’s highlights, and a dramatic, ambitious consideration of the contemporaneous themes of spiritualism and religion as they intersect with geo-politics. Developed out of a tentative collaboration with XL Records founder Richard Russell, it emotively combines an orchestral arrangement from John Metcalfe with Gabriel’s core band as well as keyboard layers from Eno. Gabriel’s singer daughter Melanie, who has toured with her father, also makes an appearance (“another lovely moment for a dad”). 

Anyone who has seen Gabriel live will attest to his dad dancing, (In Your Eyes, in particular), to which we can now add Road To Joy. It’s another big, brassy pop tune in the manner of Sledgehammer, which funks along foot-tappingly, and is blessed by backing vocals from the Soweto Gospel Choir (who previously appeared on Down To Earth, Gabriel’s theme song for Wall-E). But despite being seemingly infused with happiness, it’s not the clappy celebration of life it might appear to be on first listen. In fact, it based in another side project Gabriel is involved in, dealing with near-death experiences and ‘locked-in’ syndrome. It is nevertheless delightfully engaging. As is This Is Home, late on in the album, which started life as a suggested idea from DJ Skrillex about partying late into the night, before Gabriel turned it on its head by making it about family life, underpinned by a warming,  soulful groove.

The similarly up-tempo Olive Tree is about another ‘brain’ project, examining how interacting with nature can broaden the potential for enhancing the human experience. “Part of the theme of this song and of [i/o] really is that we are part of everything,” Gabriel explains, “but these natural worlds of non-human intelligence are out there and we haven’t yet been smart enough to understand what they’re communicating and how they communicate.” 

So Much, which features more of Metcalfe’s orchestration and Melanie Gabriel’s vocals, tackles ageing, but not in a maudlin sense. “When you get to my sort of age you either run away from mortality or you jump into it and try and live life to the full,” Gabriel explains. “The countries that seem most alive are those that have death as part of their culture.” Mortality, another theme of the album, appears in the contemplative, Randy Newman-esque ballad Playing For Time, which reflects on the passing of time. Having recorded Father, Son about his dad for the Up album, Playing For Time is a “an elegy of sorts” to Gabriel’s late mother Edith, who was his musical influence. “When my mum died, I wanted to do something for her,” he explained in the Full Moon Club release, “but it’s taken a while before I felt comfortable and distant enough to be able to write something. She loved classical music, so we have a beautiful cello playing there.” The song is full of childhood memories - ”some of which are good, enjoyable and positive and some of which are obviously sad, dealing with loss.” 

There is even more emotional heft at work in the beautiful, ethereal Love Can Heal, for me the standout song on the record. Written several years ago (and debuted on the tour with Sting, when it was dedicated to Jo Cox, the murdered Labour MP, whom Gabriel had met at a conference), it draws musically from what he calls a “sensual pallete”. It is a daringly soporific exploration of the role emotions play in human connectivity. “I know I bang on about this ‘emotional toolbox’ and how one of the roles of songs is the potential to change how you feel and change your mood according to what you’re listening to,” Gabriel says. “Hopefully, Love Can Heal has its place in this emotional toolbox.”

The core PG band - Tony Levin, David Rhodes and Manu Katché
Picture: Instagram/@itspetergabriel 

By the time i/o reaches its 12th and final track, the listener will have been through a range of emotions and music evoking a plethora of life experiences. The temptation is to think Gabriel is just another rock star in his eighth decade processing the years passed, but there is a settled acceptance to his songs, that age is just a number, and that despite the maths, there is plenty to live for. That is certainly the cause behind Live And Let Live, November’s final Full Moon release and a closing song to savour. The very last song to be completed, it’s about “forgiveness, tolerance and optimism”, but also about the positive impact music can have on the human mood.

In his Mojo interview with Mark Blake, Gabriel addressed his reputation for being somewhat dilettante: “If it’s fun and it’s interesting, I’ll do it”. i/o may have taken 21 years to release (in fact some of the songs on it go back even further in their origin), but it won’t necessarily be the another two decades before it gets followed up. “Who knows, I may just keep going,” Gabriel told Mojo, teasingly. There is even more new music in the works, though in what state of readiness - by Gabriel’s standards of perfection - remains to be seen. “I think you can over-saturate people and they get bored with you,” he said with knowing modesty. “One of the reasons I am still able to make a living doing this is that there are long periods of absence.” 

All of this might sound like Gabriel is a very serious man indeed. He is, but there has always been a twinkle in his eye. “I’m 73 now, at an age when I might as well just play around and have fun,” he told Blake. i/o may cover some complex even baffling themes, but you could never cause Gabriel of tossing off something generic or formulaic. If anything, he’s still not afraid to metaphorically walk on stage in a red dress and a fox’s head (as he did for real at a Genesis concert in 1972, much to the surprise of his bandmates). 

i/o gives firm demonstration that he refuses to become a heritage act in his dotage. “Sometimes you have to take the road that requires fear and courage,” he told Mojo. Doing things differently “makes it way more interesting for me”. He is happy to face rejection, if that’s what comes. Listening to i/o, that is not going to happen any time soon: it’s an album of rare consideration and deep thought about the world reflective of the length of time it has taken to reach these ears. While that world will have changed many times in the 21 years of i/o’s gestation, the final yards of recording and producing it have created an album of beauty, grace, intelligence and wit, qualities that you rarely come across in this day and age.  

Peter Gabriel’s i/o is released today on Real World Records

Wrong numbers: the modern guide to phone etiquette

I am old enough to remember when telephoning was something that happened by the front door, at a desk or in a phone box. The greatest irritation it would ever cause would be either the phone ringing at an inconvenient hour, occasional earpiece spillover (in the manner of ‘The Colonel’ berating Dick Dastardly), or bearing witness to someone on a call making the occasional Sybil Fawlty-style response of “Oh, I know!”. All that, however, changed with the mobile. Life changed with the mobile. 

In 1988 I was working for Sky TV at its former HQ in London’s West End. One lunchtime my newly appointed boss (I went through several during my five years at the company…) went out for a haircut at a barber’s just a few doors down the road. Shortly after he left the phone on my desk phone rang: “Poulter!” he barked (Frenchifying my name to rhyme with ‘Voltaire’). “I’m out of cigarettes.” Resisting the temptation to ask what I could do about it, given that the barber was next door to a newsagent, I replied: “Where are you calling from?”. Him: “The barber’s. I’m using my new mobile phone.” It was one of those Motorola housebricks that was proliferating amongst Gordon Gekko types in the City, yelling “Sell, sell, SELL!” or “Buy, buy, BUY!” into them before the battery gave out (usually after a matter of minutes).

His call was probably the first time I’d received one from someone using a mobile, let alone from a two-minute walk away, and certainly for anything as clearly performative as simply to say they’d run out of fags. I tell this story purely to highlight the fact that, while the act of calling from a mobile was no less unexpected than if he had called me from a landline (and frequently did with much the same request), the ability to make calls from anywhere to anyone heralded an irreversible shift of etiquette.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the very first mobile phone call being made, although it would be the early 90s before mass adoption of handsets would take off. Today there are more mobile phones in use than there are people. An entire generation has grown up only knowing the smartphone, which now accounts for almost 90% of phones in use. However, with that generation, and the ubiquity of those devices, their use has also become a source of annoyance for many on a scale of irate never imaginable when I took that call from my boss in the barber’s chair 35 years ago.

Now, before I go further, I should declare a vested interest: I’m not against the mobile phone, not only being wedded to mine from wake-up alarm to last thing at night, but also having worked for the last 13 years in the telecommunications industry, both for companies who make mobile networks, and companies that provide services over them. I came into the industry from consumer electronics only three years after Apple had introduced its first iPhone, customarily taking something from someone else and making it better. This was still the 3G era, when being able to look up a web page on a handset was a rudimentary and sluggish experience. Then came 4G, bringing us something approaching mobile broadband (and with it video and audio streaming), before more recently 5G doing much the same thing, only theoretically faster. But the thing is, as these revolutions in information and social connectivity have taken place, the phone call - surely the primary reason for owning a phone in the first place, has started taking a back seat.

Picture: Apple

This has prompted Debrett’s, the authority on all that’s good and proper, to highlight the clear generational divide between those under 40 and those over, and their attitudes to phone use. The younger you are, it suggests, the less likely you are to use a phone for conversing with people. If they do, it says, there is greater likelihood of decades of ‘telephone manner’, as it used to be called, being trashed.

Easily the primary peeve of any respectful individual who travels on public transport is the phone call (or FaceTime) conducted loudly without headphones, or even with headphones where the wearer has no idea just how annoyingly loud they are (ditto: conference call headsets in an office, but that’s another blog post entirely). Nothing seems to draw more ‘tssking’ and pass-agg glances in the direction of the callee than on a train, although the advent of in-flight WiFi and presents a new horror, as business types on planes, unable to switch off for a few hours, try to connect for Zoom while zooming in and out of satellite coverage at 38,000 feet. It’s all so redolent of Bob Mortimer’s brilliant Train Guy persona: “Ya, ya! Have a campachoochoo on me, ya! You are, as always, a vigorous pigeon. And of course, ciao and bella pommefritio”. 

“If you’re making a video call in a public space (or if you’re just too lazy to hold the phone up to your ear) you must use headphones or earbuds,” Debrett’s instructs. “Nobody should be forced to listen to your phone conversation; it will be annoyingly distracting and might be intrusive or embarrassing. The person at the other end might object if they realise their conversation is audible to a train carriage full of unwilling eavesdroppers.” Hal-le-lu-jah.

Almost as annoying are those you know are using a speakerphone to multi-task, making the occasional “Yeah” or “OK” while they clack away at their keyboards. This, Debrett’s notes, is a recent phenomenon. “We carry our phones everywhere and think nothing of making calls when we’re on crowded transport, walking down noisy streets, doing the washing up, cooking the children’s tea,” it says. “Not only are these calls often annoyingly inaudible, it is also perfectly obvious that you are making them while doing something else. This can be very alienating for the recipient, who feels marginalised and deprioritised.”

Many of these traits have been adopted by younger mobile phone users, rather than older generations brought up to answer the phone, while standing to attention: “Whitehall 1212, how may I help you”. Indeed, such is the generational divide of these personal communication faux pas, that Debrett’s has now published its “ten commandments of mobile etiquette”. 

First up is a rule which negates the notion that young people want to be called in the first place. An unexpected call, it says, is to be ignored (or feared) and sent to voicemail. According to Debrett’s Gen-Z is more likely to send texts, WhatsApp messages, voice notes and even e-mail rather than make calls, or even leave voicemail. “In general, people seem to be much happier using less direct methods. But we are still faced with a social conundrum: if everyone carries the means of communication in their pocket, why are they so elusive and unreachable?”. To this it points out that, in the pre-mobile era, to not answer the phone when it rang was to be “deeply eccentric”.

Thus, Debrett’s commands that before making a call a text should first be sent to enquire if the recipient is available to speak, surely the telephonic equivalent of the early days of the automobile when a lackey walked in front of one waving a red flag to broadcast its onset. “This preamble might seem cumbersome to traditional phone addicts who love nothing more than spontaneously picking up the phone,” says Debrett’s, “but it is considered a much less stressful way of initiating contact since it minimises intrusion and enables people to manage their own time.”

In further contravention of what made Alexander Graham Bell’s leg it down to the patent office, calls made out social intent aren’t meant to be answered. It is perfectly acceptable, Debrett’s says, for a call to be registered as “missed” and returned at a more convenient moment. Knowing how long it takes younger members of my family to even read, let alone reply to a WhatsApp, this piece of etiquette reduces telephony to the speed and efficiency of postal communications (and I’m talking here about horse-borne couriers in Elizabethan times). Beware, though, as repeated calls - leading to a string of “missed call” alerts - will only raise the recipient’s blood pressure. “Unless there is a real emergency - in which case it would be sensible to send a text - it is an unjustified intrusion, likely to alienate the recipient.” Should a voicemail be left (and if so, it’s “a matter of taste” for doing so), they should be kept brief.

Business calls, on the other hand, are “a different matter and are likely to be answered with much more willingness and alacrity”, while voicemail is “a matter of taste” but messages should be kept brief, if left at all. Debrett’s is not suggesting that phone calls shouldn’t be made, but it says that a call out of the blue can trigger an alarm: “People are more likely to react to them with panic or dread. If, for example, you see a call flashing up on your phone from your child’s school you instantly leap to the conclusion that there has been an accident”. Authority figures, such as doctors, should begin any phone call by reassuring the recipient that they are not about to die, although it also advises that while text messages are an acceptable way to congratulate someone, they should not be used to offer condolences. “There are some instances where the human voice must take priority,” Debrett’s says sagely. “Texts are an economical way of communicating but they are not good when it comes to nuance.”

Debrett’s Ten Commandments Of Phone Etiquette

1. Text before calling
2. If no answer, send a text
3. Don't repeatedly call unless an an emergency
4. Don't leave a voicemail
5. Be aware people may find unsolicited calls alarming
6. If someone says it's a bad time to talk, call back later
7. Be tolerant of older people's habits
8. Don't take calls in public spaces,
9. If you do, use headphones
10. If it's important or sending condolences, call

The New Rules of Mobile Eitquette (debretts.com)

No more messy nights - the Amsterdam party is over

© Simon Poulter

When I moved to Amsterdam, 24 years ago, there were innumerable comments along the lines of: “Oh yeah... Amsterdam, eh?! EH?!! Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, EH?!!”. 

To the uninformed I was relocating to a cesspit of iniquity, a European Gomorrah of rampant drug taking and prostitutes for sale in the windows of every street. Everything, people supposed, a single man in his early thirties could desire. Except it wasn’t. Because Amsterdam wasn’t - and isn’t - like that at all. 

Yes, the notorious red light zone de Wallen (“the walls”) exists, with its women – most probably sex-trafficked - sat in illuminated windows looking bored while awkward men leer at them from the outside. And, as you walk through quaint backstreets, the barely disguised whiff of weed tickles the nostrils as it pours out of semi-legal coffee shops. However, this is just a tiny slice of Amsterdam, one of the jewels of Europe, with its Instagramable canals, medieval architecture, vibrant culture and a history and charm matched only by the likes of Paris, Seville or Prague.

I am naturally biased, having once lived in or near Amsterdam for the better part of a decade, as well as being a frequent visitor for almost 30 years. To some extent, too, the seedier side isn’t as bad as it could be (ditto, Hamburg and its somewhat cartoon-like Reeperbahn), but I get where the city authorities, and indeed the Dutch government, are coming from in wanting to clean it up. 

Conscious of this reputation, tourists are even being discouraged from visiting the de facto Dutch capital, though this was initially a measure to cut down on overcrowding. An environmental measure was also introduced to cap flights arriving at Schiphol, Amsterdam’s massive, seven-runway international air hub, which this year alone has reduced the number of flights from the UK by 22% compared with pre-Covid travel. The Netherlands Tourism Board has even been actively promoting places alternatives like Eindhoven - a city I know well from my career at Philips, which was founded there. 

But with the exception of football nerds wishing to see the PSV Stadion, or the even more niche interest of the Philips lightbulb museum, Eindhoven is largely a ‘company town’ with little to offer tourists compared to the cultural riches of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum, the Anne Frank House, the canals or the Negen Straatjes (‘nine streets’), not to mention its wealth of cross-culture cuisines.

Amsterdam has always been one of the most welcoming cities in Europe, in one of the world’s happiest nations, according to research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. But those same people are understandably tired of the stag-weekenders who spend their time in the city getting drunk, fighting outside bars and urinating in canals (before then falling in), or swaggering about the red light zone leering at its most unfortunate residents. 

This has now been reflected by an online campaign specifically targeting 18-35-year-old British men, with one ad showing a young man being arrested and put in a cell with the atypically Dutch-blunt caption: “So coming to Amsterdam for a messy night? Stay away.”

In recent years the city has made efforts to combat the vice industry (believed to be controlled by a combination of rival Turkish and Albanian organised crime), both to cut down on the sex tourism as well as the exploitation of vulnerable women. The drugs trade, run by the same gangs, has long been associated with this, with politicians arguing that the liberal experiment, dating back to the 1970s, which legitimised cannabis use as long as it is sold in limited quantities in coffee shops, has failed. Weed sales have been regarded as a gateway to sales of harder narcotics, all with associated criminality invariably leading to violence.

When I moved to Amsterdam in 1999 moves were already in place to tackle drug tourism, prompting a national ban on the sale of magic mushrooms and an increased regulation of cannabis sales, and aimed at striking a balance between tourism and public safety. Simultaneously, concerns about sex tourism and human trafficking prompted initiatives to regulate prostitution and improve the working conditions of sex workers. There were also measures to reduce the visibility of the red light district, with an effort to redevelop Amsterdam’s central neighbourhoods by encouraging new businesses to move into streets previously dominated by the sex and drug industry.

Sustainable tourism has also been promoted, with a campaign calling for tourists to “Enjoy & Respect” Amsterdam, and embrace its rich cultural artistic heritage rather than its seedier attractions. However, in also addressing both ‘over-tourism’ and sex/drug visitors, businesses relying on tourist euros have expressed their concerns at any effort to drive down undesirabled, especially in the wake of Amsterdam’s post-pandemic recovery.

It is, then, a dilemma. Amsterdam – like everywhere else – suffered greatly from Covid travel bans and lockdowns, as the city’s hotels, bars, restaurants and shops saw business plummet. The campaign against young male Brits is targeted, but it is hard yet to gauge whether it will be either effective in achieving its aims, or detrimental to the local economy.

© Simon Poulter

As a champion of Amsterdam, however, anything which can successfully eradicate city’s “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” association, and works to enhance and embrace its unique identity is a good thing.

The city is more than simply a living museum, but its heritage - dating back to the 13th century when a small fishing village was established along the Amstel River - is more than worthy of protection. This is the city that was at the heart of the Dutch Golden Age in the 18th century, becoming a trading hub, with the construction of its famous ring of canals earning it the “Venice of the North” nickname. Its commercial and artistic foundations are still to be celebrated, either in the traditions established by the Dutch East India Company, one of the world’s earliest multinationals (and the genetic origin of the Netherlands’ global business outlook), the foundation of one of the world’s first stock exchanges – the “Beurs” (although Belgium’s Bruges lays claim to the oldest, its bourse), not to mention the work of Rembrandt and Vermeer during that same era.

There are those who see the see the discouragement of tourists looking to have the wrong kind of good time as being to Amsterdam’s financial detriment, not to mention to the detriment of its charm. But, just as New York – established as New Amsterdam – cleaned itself up in the early 1990s to its immeasurable benefit as a tourist destination, Amsterdam’s crackdown on Brits seeking to exploit its underbelly will go a long way to lessen the profile of that reputation. It will surely only enhance what those like me who know it, know it to be the real Amsterdam.

The children of the 21st century are still listening to The Beatles

It’s more than half a century since The Beatles broke up, 43 years since John Lennon was murdered, and almost 22 since George Harrison passed to the next world, but in that time the Fab industry has been relentless, respectfully - mostly - but efficiently mining a legacy generated in those ten years between 1960 and 1970 when they were originally making music together.

Next Thursday we’ll get to hear what has been pitched as the band’s “final” recording with the release of Now And Then, an apparently lost demo that Lennon recorded onto a cassette at home in New York in 1977. In 1994, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono gave the tape to then-surviving Beatles Paul McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr, who were able to recover their bandmate’s voice from other demos, add their own and instruments, and release the songs Free As A Bird and Real Love as singles in 1995 and 1996, part of The Beatles Anthology project. 

Now And Then was also on the tape, but technical limitations at the time prevented Lennon’s vocals from being adequately recovered. But now, using the same AI technology Peter Jackson used to isolate dialogue in Get Back, his epic 2021 documentary series about the making of the Let It Be album, it will be released next week as “the last Beatles song”. It features Lennon’s original vocals from the tape, along with guitar added by Harrison in 1995 (before the project was abandoned in the belief that the track was unsalvageable). Last year, Starr recorded the drums with McCartney adding bass, guitar and piano. String arrangements from Eleanor Rigby, Because and Here, There And Everywhere were worked into the mix. 

The finished track will be officially made public next Thursday, with a full release on Friday. A 12-minute film - Now And Then - The Last Beatles Song - will premiere on The Beatles’ YouTube channel on Wednesday, telling the story of how the single came about.

There had been rumours for a while of an unreleased Beatles song coming out, and a rough version of Now And Then was said to be available online, but next week’s official release of the single commences a new wave of commercial activity for the Fabs, which will see fifth - and expanded - reissues of the legendary ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ Beatles compilation albums, respectively covering 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, going on sale on 10 November (handily the day before my birthday... 😉). 

Originally released in April 1973, the new, improved and expanded editions of the albums will include Now And Then and comprise various packages, including a six-LP 180g vinyl option and a four-CD version. All 75 songs have been newly remixed in stereo by Giles (son of George) Martin and Sam Okell at Abbey Road using the ‘de-mixing’ technology used for the recent reissues of individual Beatles albums. Of course, with the exception of Now And Then, everything on the two albums will already reside in most Beatle fans’ record collections, but that won’t stop them being acquired again for some 35 extra tracks not included in previous releases, with greater inclusion from the Revolver, ‘White’, Abbey Road and Let It Be albums.

Of course, this is another cash grab by a band that, despite existing for that relatively brief ten-year period, and disbanding more than half a century ago, has become one of the most enduring franchises in entertainment. Which isn’t all that new: in 1964, their canny then-manager, Brian Epstein, negotiated a $10,000 fee for the band to make three appearances on CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show. Even in 1964, that wasn’t a particularly large sum of money, but Epstein’s deal ensured that their US TV debut was seen by a record 73 million viewers, giving the band unprecedented commercial exposure and launching the ‘British Invasion’, from which they profited handsomely (though, you could argue, costing John Lennon his life just 16 years later).

Interviewed by CNBC a few years ago, former Philadelphia news anchor Larry Kane, who covered The Beatles on their 1964 and 1965 US tours, said the band could never have imagined how long - or how lucrative - their careers would turn out to be. “It was always a big question for them: when was the bubble going to burst? I don’t think they had any idea it would go on like this. I asked Brian Epstein in 1964 how long it would last. He said ‘Larry, the children of the 21st century will be listening to the Beatles.’ He was right.”

Experts will attribute this longevity to the fact that The Beatles were, to use marketingspeak, ‘first movers’, establishing their brand in a way matched only by the Rolling Stones. Following that Ed Sullivan debut, Gretsch and Rickenbacker guitars, as used by the band, flew out of American musical instrument shops, the start of an entire industry in replica Beatle ‘mop top’ wigs, collarless suits, Yellow Submarine toys - you name it. Now, however, we’re well used to bands manufactured for pure profit, but even if, in hindsight, The Beatles were the marketeer’s dream back in October 1962 when Love Me Do came out - four clean-cut young lads from working class Liverpool, singing simple songs about romance. When billboards started appearing in America saying “The Beatles are coming”,  a commercial phenomenon as powerful as Coca-Cola, Ford or McDonalds was about to be unleashed.

63 years after the group’s formation in Liverpool, global Beatlemania has never bitten the dust. The relentless re-releases, compilation albums, physical and multimedia projects and even the incredible Cirque du Soleil Love show in Las Vegas have not only kept the legacy alive, but the tills making money. In fact, taken as a whole, The Beatles’ financial impact continues to eclipse anything or anyone else the music industry has ever produced, with McCartney, Starr, and the estates of Lennon and Harrison, together with The Beatles’ holding company, finding myriad opportunities to leverage the Fab brand that were never available to the band when they were formally together.

The Beatles continue to be the biggest selling music act of all time. Data a decade ago put their total worldwide album sales at more than 600 million (177 million alone in the US, with Elvis Presley behind them on 135 million). Even in 1964 they made the equivalent of $188 million. Paul McCartney is today worth around £650 million, with Ringo Starr worth £247 million, by default making him the world’s wealthiest drummer (though compare this with Taylor Swift who, according to a Bloomberg report yesterday, has just become America’s first billionaire pop star by value).

It was, though, business that contributed to The Beatles’ original collapse as a band: Epstein’s death from an overdose in 1967 let to the organisation behind them entering a tailspin, even if the creativity relented. The year before, the exhausted band had famously given up touring in order to focus on the quality of their music, much to Epstein’s annoyance, who saw them cutting off their noses to spite their commercial teeth. 

Following his death, they lacked the business acumen to manage their finances. The Magical Mystery Tour film was a whimsically distracting box office dud, while the loss-making Apple Boutique took the quartet further into internecine sensitivity (Abbey Road’s You Never Give Me Your Money could well have been a boardroom comment). The looming denouement would come to a head in September 1969 when Lennon informed McCartney and Starr, amid discussions with businessman Allen Klein over renegotiating the band’s contract with EMI, that he was leaving. Just not straightaway. The following April, McCartney counter-announced that he was going to leave. Such discord, of course, is now long forgotten.

“It was the closest we’ll ever come to having [John] back in the room so it was very emotional for all of us,” the now 83-year-old Ringo Starr told journalists about their work on Now And Then. “It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.” McCartney - still considered by many The Beatle who broke up the band - was equally as emotional: “There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” he said of the AI-rendered production. “And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.”

The world will have to wait until next Thursday to hear the song and judge for themselves whether it is a worthy addition to the Beatles canon, or just a sentimental paragraph in their lengthy history. It is, though, a history that shows little sign of ending. “Kids are listening today who never have seen Paul or me, they're into the music,” Ringo Starr  told USA Today a decade ago, and he’s still right. “The thing I’m most proud of is the music, not the haircuts. The music is it. That's what will last.”

He’s right. Contrarians will readily say that so-called ‘legacy’ acts like The Beatles are holding up the production line of new music, but I would counter by saying that their music is timeless and artistically classic. Shakespeare may have written his last play 400 years ago, but his work is as relevant and loved today as it was then. Perhaps pretentiously, I’d say The Beatles should be given the same consideration.

Arrested development - the brief career of the biggest band in the world

It is New Year’s Eve, 1983. I am with my brother and sister-in-law at Wembley Arena to see a band, universally tagged the biggest in the world by the press, play what would be their last gig on home soil for almost 24 years. It’s also the biggest party of the year: for a start, it’s New Year’s Eve, and it’s also the guitarist’s 41st birthday. The band is at the very top of their game. The album they’re midway through touring is a number one simultaneously in the UK and the US, and one of the biggest sellers around the world that year. It would be regarded as one of the records that defined the 1980s.

Several months previously, the band had sold out New York’s Shea Stadium, in the words of the lead singer, “borrowing it from The Beatles”. Performing to 67,000 people, they could have played to more, such was the demand for tickets, with local news stations warning those without to not even bother turning up. According to a pre-Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant, reporting on the gig for Smash Hits, all day long every car radio in the Greater New York Area was pumping out just one song - theirs, indicative of it becoming the top-selling single in the United States for the whole of 1983.

“Today it seems like The Police are the biggest group in America, just as on another day it might seem like the Rolling Stones or The Who,” Tennant writes. But, he adds, there is a darkness setting in with the trio, then still only six years and five albums into their career. Rumours in the US music press suggest that they’re about to split up. They say that Synchronicity, that record-breaking fifth album, had been made under strained circumstances, with frontman Sting, guitarist Andy Summers and the drummer (and band co-founder) Stewart Copeland barely communicating with each other in the studio.

“We’ve got the biggest album, the biggest single, the biggest video, the biggest concert tour,” Sting tells Tennant ahead of the Shea Stadium show, branding rumours of ructions as “RUBBISH!”. But the then 31-year-old singer says, tellingly: “We’ve realised what our strengths are and what our weaknesses are. In a sense we must get on terribly well to be onstage together. We still work as a group, our records are better than they’ve ever been. Something somewhere works, man, and it’s worth the difficulties, it’s worth the problems.”

A year on, with the Synchronicity tour concluded, it is announced that The Police are going on hiatus. A sixth album is reportedly considered, but in the end that turns out to be that. It would take another 23 years, and a cash-grab one-off ‘reunion’ tour, that the biggest band in the world in 1983 would play together. Sting would release his debut solo album The Dream Of The Blue Turtles in 1985, carving out a career on his own that would make him a brand in his own right – a rainforest-saving (and other good causes), tantric sex-shagging, Karl Jung-following Tuscan vineyard-owning multi-millionaire property magnate.

However, what gets forgotten in pretty much every profile of Sting is the six years that turbocharged his rise, namely The Police, and how they appeared at the tail end of punk, consciously trying to exploit its aesthetic without actually being punks.

Picture: Rocket 88 Books

40 years have elapsed since The Police disbanded (the first time), but the six years in which they produced five albums and a steady stream of properly big hit singles tends to get overlooked when the music press comes to write somewhat hagiographic profiles of the biggest beasts of the rock era. Perhaps that will change with the publication, today of Stewart Copeland’s Police Diaries. Sourced from the drummer’s personal journals, it outlines how, in late 1976, Copeland – the son of a CIA agent and who’d been playing with proto-prog rockers Curved Air until quite recently - decided that punk, then ruffling feathers via the likes of the Sex Pistols, provided a platform for commercial success. 

Calculatingly, too, he concluded that forming a trio would maximise financial efficiency (citing Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience as models). So he set about finding a couple of bandmates: “Blazing on my drums gets me breathing too hard for vocals, so either the guitarist or the bassist had to be the singer. I had a pretty utilitarian view of singing and placed more value on charisma than vocal excellence. Besides, in this new scene it was mostly yelling anyway,” he wrote in one diary entry.

The first to sign up was Corsican guitarist Henry Padovani, a friend of a friend, but lacking vocal skills. That role – after considerable effort trying to track him down - went to a Geordie bass player and former school teacher, then playing in a north-eastern jazz combo called Last Exit, with whom Copeland has been introduced to when Curved Air played Newcastle in September 1976. 

“I had called [Sting] out of the blue and asked if he had any ambition to hit the big time down in London - without his band,” Copeland writes. At first the singer was unconvinced of Copeland’s pitch, but expressed some curiosity: “In two words, ‘keep talking’, our relationship was defined for the next two years. I had to keep talking up our prospects so he could confidently pour his mojo into our combined mission rather than into all of the other options in the big city. I also learned right there that he was a free agent and open to suggestion. Excellent! He got an earful of my grandiose designs and convincing certitude but I was careful not to emphasise the punk thing. It was more about how we could use this new scene to get around the sclerotic music business empires and storm the walls.”

Picture: Stewart Copeland

Eventually Sting would come down to London in December 1976 and join Copeland’s venture (although the move was mainly to allow Sting’s then wife, Frances Tomelty, to pursue an acting career). In early 1977, Copeland and Sting found themselves playing in a short-lived prog-ish foursome called Strontium 90, where they were joined by session guitarist Andy Summers, who was a good ten years older than them, and had previously been in the ’60s outfit Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band. With the nascent idea of a punk trio still in play, Summers was asked if he’d join the other project, leading to Padovani getting the elbow.

The new band would make their live debut at a Birmingham club in August 1977, setting in train an extraordinary, six-year race to the very top. As a trio, they were still unique: most bands at the time had four members at least, but with Copeland’s frenetic drumming, Sting’s vocals (and, let’s not forget, cheekbones) and Summers’ versatility as a guitarist, they appropriated punk just as it was starting to morph into ‘New Wave’, that crystalisation of mid-70s, double denim-clad, pub rock R’n’B.

The Police as a recording entity wouldn’t come into being until the beginning of 1978 when the all-blond trio (dyed for a money-making chewing gum commercial that was never aired) started recording their first album at a tiny studio in Leatherhead, Surrey, with just £1500 borrowed from Copeland’s brother Miles to fund the project.

Outlandos d’Amour would take six months of stop-start recording to make, but before it was finished, an early single was released in the April, Roxanne – a ribald tale about a prostitute…which subsequently earned it a BBC ban. With the record finally in the can, another single was released that August, Can’t Stand Losing You, but as that covered the equally thorny subject of suicide it, too, was banned. 

With the album’s release in October 1978 the band commenced a promotional tour, from which, bizarrely, in the even more sensitive United States Roxanne took off as a single, presumably due to Americans being unable to work out what “put on the red light” was all about. Emboldened, A&M Records re-released it in the UK the following April, scoring a hit. The Police started to take off. Another reissue, of Can’t Stand Losing You, even came close to becoming No.1 in the UK, beaten only by the Boomtown Rats’ I Don’t Like Mondays.

It’s around this time that I came into the picture. I was just too young to be a punk native, but as I turned 11 in 1978 I started to become more independently musically aware. Radio One was playing the likes of The Jam, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds. Dire Straits’ pub rock-influenced Sultans Of Swing was a radio hit, and US imports like Blondie and Talking Heads were presenting an alternative view of the term ‘punk’ with their less phlegmatic, New York-savvy take on the genre. For me, pre-MTV and not yet reading the music press (I certainly wouldn’t count Look-In amongst that club), music was something to be consumed aurally. Weirdly, I discovered Genesis around the same time, despite punk nominally coming along to do away with such groups.

In October 1979, a month before I turned 12, The Police released their second album, Regatta de Blanc. Again recorded on a shoestring at producer Nigel Grey’s Surrey Sound in Leatherhead, its title alluded to the band’s “white reggae” interpretation of New Wave (albeit with another somewhat pretentious Francophile title). Like it’s predecessor, it was a three-way effort recorded with little instrumental embellishment – just guitar, bass, drums, vocals and romping songs.

Regatta de Blanc was only the second album I bought with my own money, and it would commence a competitive obsession about The Police that I had with my friends James, Colin and Rob, trying to buy their singles before each other (which reached peak obsession when we all bunked out of school to visit the local high street record shop to buy the fourth album, Ghost In The Machine on the day of its release). Regatta would give the world more singalong singles - Message In A Bottle, Walking On The Moon and The Bed’s Too Big Without You – each built around the relative simplicity of the band’s construct.

That, though, would start to shift with the third album, Zenyatta Mondatta, released another year later. Musically, 1980 was caught between rock and a hard place. Punk had well and truly been and gone, and pop was about to be reinvented again by dance and electronica. New Romantics, all of whom had been into progressive rock in the mid-70s, then punk, were on the verge of turning the synthesiser into a mainstream pop instrument, and not just something used for elongated noodly solos by the likes of Tony Banks and Rick Wakeman. Savvy magpies that they were, The Police added keyboards to their palette, causing some eyes to roll north, given how they’d produced two successful records so far built around guitar, bass, drums and a voice. 

It wasn’t, though, an overt shift: Zenyatta spawned more supremely radio-friendly hits, like Don’t Stand So Close To Me (the somewhat conceited parable of Sting’s experience as a school teacher - “Young teacher/The subject of schoolgirl fantasy...” – and that heinous couplet “He starts to shake and cough, just like the old man in that book by Nabokov”, the first of many occasions when he will go to great lengths to demonstrate how well read he is). Less erudite was De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da, a classic case of pop eating itself in being a song about the how rudimentary pure pop can be.

Sting’s - we assume – tinkering with the formula that had sustained them thus far would reach a new degree of critical discord another year later (yes, the band was still releasing albums annually) with Ghost In The Machine, which thankfully did away with the French titles to make a more strident literary reference, the book by psychologist Arthur Koestler. 

Recorded partly in Montserrat, with the Peter Gabriel/Phil Collins engineer Hugh Padgham (responsible for creating Collins’ ‘gated reverb’ drum sound) marking his debut as assistant to Grey, Ghost took The Police in an at-times darker musical direction, with their sound broadened out by more synths and live brass instruments. It wasn’t without its bright pop - Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic captured the sunny vibe of the island recording environment - but singles like Spirits In The Material World and Invisible Sun, inspired by the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, along with the album’s two closing tracks, Secret Journey and Darkness, sounded a world away from the playful rock that had launched The Police only four years previously.

Via those four albums in as many years, The Police become imperious. Sting, in particular, was everywhere, thanks to the cheekbones that had already made him a staple (but not the staple, hem, hem) of teen poster magazines the world over. But that, then brings us logically to “the biggest album”, Synchronicity.

Comparable with, I suppose, U2’s The Joshua Tree, Michael Jackson’s Thriller or Prince’s Purple Rain, it was the record that saw the band’s 45-degree trajectory reach its zenith – and their demise. On the one hand, it probably was one of the albums that defined the 1980s when it appeared in 1983, but on reflection 40 years later, was also beset with a pretentiousness in which The Police did, somewhat, disappear up their own arses (a feat that would indeed be replicated by U2 and their bastard offspring, Coldplay).

I recently listened to the Hugh Padgham-produced Synchronicity again and was struck by how much they were trying to cram into it sonically, verbally and musically. There’s no doubt that Every Breath You Take is a singularly distinct hit, even after four decades of over-exposure. It is also, still, a source of contention between Sting and Summers, who have had a longstanding dispute over the song’s writing credits, a disagreement the guitarist says is still “very much alive”. 

The dispute centres around Summers’ dampened chord sequence which drives the song. Sting’s original demo didn’t have any guitar at all, which became a source of contention: “Stewart and Sting couldn’t agree on where the drums and bass were going to sit within the song,” the now 81-year-old Summers recently explained to Canadian podcaster Jeremy White, revealing that Every Breath You Take wasn’t even going to make it onto the album. “That song was going in the trash until I played on it, and that’s all there is to it. And I think that’s composition, absolutely.” 

At that point in Synchronicity’s recording, The Police were struggling for material. “The famous story is that Sting just turned to me and said, ‘Well, go on. Go in there and make it your own,’” Summers explained. “I had all this sort of stuff under my fingers. I was The Police stock-artist guitarist, if you like. And I went in and I got that lick almost, it was like one take. Everyone stood up and cheered.” There was further turbulence with the song when the album came to be mixed, with Summers feeling that the mixing engineer had “ruined” the guitar sound.

Internecine grief notwithstanding, Every Breath You Take would go on to become the best-selling single of 1983 and the fifth biggest-selling single of the entire 1980s. But its stormy gestation became totemic of the dynamic within The Police by that point. And Summers’ revelation that they were struggling to fill the album is also telling, given the patchy state of the rest of Synchronicity.

King Of Pain and Wrapped Around My Finger are two of Sting’s finest torch songs. But there are too many misjudgements on the record. Mother – in which Summers largely shouts manically “Every girl I go out with becomes my mother in the end!” should have remained a demo, while Copeland’s Miss Gradenko just goes nowhere. The two title songs – Synchronicity I and Synchronicity II – are a screeching mess. One of the highlights, the jazzy Murder By Numbers didn’t even make it to the original vinyl release, making it worth listening to the end of my cassette version for.

The Police in 1983
Picture: James Milton

Clearly with Synchronicity The Police had started to outstay their welcome, despite the album’s gargantuan success. The promo videos, Sting’s limelight-hogging (whether intentional or not), his pretentious, thesaurus-swallowing lyrics and overtly confessional writing were all starting to grate. Like its four predecessors, Synchronicity had three or four discernible hits, but unlike its predecessors there was a diminishing rate of return on all the rest. That said, its commercial success - perhaps justifiably, if critically disproportionately – warranted its inclusion this year in the Library Of Congress’s United States National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

The Synchronicity tour – on which I saw The Police at Wembley - expanded the band in every dimension: backing singers, huge video screens, enveloping sound, the mad costumes from the videos. Ever the politician, Sting’s rebuttal to Neil Tennant masked the fact that, in all probability, he knew The Police were over. Speaking about the Shea Stadium gig some time ago, he recalled that, during the performance he’d thought “‘This is it, you can’t do any better than this’. That’s the point I decided to stop.”

With the Rolling Stones just marking their 62nd year making records with the release of Hackney Diamonds, and Paul McCartney still actively being Macca, it’s clearly possible for some acts to enjoy longevity. But only just. The Beatles themselves lasted barely a decade, and yet carved a place in music history unsurpassed by anyone else, commercially or creatively. The Police blazed for even less time - five albums over six years. 

37 years after they broke up the dynamic between the trio remains awkward. Summers has hinted at legal action over the Every Breath You Take dispute, while Copeland admitted recently to The Times that he and Sting continue to have a complicated relationship (“We love each other, but we’re not birds of a feather”). But for, probably, a good half of their original three years together they were a terrific band. 

The recently re-released tour film Around The World shows just how good they were, following the group on their 1980-1981 world tour when, according to Summers, they had “just about enough popularity to get booked around the globe”. He’s being cute, of course. Only three years since their formation, they were still full of punkish energy. While they may not be as revered as titans of punk and the New Wave like The Clash, the Pistols or The Jam, their live performances were every bit as frantic - Sting’s stage charisma, Summers’ innovative guitar work, and Copeland’s extraordinary drumming. “We were always a very guerrilla band,” he told Super Deluxe Edition’s Paul Sinclair recently, and he is right - up to a point. His book outlines just how guerrilla they were, but also exposes how ego and overreach led to The Police burning bright for only a short period of time.

Stewart Copeland's Police Diaries is published today by Rocket 88 books

Aged like sparkling wine – the Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds

Let’s get over the whining. Let’s forget the persistent grumbling. Let’s just quietly ignore the fact that the Rolling Stones are long past their raw original reinterpretation of the blues and the blatant cultural appropriation that fuelled their emergence, together with the sexually-charged mischief that set them apart from That Other Band. Instead, let’s revel in Hackney Diamonds, their first collection of original new songs for 18 years.

Because, for the first part, it defies logic: it doesn’t sound like a band led by an 80-year-old lead singer, with a near-80-year-old pirate-guitarist and his 76-year-old ‘younger brother’ combining to produce the sort of energy emitted by outfits a quarter of their history. Even if you view the Stones today as barely bothering to masquerade their self-parody, they’re still capable of doing something that no one else is capable of: being the Rolling Stones. 

That point hit me someway through their set in June last year at their historically significant Hyde Park Calling gig. On what was my fifth time seeing the Stones live, and with Charlie Watts 10 months gone (his absence still raw within the band), they lived up to their moniker - The Greatest Rock And Roll Band In The World™. Because in the course of those two hours they didn’t put a step out of place to in any way diminish the Rolling Stones brand. And, yet, I couldn’t get out of my head the fact that this was an outfit then celebrating 61 years since former schoolboy friends Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reunited on a platform at Dartford Railway Station, forging a musical partnership that, even with frequent schisms in their own relationship, endures to this day. 

Not that they need the work. Their last, Covid-interrupted tour had barely ended before there was news of a new album, their 24th (or 26th if you’re counting US releases), although Jagger has maintained that none of them were in any “urgency” to record new material. And, yet, here we are, with Hackney Diamonds - 12 new songs, including final appearances from Charlie Watts (on the tracks Mess It Up and Live By The Sword, which also features Bill Wyman), involvement from Sir Paul McCartney and Lady Gaga.

“Everyone seemed happy to do a tour every few years and nothing for the rest of the time,” Jagger recently told The Times, adding that the business has flipped. “In the old days, the tour used to be a promotion for the record and the record was the thing. These days you make loads of money on the road and you don’t make much money on the record, which means you’re still selling tickets even when you don’t have a new album to promote.”

Picture: Facebook/Rolling Stones

He suggests that it reduces the incentive to make something new: “You end up thinking ‘They just want to hear Paint It Black [on tour]. They don’t want to hear anything else. They’re quite happy. Who cares about our new record?’”

Jagger clearly did, and corralled Richards, Ron Wood and drummer Steve Jordan, Watts’ anointed understudy, into the studio this time last year, setting the target of releasing it now, a deadline they met, reflecting the consummate efficiency with which Rolling Stones Inc. operates. 

In the end it took them just three weeks in a Los Angeles studio to complete, making use of chums who were around at the time, like Lady Gaga, who sings on the luscious, gospel-influenced Sweet Sounds Of Heaven, which also includes keyboard work from Stevie Wonder. Sir Elton John turns up playing keys on Get Close and Piano, while McCartney adds bass on the punky Bite My Head Off.

Viewed through the prism of the kind of commentary I opened this post with, it’s very easy to see Hackney Diamonds as The Stones By Numbers. As is the customary gag, they even let Keith sing on one (Tell Me Straight). But that ignores the fact that the Stones’ very essence runs through the album from start to finish (which, incidentally, ends with a cover of the song that birthed the band - Muddy Waters’ Rolling Stone Blues).

It is a very good Rolling Stones album indeed, and by a country mile an improvement on the somewhat pointless Blue & Lonesome. Some have suggested that it’s their best album since Some Girls, the album that signalled the end of their prime (Tattoo You, which followed in 1982, was cast in the same period and can be seen as largely a collection of ’70s outtakes). 

Here’s where they’re clever: from the outset, Angry, to the conclusion, you will think you’ve heard it all before, except you haven’t. No one ever bought a Stones record for Beatles or Bowie-like progression, so there’s not likely to be any disappointment with Hackney Diamonds. It’s a Rolling Stones record. It’s what they do. It’s what they do that no one else does. And it is brilliant.