2020: the antidote

Back in June I waxed somewhat lyrically about the re-release of The Blue Nile’s fourth and final album, High, and how Messrs Buchanan, Bell and Moore’s mellifluence was the perfect antidote to these sulphurous times. Well, guess what? Those times are still with us, and the need for a soothing balm is as acute now as it has ever been. Step forward, then, Tim Bowness.

One of the UK’s much-respected but not universally-known singer-songwriters, his collaborations with - full disclosure - my friend Steven Wilson date back to the late 80s and the formation of ‘no-man’, an outfit once described by no less an organ as the Melody Maker as "conceivably the most important English group since The Smiths”. Over the last 33 years, the Bowness/Wilson partnership has generated seven critically acclaimed albums, including their most recent, the “disco epic” Love You To Bits. When not in each other’s professional company, the pair have focused on solo interests - Wilson, with the equally revered Porcupine Tree and latterly, albums on his own, with Bowness working prolifically on five solo albums of his own (including his last, the highly rated Flowers At The Scene, which included contributions from Wilson, XTC’s Andy Partridge and 10cc’s Kevin Godley) and a plethora of collaboration projects. But now comes his sixth, Late Night Laments, which pretty much does what it says on the tin - a soothing collection of nine songs (14 on a limited edition CD with extras) which evoke the intimate, even claustrophobic state of late night, headphone-wearing consumption of atmospheric music. That description, though, probably doesn’t do Bowness any favours: Late Night Laments is no ambient gloomfest, but certainly does provide a timely reflection of where we find ourselves today.

“50% was written in late 2019 and 50% was written in early 2020,” says Tim of a creative process that went right up until the first signs that something more than just a flu outbreak was going on. “From the very first tiny newspaper article on the new coronavirus, I was aware of what was happening,” Tim recalls. “It was no surprise to see it go from a small piece on page 20 to taking up the first 20 pages of the paper by late February.”

Notably, the album was formally finished on the day lockdown was announced in the UK. Some of what it covers was certainly prescient. “My main worry was that some of the themes - hate crimes, generational divides, terrorism, social exclusion, etc - would be irrelevant in the face of the virus. As it turned out, a lot of the subject matter seems more current now.” Perhaps inadvertently, Bowness realises that he’d tapped into the emerging reality. “On one of my last listens through [in preparation for release], I became so absorbed in the experience that when the album finished I had to gradually re-remember that ‘lockdown’ and ‘the virus’ were real things. The music (or my exhaustion) had made me forget what was happening in the outside world and for a few moments the all-too depressing reality we’re living through seemed like far-fetched fragments from a bad dream.”

The result is an album of reflective, stripped back consideration, written from the perspective of an individual, late at night, enclosed in the almost claustrophobic intimacy of a living room, the outside world shut out by headphones, the music channeled from source to ear by the shortest of routes. The cover art, by longtime artwork partner Jarrod Gosling, almost says it all. “The artwork does provide a good insight into the album, I think,” says Tim. “There is a sense that the music is quite beautiful and comforting, while the lyrics represent a harsh dose of reality. I imagined the album as being like someone trying to immerse themselves in their own special world of favourite books, favourite albums, familiar furniture, while in the background the constant hum of global news is serving to puncture that state of grace.”

Bowness’s own ingestion of culture played some role in that, with songs like Darkline evoking the music of 60s spy thrillers. No surprise: “Late last year, I went through a phase of reading le Carre books,” Tim reveals. “Although they’re sometimes dismissed as genre thrillers, they’re actually well-written and frequently emotional pieces of work. There’s a real sense of sadness in his writing and a great depiction of how small lives can be sacrificed to the supposedly greater good of national politics or religion." Added to that is his love of 60s spy films and the scores of people like John Barry in the Bond and Harry Palmer series.

Late Night Laments is certainly a tonal shift from Bowness's last outing, no-man’s Love You To Bits, with its themes of relationships-lost framed by a clubland-infused electronica. “I think it was a necessary shift in direction,” Tim says about his latest direction. “What I do is often a reaction to what I’ve done previously, so albums can be a continuation of the most recent work or a complete rejection of it. In this case, the songs emerged totally spontaneously and were very different from the dynamic Love You To Bits and the eclectic Flowers At The Scene. I didn’t intend to write a late night ‘headphones album’, it was what naturally came out.”

One Last Call was the first track out of the bag - and closes the album (“The beginning became the end”), and concerns itself with idealogical terrorism, albeit written ambiguously as also a love song. Between these two points, it sets the sonic template for the entire album, all atmospheres, subtle bass motifs and Bowness’s own emotive, intimate vocals. “I didn’t intend to write a late night ‘headphones album’,” he says. “It was what naturally came out. Once I’d written One Last Call, the album title, album direction and album cover came to me pretty much immediately.”

The themes bubbled up as he went. The album’s opener, Northern Rain covers something I can closely relate to, the progressive demise of someone with dementia, but while this might sound depressing, the song is, in Tim’s own words, more about “coming to terms with ever-shifting change and being replaced.” I’m Better Now takes a nihilistic view on hate crime, seen through the eyes of a perpetrator, and examined through the prism of society’s increasing division, especially the polarities that politics here and in the US have been tainted with in recent years. “I wanted to present an extremist view and an extreme act in a way that ‘almost’ made it appear normal. The banality of evil,” says Tim. Elsewhere, We Caught The Light, written in the early hours of New Year’s Day, tapped into a “strange sense of foreboding” Bowness had that 2020 “was going to be significant and not in a good way”. “We caught the light,” he sings over a gentle melody, “but missed the signs”. Makes you pity those journalists who’ll be compiling the end-of-year retrospectives in December.

To make the album Bowness tapped into his expansive network to call on the talents of people like co-producer Brian Hulse, whose drum machine programming plays a constant part in the album’s sensuous textures, as well as Steven Wilson to mix the project. The joy throughout is that everything is perfectly weighted. Nothing - not the vocal or the instrument - is ever overplayed, with contributions by Porcupine Tree bassist Colin Edwin and former Japan keyboard player Richard Barbieri (who has long featured in both Bowness and Wilson’s work) adding subtlety, rather than obvious virtuosity. A case in point is the delightfully slowburn Darkline (inspired by a typically black-humoured Warren Zevon comment during his final days), on which Barbieri contributes a muted scream of a synth solo that just works in the piece.

If One Last Call, the first song written for the album provides its “emotional template”, according to Bowness, it’s impossible not to draw reference to the aforementioned Blue Nile, with whom many positive similarities can be drawn. Perhaps this is no coincidence, given the involvement of The Blue Nile’s recording engineer Calum Malcolm. “I’m a huge Blue Nile fan, and have followed the band’s work since the beginning,” says Tim. “I particularly love how they manage to humanise imaginative electronic soundscapes. My voice is totally unlike Paul Buchanan’s, but there’s no doubt that the feel of and the textures in The Blue Nile’s music have an influence on what I do since the beginning of my music making.” Another reference is Peter Gabriel - himself a huge part of The Blue Nile’s source code - and it’s with some pride that Bowness, a longstanding Gabriel fan, is now signed to his Real World organisation in a publishing deal. “I greatly admire the label and studio and have long been a fan of Peter’s, so it’s a lovely association. Hopefully there will be creative and career repercussions as well.”

Late Night Laments is, then, a fantastic addition to Bowness’s canon and, he says, the unpredictable nature of the directions he takes each time could lead him anywhere (“As many of my albums are a reaction to what I’ve just completed, you can expect a full-on K-Pop extravaganza or a detour into Noise Metal!”, he says, maybe jokingly). But there is no rush. This is an album that will get plenty of play, especially throughout the remainder of this particular shit show of a year. It does indeed recall the ambient brooding of The Blue Nile, but also Talk Talk and Prefab Sprout. Significantly, though, it also recalls the wooziness of One World, one of my favourite John Martin albums. That closes with the eight-minute Small Hours, a lot of Echoplex and the sound of geese recorded on a tape recorder taking flight from a nearby lake, amongst other ambient sounds. Previously it had been my go-to source for late night listening. With this new work by Bowness, I’ve found a successor.

Happy days are here again!

Picture by Thomas Park on Unsplash

I'll admit, the headline you see above might be somewhat odd, given that The Thing is still with us, much like Donald Trump, and the economy - and I'll declare here to not being much of a professional economist - is pants. However, one thing 2020 has taught me is to cherish small mercies. That first post-lockdown haircut, the country walk on a sunny spring afternoon, our back-to-basics, passport-free staycation. It reminds me of my parents' stories of wartime rationing, and what constituted a treat. The pandemic, for all its awfulness, has been nothing like wartime conditions. Yes people have died, but bombs haven't fallen on our houses night after night, and even that weird period in March when toilet paper couldn't be bought for love nor money soon resolved itself. Cynicism aside, though, the curtailment of some things we considered routine has, I'll admit, hit hard.

Shortly before the lockdown was imposed, I was diagnosed with a medical condition that required a complete overhaul of diet and lifestyle. Stupidly, I'd allowed myself to succumb to it, but frightened by the diagnosis, I launched myself instantly into a fightback. Here's where, sometimes, fate can be both cruel and fortuitous at the same time: in February, I moved in with my girlfriend; late February, I secured a job after a few months without one; soon after, I was struck down by a form of vertigo that led to the GP suggesting, casually, that as a new patient at the practice I should get a general health check. This revealed that I had Type 2 Diabetes, and not insignificantly, either. Now ensconced in my new home environment, with what felt like a death sentence and a municipal swimming pool just a five minute walk around the corner, I decided to do something, and made best use of the pool as many times of the week as I could. Then, after two or three weeks of luxuriating in the cardiovascular and mental health benefits of waddling up and down the lanes for an hour or so, it was brought abruptly to a halt by COVID-19. Everything, let's face it, was brought abruptly to a halt by COVID-19, but this was particularly frustrating as swimming was the one form of exercise I actually enjoyed.

Yesterday, then, was the reawakening. The local pool reopened, albeit with its own version of the new normal we have to experience everywhere else. My swimming slot had to be booked in advance, I had to arrive ready to swim, with trunks beneath my tracky bottoms (the supreme irony being that Storm Lewis decided to dump stair-rods of rain from the moment I left the front door until I arrived at the leisure centre's entrance). Inside, there were no changing room shenanigans - just "pop your clothing at the side of the pool" and plunge in. Given that there were no more than ten people in the pool, and lifeguards aplenty, the lack of using a locker (plus, I've forgotten my padlock combination code in the five months since I last used it) meant the whole experience was easy.

Once in the water, there was a choice of 'Medium' or 'Fast' lanes, though this didn't dispel the usual knob all municipal swimming pools attract, who thinks they're Mark Spitz (one for the teenagers there...) and chop up and down like speedboats with a sense of entitlement and little consideration for the more elderly pace of others. Like me, a profoundly slow swimmer. After 41 minutes and 31 lengths - not bad for a first swim in five months - and what my watch informed me was a bounty of calories burned, I reclothed and left via the fire exit, following a strictly defined route around the poolside, and walked home. Endorphins were pumping (I believe that's what they do), I felt good. Despite the heavens still looking Biblically grim, I actually felt that a weight had been lifted from my shoulders (on top of the two stone I've lost since my diagnosis).

Happy days, then, are here again. Swim slots can be booked up to a week and a half in advance, so my new obsession is refreshing the leisure centre website to nab them, much like the compulsive-obsessive behaviour to secure Ocado deliveries some months back. Now it's swimming sessions. Even if it means I now spend my evenings on the pool's website, like someone sitting on eBay trying to bag a bargain, I reckon I'm better for it. Or, at least, will be until lockdown returns again...

Something Fab worth saving

COVID-19 has reaped much misery, I don't need to tell you that. Almost three-quarters of a million deaths worldwide and counting, with 41,000 in the UK (or 46,000, depending on your preferred accounting method). The pandemic has cut a huge swathe through business, with high streets and airlines, department stores and restaurant chains, forced into administration, some possibly never to reopen. As of last week, 175,134 people had been made redundant in the UK as a result of the crisis, with 9,373,700 employees at 1.2 million companies placed on furlough. That, you could say coldly, is business. The economy will return, "the green shoots of recovery" will poke up at some point. They always do.

The arts, though, have suffered particularly badly, with theatres dark and music venues shuttered for the foreseeable future. I've lost count of the number of gigs I had tickets for which have been transmuted optimistically to 2021, much like mine and your next foreign holiday. So the argument to keep one individual venue open, as opposed to the thousands of others currently struggling, is a tricky one. However, news this week that the Cavern Club in Liverpool is facing closure is worthy of debate. Opened in January 1957, just as the rock and roll era took off, the warehouse cellar at 10 Mathew Street became, arguably, the most famous music venue in the world thanks to being "the cradle of Merseybeat", granting early exposure to acts like Gerry & The Pacemakers, Billy J Kramer, The Searchers, Cilla Black, and the Merseybeats themselves, plus a quartet that would go on to project Britain across the world - and still do.

The Beatles made their Cavern debut on 9th February 1961, the first of 292 appearances over the following two years. Seven months later local businessman Brian Epstein called in one lunchtime and saw the Fabs for the first time. By the following June he'd become their manager and had secured a recording deal with Parlophone Records. History - and not just musical history - had been made, and the Cavern had been where it had happened.

The importance, then, of this slightly dingy backstreet cellar should not be underestimated: it could be argued, of course, that Liverpool's Cavern plays no more an important part in British music than, say, the former Station Hotel in Richmond (location of the Crawdaddy Club which spawned the Rolling Stones), or the nearby Ealing Blues Club and Twickenham's Eel Pie Island, but the Cavern's nurturing of The Beatles in their early days is worthy of special national interest. I'm not going to wax on here about The Beatles' career and legacy - Lord knows, there's plenty of reference material out there on the subject - but it wouldn't be that preposterous to place them in the same league of historic importance as Shakespeare, Dickens, Wordsworth and Chaucer. I'd go so far as saying that the Cavern is of similar national significance as Stonehenge, and easily the equal to the Royal Albert Hall (especially now they know how many holes it would take to fill).

Liverpool's mayor, Joe Anderson, has warned that the Cavern is in grave danger of closing forever as a result of losing £30,000 a week since the beginning of the pandemic. He is understandably concerned, given that the club anchors the 'Beatles Experience' - the micro tourist industry that brings visitors to the city for its numerous Fab exhibits. Bill Heckle, one of the Cavern's directors, has called for government help to see the venue through the crisis: "We made a decision a few years ago to keep as much money in the bank as possible for a rainy day, not realising it was going to be a thunderstorm," he told the Liverpool Echo, revealing that, like so many businesses, they've been now forced into making redundancies - 20 so far, with another 20 likely in the next few weeks. "If the government grants allow us to open at 30% then we still lose money," Heckle says. "I wouldn’t expect [the government] to pay our profits, but at least make sure we don’t lose money, because it’s costing us £30,000 a week at the moment to be closed. That’s a lot of money."

Heckle stresses that it's not just nostalgia that should keep the Cavern alive: "The history is continuous. It’s not a museum," he told the Liverpool Echo. "It’s a very vibrant part of the Liverpool economy, which is why we’re reaching out at the end of August and reopening the Cavern for a week, virtually and bands from all around the world have sent messages and recorded sets. We know we’re not going to make money, it’s about really reminding people we’re here and the sole aim is to get out the other side. I’m sure we will, but it is about survival." It's a tough call. The arguments against protecting even as hallowed a venue as the Cavern are strong. My argument is that it is a museum, and a critical one at that. But why save this one venue and not, say, the local pub near me where a young Eric Clapton joined The Yardbirds, which has just been flattened to make way for more high-rise housing? The difference is, in fact, a bit bigger than just sepia-tinged emotion. The Cavern begat The Beatles, and there's a much bigger story behind all that.

Even if the timespan between their Cavern debut and their legal dissolution on 31 December 1970 spanned less than nine years, it's still a truly remarkable, unmatched nine years in terms of what The Beatles did in that time. They evolved, progressed and matured, before the world's very ears and eyes, all while remaining in their 20s from start to finish. And, yet, in that time, they went from fresh-faced, mop-topped, zoot-suited youngsters to bearded, absorbed hippies; metamorphosing, creatively, from the chirpy, innocent pop of Love Me Do to the wistful, even cynical soul of Let It Be, if you follow the chronology of releases. Even if you think of those nine years in terms of moving from their childhood homes to Surrey mansions, the role of the Cavern as the seed bed of The Beatles' success can't be ignored.

As a side point, on Monday a German friend of mine reminded me that it was 60 years to the day that The Beatles made their debut in Hamburg, having been recruited to be part of the city's efforts to boost its international appeal. Aged between 17 (Harrison) and 20 (Lennon), the foursome learned their craft, playing seven-days-a-week, for four-and-a-half hours on weekdays and six hours at the weekend, and sleeping in a squalid room at the Bambi Kino cinema on the Reeperbahn. It was their education. No magic route to fame via a TV talent show. And it prepared them, when they returned to Liverpool, for more graft at the Cavern.

Recently I listened to the first volume of The Beatles Live At The BBC and was astonished by the repertoire they'd developed in Hamburg and then perfected at the Cavern. By the time they started doing sessions for Auntie Beeb in 1963, they'd banked an incredible collection of rock and roll standards, including Chuck Berry, Ray Charles and Carl Perkins covers, as well as their own early self-written songs. This was pure craftsmanship. Again and again, the archives show that it was, first in Hamburg, and then back home in Liverpool, that The Beatles were formed as an incredible live band, with those early BBC recordings capturing the extraordinary energy that underpinned their reputation in that Liverpool cellar club.

Quite how this informed their most creative years and the astonishing progressiveness of Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and beyond, is hard to really gauge. Their final concert, in 1966 at San Francisco's Candlestick Park, was not, as often surmised, a retirement. They simply didn't tour again. Instead, they retreated into their homes and the studio to move the rock'n'roll era into the classic rock era by writing those incredible albums that defined the final four years of their career as a recording unit, and their development into one of the most enduring symbols of the pop era, still to this day. Rather than being seen as a building block in that story, the Cavern should be seen as the foundation stone. To me, that places it in the same category of national cultural importance as a landmark like Stonehenge. And we wouldn't let that disappear, would we?

I can feel it coming in the air tonight - Phil Collins is cool

Picture: YouTube

"No he's not!". "He never will be!". I can hear the tea being spat out from here. Phil Collins is, was and can never be cool. Everyone knows that. The problem is, no one really knows why, or bothers to find out why he shouldn't be. But let's come to that later, because the big news this week, along with the usual apocalyptic yada-yada about COVID-19, Britain being hotter than Hades and the worst recession in human history, is that Phil Collins has returned to the charts thanks to a viral video of 22-year-old American twins Tim and Fred Williams listening to his debut solo single, In The Air Tonight, for the first time.

ICYMI, the twins host a YouTube show, Twins React, in which they review videos of songs they've never heard before. Their reactions are the show's chief selling point but it has evolved into something more cultish, as the brothers from Gary, Indiana (the city on the shores of Lake Michigan where pop's Jackson family came from) explore a wider world of music. At first they focused on rap, with which they were more familiar, but then they were turned on to Frank Sinatra's I've Got You Under My Skin (Tim had, apparently, never even heard of Sinatra) and things like Radiohead's Creep. A review of Dolly Parton's Jolene received two million views, prompting a Twitter response from La Parton herself: "No point in begging. Jolene already stole these two."

My original copy of In The Air Tonight - bought from MJM Records in New Malden in January 1981

So, back to the twins' encounter with Collins' solo debut: pressing play, they are at first mildly intrigued by the opening hiss of a Roland CR-78 drum machine's hi-hat. It was this noise that arrested my interest at the beginning of January 1981 when, browsing in my local record shop, looking for something to spend my Christmas money on, I, too, heard In The Air Tonight for the first time. I was pulled in by those first couple of bars of synthetic beats followed by the three-chord minor key motif from a Prophet-5 synth. Then comes the haunting, echoey vocal: "I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord". In their YouTube review, the Williams twins start nodding and trading comments about the song's overall vibe as it begins, unsure as to whether they're listening to rock music or, due to the drum machine, early hip hop. Halfway through, Collins sings: "Well, the hurt doesn't show, but the pain still grows - it's no stranger to you and me" followed by the thunderous break of live tom-toms struck in quick succession - "duh-DUFF-duh-DUFF-dah-DUFF-DUFF-DUFF-DUFF-DUFF-DUFF!". "I have never seen nobody drop a beat three minutes into the song!" Fred exclaims. “That was cold, that was cold how he did that," his brother adds. "I ain’t gonna lie, Phil, you got me on that". As of Tuesday this week, the twins' video had been viewed more than four million times. Their subscriber base has also gone from 40,000 in early July to 400,000 today. Moreover, their review of In The Air Tonight has sent the song back into the charts. At the beginning of this week it sat at No.3 on the iTunes chart and was the fourth biggest selling song in the US in the week ending last Saturday.

The Williams' fêting of Collins might sound kitsch, like Glastonbury somewhat patronising a Barry Manilow or Lionel Richie with the 'legend' slot, but the now-69-year-old has form in this area: hip-hop artists have long been fans, even putting together a tribute album in 2001, Urban Renewal, that featured the likes of Ol' Dirty Bastard, Dane Bowers, Lil' Kim, Kelis, Pharrell and Montell Jordan covering some of Collins’ biggest hits. They weren’t, though, being ironic.

Here’s where we get into the complicated DNA of Phil Collins' appeal. Up until In The Air Tonight, and its accompanying album, Face Value, Collins had been the drummer in Genesis who, when Peter Gabriel moved on, took over as lead singer. But in the 11 years between joining Genesis, fifty years ago this month, and the recording of his solo debut in 1980, he’d built a deserved reputation as a truly gifted drummer, something his critics frequently forget or ignore. Although Genesis were often derided, particularly by the music press during the punk era (which they survived) for being proto-prog, Collins' own musical sensibilities were often glossed over, despite coming from a musical background that included The Beatles, Motown, Stax and R’n’B, and branching into jazz fusion with the noodle-mungous Brand X and hanging out with members of Weather Report. Collins may never have been considered hip, but he was a highly respected musician, respected across the musical spectrum for his truly inventive, melodic drumming in particular. A case in point is Turn It On Again, the Genesis chart hit. Drum nerds might note that it is in 13/8 time. Who knew?

In The Air Tonight was either a turning point, or even the turning point. Some argue that Collins never bettered it, but that would be unfair. It does, though, stand out in his solo career, a point not lost by the fact that it was the first song on the first of eight studio albums, several of which generated enormous chart hits on both sides of the Atlantic and turned Collins into a global superstar. In The Air Tonight was a defining statement for an artist who'd been, until Genesis had its first chart hit three years before, relatively unknown. It was also unique as a pop song; like Ultravox's Vienna (released five days later), Collins' single was relatively long at over five minutes. Both songs were also divided by tempo changes more than halfway through. Both, too, had a similarly dystopian feel. It was, though, the album that ITAT appeared on that set in train one of the most dominant musical careers of the 1980s and early 1990s. Because, after the opening track, with its added bombast halfway through, enhanced by the so-called "gated reverb" Collins had accidentally invented with producers Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham while working on Peter Gabriel's third album, the album Face Value took an eclectic and meandering path through Collins' personal style palette. Track 2, It Must Be Love, was the kind of saccharine-sweet love song that Collins haters deflected the most. Track 3, a cover of the Collins-penned Genesis song Behind The Lines featured the Phenix Horns, the Earth, Wind & Fire brass section.

Hardcore Genesis fans, who’d barely adjusted to four-minute love songs replacing 22-minute epics, were horrified (worse came with the next Genesis album, 1981’s Abacab, which featured the Horns again). There was a plaintive dustbowl song, The Roof Is Leaking, and more brass-infused R&B in I Missed Again and Thunder And Lightning, and the album closed with a brave, technically brilliant cover of The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows, with a production that pointed much of Collins' later studio work back to what George Martin had pioneered with the Fabs to begin with. The trouble was, the albums that followed could be accused of repeating the pattern. Hello, I Must Be Going opened with a slowed down drum pattern reminiscent of In The Air Tonight's drum fill, while also providing a substantial hit with Collins' cheeky cover of You Can't Hurry Love. No Jacket Required included the clearly Prince-influenced Sussudio, and was, arguably, the album with the most hits and the biggest establishment of Collins as one of the 80s' biggest pop stars. But Seriously brought with it a similar array of hits and big productions, including I Wish It Would Rain Down with new chum Eric Clapton, Something Happened On The Way To Heaven and That's Just The Way It Is, though it was Another Day In Paradise that would endure, negatively, as another stick to beat Collins with, being a song sung by a multi-millionaire rock star about homelessness.

Collins' solo career started to spill over into his Genesis work, as the band moved further away from the prog epics about Giant Hogweed, and into becoming MTV darlings with their ‘wacky’ videos for songs like Illegal Alien and Invisible Touch. Collins took the blame for all this, without anyone bothering to know that it was as much the desired direction of Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks to go into a more pop direction. Collectively, though, Collins became an overwhelming fixture of the era. In some ways, he was the '80s. In The Air Tonight had featured heavily in the pilot of Miami Vice, in a scene featuring Crockett and Tubbs cruising down, fittingly, Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, in their Ferrari Daytona. Collins would later appear in the show, playing a shister game show host called ‘Phil the Shill’ (a somewhat notorious part, as the character used the word “wanker” on prime-time US TV at a time when a) it wouldn’t have been allowed on British television and b) most Americans wouldn’t have recognised the word, anyway).

At Live Aid, Collins appeared twice - first at Wembley and then later, courtesy of Concorde, in Philadelphia. Why? “Because they asked me.” Not even he realised how omnipresent he’d become: “I was always there,” Collins told The Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey in 2016 when publicising his autobiography, Not Dead Yet. “I was always in your face. People were always talking about me, usually not in a nice way. There was definitely too much of me.” Peak zeitgeist was probably reached when Bret Easton Ellis wrote his novel American Psycho - later made into a film with Christian Bale - in which the principle character, murderous ‘80s investment banker Patrick Bateman, expounds on Collins’ music: “His solo efforts seem to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying in a narrower way,” he comments in the film adaptation while telling a couple of prostitutes to act out his sick fantasies. This, probably, was at odds with the ‘Nice Guy Phil’ persona that been built up by first being a decidedly un-rock-and-roll rock star, and then developing a solo career around music that, well, your granny would like. But it didn’t stop him selling millions more records, working on Disney musicals like Tarzan, and being the go-to drummer for every Prince’s Trust celebathon (he was a trustee of the charity).

In some respects, there are two, possibly three Phil Collins. There is the gifted drummer who played more of a role in Genesis’s early phase than many would acknowledge, and still kept them interesting when he took over as singer in 1975; then there is the global pop superstar, whose hundreds of millions of record sales, at one point, sat behind only Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson’s respective totals, whose tempestuous love life just seemed to fuel more albums of ballads and self reflection; and then there is a third Collins, vilified for divorcing his second wife by fax (he didn’t) and voting Tory (he didn’t, in 1992, as was reported - he’d told Piers Morgan, then editor of The Sun’s Bizarre column, that he’d consider going abroad if the incoming Blair government raised taxes, which became seen as a hardline Conservative position). But then he met and married his third wife, the Swiss national Orianne Cevey, and moved to the Swiss Riviera. For the tabloids, the story wrote itself.

More recently, though, Collins has been less uncool as unfortunate. Twenty years ago he temporarily lost his hearing, the start of a chain of health issues that have led to, today, him being unable to drum, walking with a stick, and performing from a chair on stage. We can assume that the Genesis reunion tour - now rescheduled to next year - will not see the once impish Collins leap about the stage and perform the elaborate tambourine ‘tarantella’ during the song I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe). Certainly there will be no mesmerising drum duets with second drummer Chester Thompson. Here, then, lay the core of what it was that I liked about Collins in the beginning.

However, this doesn’t address the issue of whether Collins can ever be considered cool, even if his reputation in the music industry - and not just the hip-hop community - is mostly intact. The Tory/tax exile mythology may have skewed views, notably Noel Gallagher’s (and even Bowie once cruelly referred to his ’80s pop spell as “my Phil Collins years”), but for those prepared to wade through the syrup of his ballads - brilliantly lampooned by Spitting Image with a profusely blubbing Collins singing Hello, You Must Be Going - go back to the period of Collins’ history which counts the most for me, as a member of Genesis in their most creative, musically contrarian phase, before the videos and US Top 40 assault.

Even when Collins was ‘just’ the drummer, sat behind the increasingly outrageous Gabriel, guitarists Rutherford and Steve Hackett hunched over 12-string guitars to the right, and keyboard player Banks adopting an equally slumped posture to the left, he applied techniques that made most other rock drummers look decidedly pedestrian (which is why he ended up doing side work for Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, John Cale and other contemporary luminaries). When he stepped up to the lead singer’s microphone, he brought an everyman appeal that contrasted with Gabriel’s previous aloofness. That’s the era I’d point to and say, you know what? Phil Collins was pretty cool. He still is, to be honest, but just don’t let that get in the way of established media lore.

I'm back, back, BACK - to the living room

Picture: Microsoft

It’s not often that I return to work from a holiday and not feel a pang of regret. Or, at least, exhale a grumpy “frnrhhhrrr” as the morning alarm intrudes my first morning back after a final blissful night of not-working sleep. This time I didn't fall back into slumber and therefore waking an hour later with a lot of agitated F-wordery in the manner of Hugh Grant in Four Weddings And A Funeral. No, this time, none of that. My two-week staycation did the job perfectly, and I returned to work yesterday relaxed and refreshed, as holidays are supposed to render you. Well, I say "returned to work" but, er, not back at work, as in the place of. That, once more, is as it has been since early April - the living room. And it will continue to be for the foreseeable future, despite Boris Johnson advising Britain to “cautiously” go back to work from the beginning of this month.

My company - very wisely - is, like many others, neither encouraging the mass return to office life nor extensively facilitating it, for now. Plans are being drawn up to make it happen when the time is right, but on the basis that productivity-wise, we're all doing alright from home and have been since March, so there's no immediate requirement to bring everyone back in. Not that doing so would be straightforward. When I started my new job in April, the whole lockdown thing was still only envisaged as temporary. Coronavirus deaths were low - England had recorded just 403 by 5th April -  but with exponential leaps of 5, 14, 25, 70 and 188 in the week leading up to it. The total UK death toll is now over 46,000, with 311,641 cases reported. Deaths are down, but the number of cases is rising. With that in mind, Boris and his ministers would still love us back in our offices, eating in local restaurants or buying lunch at sandwich shops, spending money again on suits and business shirts, and getting them dry cleaned in the same vicinity, thus stimulating the sub-economies that exist around places of work, especially in cities.

However, the appetite amongst both employers and employees to restart commuting, and therefore mingling with The Virus, is decidedly low. Analysis by The Guardian found that working-from-home would remain the norm for many big companies at least until September - a month later than the 1 August date Boris had set to get people back into the workplace. Some companies, like Google and the NatWest Group, have even said that home working would remain in place until next year. For many employees, the kitchen, spare room or, if they’re lucky, home office, will remain the de facto place of work for the foreseeable future. Some companies are even reinforcing the WFH culture, providing employees with subsidised desks, office chairs and Bluetooth headsets. Others, though, are trying to lure staff back into the office by offering free food and drink, and other perks. Investment bank JP Morgan has installed thermal cameras and stationed a nurse in the lobby of its Canary Wharf office. The accountancies PwC and EY as well as the banks Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays are all working on the principle that limited returns to office working will take place in September. But it’s still all very tentative. All major employers, with substantial amounts of office real estate, still have to get their heads around social distancing. In order to reopen, shops and restaurants have had to go to extraordinary lengths to put down direction arrows on floors, install plastic screens or simply provide staff with PPE. Offices have the added complexity of how to transport hundreds of employees to office floors by lift, even if the general government wisdom is that employees sitting amongst each other for eight hours a day should be safe.

Getting to your desk is one thing, but getting to the front door is another thing entirely. Commuting by public transport has not - and is unlikely to - returned to pre-pandemic levels. Our street serves testament to this, normally being used as a free car park for the local Zone 4 railway station a five minute walk away. Even taking August into account, parking is still freely available to us residents. People, clearly, are not going back to work. In the City of London, more than half a million people usually work in the financial district, almost exclusively travelling by public transport, but, according to the Institute of Directors, there isn’t likely to be a “mad rush back to the office” this month, according to its chief economist, Tej Parikh, who told The Guardian that this reluctance was down to public transport and childcare concerns. “Adjusting workspaces can take time, and isn’t without costs,” he added. Simply put, the summer holiday months just aren’t the time for offices to staff up again (assuming they’re not making people redundant). But clearly some companies are looking even further than than the summer.

My own experience of working during the pandemic has been defined somewhat by the fact that I started work at my company three weeks after the UK officially went into lockdown. Apart from my boss and his boss (with whom I met for my interview), and one other team member, I’ve never spent any time in the physical company of the myriad people I now work and interact with on a daily basis. In a past life, I actually embraced working from home: I could get things done (not easy in an office shared with boisterous sales people). But it’s really not all that it’s cracked up to be. Getting up, travelling on the Tube, grabbing a coffee and then firing up the laptop, before reversing the whole process several hours later has its benefits. Distance, mainly. An opportunity to separate work from home.

I’ve been in the workforce for 34 years and operated out of a variety of environments and team situations. But for younger employees, especially those on the first rungs of their career, being forced into whatever work-from-home set-up they’ve had to adopt - which includes bedrooms and shared kitchens - they’re missing out on the office. Even the annoying things, like your desk neighbour’s toxic Cup-a-Soup, loud phone conversations or inane football banter (actually, that’s alright). Not even The Sound Of Colleagues website, with its background sound effects of real offices, can recreate the experience.

A few weeks ago The Times interviewed Generation Zers about how they were coping at home, and found many to have enjoyed the freedom of sitting in your pyjamas all day long, with no ghastly commute to cope with, but have increasingly found that they were missing out on networking and socialising - yes, including the running commentary from across the desk on their colleague’s romantic travails. One very wise 24-year-old even noted that he was losing out on the benefit of sitting alongside older, more experienced colleagues. “Video conferencing will never be the same as meeting,” he said.

In some respects, the pandemic has occurred at the worst time for everyone. As April and May came around, we enjoyed glorious weather in the UK, and while June and July were oddly less good, summer’s continuance with the sort of hot sunshine we’ve been having so far this August, is clearly not going to chase people back into the office, even if the lure of professional-quality air conditioning is quite a draw. Of the UK’s 15 million people who’ve been working from home throughout the crisis, more than two-thirds - according to the Office for National Statistics - worry that going back to workplaces carries too much risk. “The overwhelming majority of British people work in offices, the London School of Economics’ Professor Tony Travers told The Times recently, adding that services now accounts for 80% of British GDP.

However, a recent study by Morgan Stanley found that only 34% of Britons have so far returned to work since Boris ended the “work from home, if you can” guidance. and announced that people could return to their place of work at their employers' “discretion”. Morgan Stanley found that three-quarters of Germans, Italians and Spanish had already returned, with as many as 83% of French office staff back (though there's no clarity on whether they immediately buggered off again to enjoy les grandes vacances). British office workers seem to be even more stubborn: nearly half of office staff are still working from home five days a week, with just a quarter returning on a part-time basis. Perhaps a lack of official clarity is partly to blame. Just two days after Johnson gave his guidance, the government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said: “People who can work from home should continue to do so". In London, public transport is still operating at only 25% of normal passenger traffic, a telling figure despite some evidence of arterial roads creeping back to their usual congestion.

All this raises the question of whether things will ever return to normal. Maybe they won’t, or at least, we won't return to 9-to-5, Monday to Friday office working. The functional need for workplace distancing and the social adjustment that millions of workers have, abruptly, had to make since March, could change the working culture forever. But we will still need some place to physically attend, even if it’s for weekly team meetings, or collaborative sessions that can’t be done over Zoom or Google Hangouts. Furthermore, many workers will, over time, simply grow tired of their working from their home environment, and desire the alternative that an office provides (which also means not suffering the vagaries of iffy broadband). Tech giants like Apple and Google have continued to invest in vast architectural wet dreams in which to house their workers, with the former’s chief executive, Tim Cook, even insisting that “Nothing yet replaces human interaction” and dismissed the idea of his people never again not working in physical proximity to each other. The problem is, no one at the moment wants to be in physical proximity to anyone who doesn’t reside in their ‘bubble’. Unless they’re crowding out Bournemouth Beach. When they’re supposed to be working from home.

It's the end of the staycation, and I feel fine

© Simon Poulter

There was no 4am start this year. No pre-dawn gathering of grumpy teenagers for the drive to Gatwick. There was no glorious arrival, either, as the hot sun first hits the face as you walk down the plane’s steps on your way into the arrivals hall and, ideally, collection of your baggage. No, this year there was the briefest of journeys down to the south coast, a 45-minute ferry crossing, followed by a glorious week on the Isle of Wight. This was followed by a second week at home in which I had my hair cut, maxed out the credit card at a designer outlet shopping centre, sat in the garden a bit, went to the pub for lunch, walked down the high street for coffee, celebrated my girlfriend’s birthday at a swanky London hotel, came home and sweated in the garden a bit more. And I feel brilliant. Most relaxed I’ve felt in, well, months.

I’ve got to admit, this year’s enforced staycation has benefited from glorious weather. While on the Isle of Wight there was a point where the self-reassuring “well, this could easily be the Mediterranean” started to become a cliché. But the truth is, it was. And all with shopping trips to Marks & Spencer without the customary adolescent sniggering at foreign brands with ‘funny’ names. Even the apartment we rented - on spec - overlooking Cowes harbour contributed to a blissful state of escape for all of us. No rush in the morning to get to some amusement on time, nowhere on the island more than an hour away, and still back in time for dinner indoors or the four-minute walk into town.

For those who holiday on these shores every year, quite happily and without any sense of injustice, I must sound like a right metropolitan knobhead. But for all my adult life, and that of my partner (and, indeed, her children), holidays have been about properly getting away - as far away as jet travel will accommodate. The summer escape has been exactly that - an opportunity to see somewhere else, to experience somewhere else, to be somewhere else. But this summer, given COVID-19, there was no way that a) we weren’t going to have a break and b) we weren’t going to any of the usual destinations, with their azure seas, sandy beaches, hotel swimming pools, comedy waiters pedalling their well-worn shtick every night - and the risk of not getting back, or getting back and spending the next 14 days in quarantine.

I don’t wish, either, to sound too revelatory. Plenty of middle class Londoners descend every year on Falmouth, Newquay, Salcombe and all the other quaint West Country destinations, where the locals detest these so-called “grockles” while theoretically coining in their dosh. The staycation is nothing new. All of my childhood holidays until the age of 13 were exclusively in either Wales or the West Country, and most, if not all, involved mostly wearing cagoules and other forms of wet weather protection. Even the summer of 1976, when the rest of Britain turned a dusty brown, we managed to stay in a mid-Wales self-catering cottage where it stair-rodded down. Every. Single. Day. Our staycation this year has been blessed by the weather. I’m sure, in our well-appointed apartment, we would have remained stoic had it have poured every day, but luckily we didn’t need to be. Ditto this last week, which has managed to conclude with the second consecutive hottest-day-of-the-year on a Friday, too. But enough gloating.

Putting money into the coffers of clearly struggling restaurants has been an act of mutually convenient benevolence. The virus has changed the way places like these do business (woe betide anyone not owning a smartphone when they go out now, as almost everywhere seems to operate menus and ordering systems called up via downloadable apps or QR-code links). Which is why the lurid tabloid headlines of overflowing beaches swarming with human flotsam seems at odds with the reality elsewhere. Nowhere we’ve been over the last couple of weeks has exactly been heaving. On the Isle of Wight, the best beaches were popular, but never uncomfortably so. Perhaps, though, it’s not surprising. We took the plunge and booked our week in order to ensure we had some semblance of getting away. Others have been understandably less confident. Few places we went on the island were anywhere close to what I was expecting for the end of July, which is a worry as tourism contributes nearly half a billion pounds to the local economy, and provides employment to 16 per cent of the population. Cornwall - somewhere I haven’t been on holiday since a disastrous childhood family trip, staying in an old miner’s cottage in the delightfully-named Delabole, which sprang a leak halfway through our fortnight forcing us to abandon ship a week early - has become de rigueur for posh urbanites. “Chelsea-on-Sea”, screamed hysterical headlines last week after the streets of places like Newquay appearing to be overflowing with Tarquins, Camillas and their Tobys and Lucys. David Cameron is probably to blame (though not just for Cornish tourism...). Like the Isle of Wight, the New Forest, the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, et al, tourism accounts for a lot of the economy in Cornwall, too. £1.5 billion last year, the result of 4.5 million visitors (half the population of London or almost twice that of Birmingham, for comparison). And, yet, while the headlines might suggest carnage, the reality - as we found on the Isle of Wight - is somewhat different, as establishments have to limit their opening hours, bring in enforced distancing and COVID-compliant hygiene measures.

A recent piece in the Financial Times by columnist Sebastian Payne revealed that some places he visited in Cornish resorts can’t actually afford to reopen with the new rules. “Plus,” one shop owner in Polperro stated, “we all know there is probably another lockdown coming later this year so what’s the point of reopening to close again?”. I mention this simply because of our admittedly smug indifference to ‘FOGO’, fear of going out. OK, wearing a mask in hot weather is a pain, but if that’s the only hardship getting in the way of having a relaxing couple of weeks off, then what’s the problem? I know it’s not as simple as that, but over the last couple of weeks we’ve enjoyed a glimpse, maybe, of what a normal holiday should be like, but not once did we feel hard-done-by. Actually (and don’t tell my other half), I actually enjoyed seeing the English countryside, even the one day when it was cool and drizzly. Maybe it’s because I needed a holiday after five months of lockdown (one in which I was also coping with a new job and a new diagnosis of diabetes), but I have enjoyed the last two weeks probably more than many of my more expansive holidays over the last 30 years or so. Yes, exotic is nice, but sometimes something that, at first, might appear prosaic, can turn out to be just what you want from a holiday: a simple pleasure.

The rebirth of cool: the Absolute Beginners soundtrack

In my actual timeline, I am a child of the 1960s. In my self-mythology, I’m a child of the rock-pop era. There is some legitimacy to this claim: I was, after all, born in November 1967, three months after the Summer Of Love and two weeks after Hendrix recorded Little Wing. My childhood was spent in the 1970s, which meant attending the Thursday night ritual of Top Of The Pops, and bopping along to Mud, The Rubettes, Smokie, and being ever-so slightly freaked out by Alvin Stardust clad in full leather, pointing at the camera with a gloved hand bearing a large jewelled ring on the index finger.

It was only later on in the 1970s that I discovered what is now referred to as “classic rock”. This meant that my musical upbringing - until I ‘accidentally’ discovered Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album (well, taped it off my brother’s copy) - was shaped by the Top 40 tunes of the decade as a whole, which meant putting up with Peters & Lee’s Welcome Home and ABBA, and becoming mildly interested in the punky chops of Blondie, The Jam and The Police around the time I started secondary school.

By no fault other than the year I was born in, I turned 13 in 1980, which meant that the 80s were my coming of age, music-wise. This was the decade that began with the Floyd’s Another Brick In The Wall at No.1 and ended with a Top 10 that included Jason Donovan, Soul II Soul, Jive Bunny, Madonna, De La Soul and New Kids On The Block. Make of that what you will. My read is that you probably can’t generalise any one era: the 50s might have given us rock and roll, the 60s the golden age of pop (or pop-rock if you prefer), the 70s rock, punk and disco, and so on, but really we’re in broad sweeping statements here.

Recent trundles about the South Coast, listening to the type of "classic hit" radio stations Peter Kay captures so brilliantly with 'Forever FM' in Car Share, reminded me that the 80s were no different. Sure, there was plenty of cheese, but no different then than now or, indeed, any era you pick. The difference, though, between the 80s and now is that - and I’m going to go full card-carrying, cardigan-wearing old fart here - there was some musical integrity, then, about Top 40 pop. You know, real instruments and no Autotune, unlike the software-infested durge coming out of the station we had on the car last week on the Isle of Wight.

So, then, a statement of the bleeding obvious: there’s something for everyone in every decade, and no one has the right to call snobbery over anyone else’s. Rant over, the reason this comes to mind is the reissue this week (and rediscovery in my vinyl collection) of an album that, in one particular way, captured a specific aspect of the 80s. Last week I blogged about the demise of Q magazine and my involvement in the launch of a near-rival in 1986, looking to break into the ‘men’s lifestyle’ market, which was being fuelled by Soho, The Face and i-D magazines, and the convergence of style, fashion and music of the early 1980s. So the reappearance of the Absolute Beginners soundtrack album has randomly evoked a phase of my musical education when the 1980s tapped into the 1950s, and jazz made an unexpected appearance. We had, of course, Sade, whose Diamond Life became a period cliché due to its association with ‘yuppie’ wine bars (though it’s true - you couldn’t avoid the record if you visited such establishments). Plus there were pseudo jazz acts like Carmel, Matt Bianco and Swing Out Sister, along with Everything But The Girl’s Eden album and even The Style Council, with their cod-jazz leanings on their debut, Café Bleu. All of it was, though, eminently cool.

Julien Temple’s 1986 screen musical adaptation of Colin McInnes’s 1950s-set, coming-of-age novel Absolute Beginners just seemed ripe for the time. It was brash, it was bold, it was colourful, it was invariably overblown - and many critics just didn’t like it - but it was, for all its many faults, relentlessly cool. Not quite the commercial and critical dud it has since been painted to be, Absolute Beginners had a certain charm - in particular, its soundtrack. Temple drafted in jazz great Gil Evans to oversee it, and in between pieces of Evans-arranged incidental music, it captured a eclectic, but jazz-themed mix from the likes of Sade, Ray Davies (in a particularly amusing skit as a put-down dad pleading for a “Quiet Life”), Patsy Kensit (on-the-money 80s casting as the film’s love interest) with her band at the time, Eighth Wonder, and even a stormy instrumental by Jerry Dammers of The Specials to accompany the film’s riot scene (a statement on the 1950s Notting Hill race riots). Paul Weller - who’d already written his own paean to the McInnes book with The Jam’s song of the same name - got on the soundtrack with The Style Council’s bouncy Have You Ever Had It Blue.

The standout contribution (inevitably, given my pronounced leanings), however, came from David Bowie. The Dame was at something of a career plateau when Temple invited him to ham it up as vampiric advertising executive Vendice Partners - himself a skit on Soho’s then-status as 80s London’s adland epicentre, replete with an intentionally fake American accent. When the film was released, Bowie was several months on from his barnstorming appearance at Live Aid, a performance in which he’d appeared with a brand new backing band (including Thomas Dolby), having discarded - as he often did - the group he’d worked with on the Let’s Dance album and its subsequent Serious Moonlight tour. Temple’s Absolute Beginners was already in production when Live Aid came around, and Bowie’s theme song for it was recorded at Abbey Road just a month before the self-style “global jukebox” was staged.

Like Queen and other acts who were given a career lift by the charity concert, Bowie’s appearance in Absolute Beginners, and his musical contribution to it, went further in cementing his legend status, but not in any obvious leap or bound. You could argue that he'd left behind artistically interesting, complex music, and that Let’s Dance had sent him fully commercial (with the mid-80s Tonight and Never Let Me Down albums widely considered creative lows). But with Temple’s film, Bowie looked like he was just having fun. As Partners, he camped it up for England, but it was the title song - all eight minutes of it, in its full version - that stood out as, arguably, one of the great entries in the entire Bowie catalogue, and certainly of that period of his career. When I saw him at Wembley a year after the film ca out, on the much-derided Glass Spider Tour (regrettably, my only experience of Bowie live), it was Absolute Beginners’ energy that made the biggest mark of the night. I could wax on further about Bowie here, but as much as we (well, I) still mourn his loss, it’s memories of his involvement in this film - both the comic acting and the impassioned theme song (not to mention another gem on the soundtrack, his cover of the old Dean Martin standard, Volare), that added another chapter - no, paragraph - to the already expansive Bowie story, and to the magic of why few bend a knee to The Dame as much as I still do.

The Absolute Beginners soundtrack, then, snapshots two eras: the 50s the film portrays, and the mid-80s in pop. Just as Live Aid, it’s near-contemporary, captured the crossover between the generations (those of the classic rock era like Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, Bowie, The Who, Queen, etc, and those from the more immediate present - Madonna, Duran Duran, Phil Collins, Spandau Ballet, George Michael), Absolute Beginners sliced into a momentary phase of the 1980s, when Soho cappuccinos, Bass Weejun loafers and wearing pastel V-necks over the shoulders - essentially the entire Paul Weller vibe at the time - provided a jazz-infused, politically-minded (anti-Thatcher, Red Wedge et al) interlude to the decade that brought us puffball skirts and red braces-wearing, Bret Easton Ellis-inspired bankers with far too much gel in their hair. But above all, in just the first eight minutes of side one, it brought out a recording by David Bowie that combined so much of his undoubted talent - drama, excitement, luscious chord changes and an impassioned vocal, plus a Bowie trademark that often goes unrecognised: a honking saxophone.