Letter From America: The Boss is back

What did you do during lockdown (and by that I mean the first lockdown…)? Did you discover the joys of Zoom? Were you sucked into a weekly online quiz with your extended family? Did you acquire a new hobby? Eat yourself into a Jabba The Hut-sized mound? Finally make use of that yoga mat you’d bought but never used? Or, perhaps you did a Captain Tom, and walked yourself into the record books and the nation’s hearts. 

If you’re a musician, lockdown has possibly been a boon to creativity, if only to compensate for tours not going ahead. Look at Paul McCartney - he recorded McCartney III, out in December, on his own at his studio in Sussex, handling all the instruments himself. And I bet it’ll be a corker.

Though this took place last November (a sweeter, disease-free time, right?), Bruce Springsteen’s approach to housebound boredom is to invite your mates round and, in a week, put together a new album. Not that those mates are anyone: they’re called the E-Street Band. And the album is Letter To You. 

Recorded over five days at The Boss’s home in Colts Neck, New Jersey, a twenty-minute drive from Asbury Park and the real Jersey Shore so steeped in Springsteen history, the album, in his own words, “turned out to be one of the greatest recording experiences I’ve ever had.” That might sound hyperbolic, but Springsteen says there’s a “emotional nature” to the album that he loves, a point that comes across in the Apple TV making-of film about the album. It shows the camaraderie of a group - trusted sidekick Stevie Van Zandt, Patti Scialfa (Mrs. Springsteen), Nils Lofgren, Roy Bittan, Max Weinberg, Garry Tallent, Charlie Giordano and Jake Clemons (the ‘Big Man’, Clarence’s sax-playing nephew) - crafting an album, a band Springsteen says in the film informs how he writes, inspiring him to “write big”. 

Back in the spring of 1974, Springsteen and the band started work on the Born To Run album, labouring over the next 14 months - six of which on the title track alone - to create scale, something akin to the Spector ‘wall of sound’. It was an angry, frustrating time for all concerned, but ultimately, the exhaustive process produced a perennial classic. In sharp contrast, Letter To You took a fraction of the time to make, but the result is, it has to be said, equally impressive. That said, some songs on the album took an awful long time to reach a record: the epic If I Was A Priest was originally written for the Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. album, Springsteen’s debut almost 50 years ago. Dusted off and finally recorded in the November session last year, it’s as fresh as anything more freshly minted, even for a song which treads somewhat on religious sensitivities by imagining Jesus walking through the Wild West. Significantly, it has an important place in Springsteen lore, being one of the songs he played for Columbia Records executives at their first meeting in May 1972, prompting label boss John Hammond to hope that every song on the artist’s debut LP would be like it. 

Another resurrected from the 1970s is Janey Needs A Shooter (which Warren Zevon purloined with The Boss’s permission for his 1980 song Jeannie Needs A Shooter), while Songs For Orphans also dates back to the Greetings era, and has only previously been heard in public before at a single show 2005 Devils And Dust tour. “It's wonderful how the older songs fit so well into this album, Van Zandt told Forbes recently. “It's remarkable really. That, Janey Needs A Shooter and Songs For Orphans are all from the early '70s. To have something fit so well 50 years later - oh my God, I swear we have completely redefined chronological time, I'm telling you! I think rock and roll has changed science. Seventy is the new 40.”

Picture: Bruce Springsteen, 2020/Danny Clinch

Springsteen is now 71, but as if proof that age is just a number, Letter To You arrives in what feels like a period of unblinking industriousness. Like his near-contemporary Neil Young (or even, come to think of it, his somewhat British equivalent Paul Weller), there has been little sign of slowing down as he reaches his more senior years. Letter To You is his fourth in eight years, his second since 2014’s High Hopes with the E-Street band fully on board, and comes just a year after the wonderful Western Stars. All this, the Born To Run autobiography, and that extended run of Springsteen On Broadway, his New York residency that ran for five shows a week from October 2017 until December. The following year. Much like his legendary, near-four hour concerts, Springsteen has never done things by halves.

“I’m at a point in my playing life and artistic life where I’ve never felt as vital,” he recently told the New York Times. “My band is at its best, and we have so much accumulated knowledge and craft about what we do that this was a time in my life where I said, ‘I want to use that as much as I can.’” The product of this is an album recorded live and without need for endless overdubs, but also an album of undeniable energy, power and subtle texture in tremendous balance and, somehow, an inherent sense of love and camaraderie. Missing, of course, from this are the late Danny Federici and Clemons Snr, though their spirits - as witnessed frequently in the Apple TV documentary, are never far from any of the band’s hearts, least of whom, Springsteen himself. The band’s closeness undoubtedly was the fuel that drove the making of Letter To You.

“I had cut a song on the record called Janey Needs A Shooter earlier on for a one-off for Record Store Day,” Springsteen recently told America’s National Public Radio. “But when I listened back to it, it was the closest thing the band had ever sounded to Darkness On The Edge of Town. You know, that was because we all played together and sang at one time, and because we relied only on the instrumentation of the band and no overdubs. So I said, well, I'd be interested in making a record where we return to the template of Darkness On The Edge of Town. And so, consequently, I made no demos of the songs. I simply recorded them on my acoustic guitar into my iPhone, waited until the band got here, played in the songs on an acoustic guitar and then we went and performed the music.” 

“I knew I wanted to make a record with the band,” Springsteen added in his New York Times interview. “I knew I wanted it to be the pure instrumentation of the band: two keyboards, the guitars, the bass, drums and saxophone, and I didn’t want anything else. I didn’t want to demo or have preconceptions of the music, so I didn’t touch the songs until I taught them to the band. The approach is confirmed by Van Zandt, who told Forbes: “I kept emphasising if [Springsteen and the E-Street Band] do make another record - and it was really not clear if we ever would - but I said, 'If we do, let's go back to the old way’, which we had done on three records, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River and Born In The USA, where Bruce walks in with an acoustic guitar, plays his songs and everybody has a chance to give their input.”

The result is a classic Springsteen album, neither melancholy or overtly upbeat, but a continuation of the reflective mood he’s been in since the autobiographical period of his book and Broadway show. Along with the songs written in another time, there are nostalgic hat-tips to the past, such as the stonking Last Man Standing, which pays tribute to his teenage band, The Castiles, of which - he reveals in the Apple TV film - he is now the only surviving member. There is similar thought for mortality and absent friends on I’ll See You In My Dreams. While the dynamics of Letter To You may not vary from expectations of what a Bruce Springsteen/E-Street Band album should offer, there is so much more to enjoy that just the comfort food of familiarity. The understated opener, One Minute You're Here is as tender as the title track that follows it, or as prototypical as Ghosts, perhaps serving the simple purpose of being a celebration of what it is to be in this brotherhood of musicians.

Rock bands are, in general, uneven communities. Invariably riven by ego, creative tension and mismatched personalities, they are often held together by artistic tension alone. Bruce Springsteen has, at his disposal, an unique family, even when he dips into the E-Street collective on his 'pure' solo albums. Together they produce something no other entity in rock music is capable of. As hackneyed as it is to say, they are truly more than the sum of their parts. Letter To You, with its raw simplicity, its power and energy is an album to savour, for sure, but also one to just enjoy for what it is. And it may well be one of the best that Bruce Springsteen and his gang have ever produced.

Running down his dream: Tom Petty’s Wildflowers reissued

As the already-straining bespoke piece of furniture we had built in the summer testifies, there is no shortage of hefty box sets and ‘super deluxe editions’ peddled in good faith to purveyors such as myself (i.e. middle aged, curious, compliant). Some are genuinely worth it. Some offer a volume of richness to justify the expense, whether unearthed rarities or newly remastered albums are your thing. Some, though, can leave you cold, little more than the original albums filled out with studio offcuts, which were probably rejected at the time for all the right reasons.

It is, when you pull back and observe from cruising height, a bit of a racket, but there’s plenty of us willing to part with hard cash. The question, though, is often whether these box sets become trophies to put on display or genuine artefacts to savour - in other words, listen to. 

I recently had this conversation with a musician friend of mine, who has probably done more than most to fuel the collectables trade by being a pre-eminent master of producing multichannel remixes. I’ll admit, as a lapsed audiophile from my Philips career, there is something enjoyably fetishistic about listening to previously binary stereo albums three-dimensionalised by the application of surround sound. But it is, I recognise, enormously niche. Some artists make it worthwhile: Jimmy Page has personally worked on the numerous Led Zeppelin box sets, and the duty of care he applies is there to be heard, both in the production work and in the extras thrown in. The Bowie box sets, my other touchstone, are clearly aimed at completists, but the recent online (and soon, physical) releases of his 1990s live albums have provided much needed perspective on just how good The Dame was in a period many consider his wilderness years (or post-wilderness, if you consider the mid-80s to be his barren time). 

Recently I eulogised about the Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup reissue, not for the excellent live album that comes with it (it’s an irrefutable fact that the Stones will never release a bad live album), but for a chance to reassess a studio album often disregarded because it came after the band’s run of classics, and to do so with new sonics to boot. Others, sadly, are often cynical exploitations, and I’m not going to waste your eyeball time here on a lengthy list of offenders.

Many box sets are, however, the product of passion, of a desire to reflect a legacy rather than a chance to fleece the fan. One case in point is Tom Petty’s newly-released Wildflowers And All The Rest, a five-CD/nine-LP package built around the late rocker’s tour de force 1984 solo album, Wildflowers. What makes it such an exception is that the package bears the hand of Petty himself, despite his death three years ago this month. Rather than merely being a reissue of the original album plus a few extras that didn’t make the original release, it is a rich and seemingly endless mining of the exhaustive process that Petty and producers Rick Rubin and Mike Campbell went through to produce what could have been originally a double-album of at least 25 songs, were it not for the record company insisting on it being a single-disc record.

This clearly stuck in Petty’s craw, and before his untimely demise he made it a personal ambition to restore Wildflowers to the album he’d originally wished to put out. “I broke through to something else. My personal life came crashing down, and it derailed me for a while. But I was at the top of my game during that record,” Petty has said. Thus, the new package contains the original 15-track Wildflowers, plus the All The Rest collection, which contains ten additional tracks planned for the original release, as well as five previously unreleased tracks, as well as home recordings and alternate versions of tracks that were eventually committed to record, all helping frame a creative process that yielded one of the most satisfying showcases of Petty’s songcraft. And as if all that wasn’t enough, the new release also includes 14 live recordings of songs from the Wildflowers sessions. 

Posthumous releases can, often, appear to have the ghoulish hand of record company exploitation, but there is a profound sense with Wildflowers And All The Rest of it being a heartfelt continuation of Petty’s own dream, with his widow Dana, daughters Adria and Annakim, and Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench of The Heartbreakers all involved in lovingly curating the project. The end result is a 54-track immersion into Tom Petty at his very best. Thematically and tonally, it fits within the cadre of Petty’s career, dating back to the swampy blues of Mudcrutch, the band he formed with Campbell and Tench in Gainesville, Florida, in the mid-1970s. That might suggest a lack of expansion or evolution, but you wouldn’t accuse Bruce Springsteen of varying little beyond his blue collar, blue-jeaned roots rock’n’roll, and that, at essence, is what Petty has shipped, and shipped so well throughout his time on Earth. 

From the oustset, the bluegrass-tinged title track, the original album meanders effortlessly through a brand of music that only Americans seem capable of pulling off authentically. The stomping You Don’t Know How It Feels is a worthy steering wheel-tapping radio hit, all drums, bass string riffs and harmonica fills, and the kind of chorus refrain that Petty should get far more recognition for as a pop artist. There are more familiar Petty sounds on the likes of You Wreck Me, with its grinding guitars and youthful vocals harking back to American Girl or Refugee, while Cabin Down Below gets into a pithy Southern groove. There are more downbeat moments, too, such as House In The Woods, which takes a slower pace and a grungier tone that could easily have come from one of Neil Young’s more oil-stained denim outings.

As for the ‘extras’ (or, to be more correct, All The Rest), it would be hard to say that they represent a Petty aiming for something different or reactionary. But it’s also hard to understand why Warner Brothers felt that what didn’t appear on the original release wasn't worthy, then, of airtime. Because, simply put, there’s not a duffer amongst them. Somewhere Under Heaven jangles away delightfully, with Petty’s shimmering™ Rickenbacker 12-string giving it the inevitable Byrds/Dylan comparison, but also a dramatic, even prog-rock landscape. California is full of optimistic pep, a paean to the Los Angeles the Floridian Petty made his home, and redolent of everything aspirational you can imagine about the state (and resonates with me as the part of America I have experienced more than anywhere else, and even lived in for a couple of years). In contrast, the introspective Harry Green finger-picks its way bucolically through a restrained rant about a redneck.

Picture: Mark Seliger

While the whole project is seen as a Tom Petty solo album, he is rarely far from the Heartbreakers, of whom most make appearances, as well as a couple of Petty’s celebrity chums, like Ringo Starr, drumming on To Find A Friend and Carl Wilson adding his vocals to Honey Bee. Personnel, however, rarely define a solo album, however. All, no matter how collaborative, depend on the direction of the principle, and that makes the ‘Home Recordings’ disc arguably the most interesting of all, as it features Petty’s demos for what would have constituted the full 25-track album he’d intended Wildflowers to be. Stripped to the intimacy of voice and acoustic guitar, these are more than just ‘unplugged’ arrangements, but black and white pencil sketches before the full colour rendering, and while they clearly provide the colouring-in template for the final versions, the performances of Wildflowers, You Don’t Know How It Feels and a couple of unused track, Confusion Wheel and There’s A Break In The Rain (Have Love, Will Travel) strip things away to the heart of what Petty was trying to achieve as a songwriter.

Posthumous releases are all-too often money grabs by greedy record companies trying to cash in, or even - sadly - desperate attempts by the bereaved family to make a few bucks out of their loved one’s legacy. No matter how much they get packaged up as “something for the fans”, usually they are often about exploiting the fans. Wildflowers And All The Rest is not one of those exercises. In fact, rather than being a rushed-out greatest hits collection, it is a lovingly-curated, delightfully engaging example of how best to let the music do all the talking. It is the perfect self-tribute.

Finns ain’t what they used to be

The conventional wisdom is that people from Nordic countries are the world’s most easy-going and contented. Apparently, they enjoy the good things in life more than anywhere else, from health and wellbeing to work-life balance. Finland, in particular, scores by far the best on these things, coming top in almost everything the OECD regards as good, from living standards to employment, education to life expectancy. Finns are, in general, happier with their lives than the OECD average. This even extends to civic engagement: voter turnout, a measure of participation in the political process, was 67% during the country's last general election, an estimated three-quarters of the country’s top 20% earners voting, and even 62% of the bottom 20% casting their view.

Perhaps this explains why a brouhaha has erupted after Finland’s impressive young prime minister Sanna Marin appeared in a magazine profile wearing a very tasteful black blazer with - SHOCK! - nothing underneath but a vintage necklace. Despite the ensemble appearing no racier than a deep-cut ballgown, some social media users went nuts, accusing Marin’s outfit of being “inappropriate”, and that it “eroded” her credibility. In her defence, thousands of supporters countered the outrage, rightly accusing it of being highly sexist, and sharing pictures of themselves (including hairy-chested men) wearing identical jackets and necklaces, accompanied by the hashtag #imwithsanna. Some highlighted the misogyny of the fuss by posting pictures of male leaders exposing their chests, including Vladimir Putin fishing shirtless and one of former Finnish president Carl Gustaf Mannerheim…erm…posing naked on horseback.

What is ridiculous about the whole affair is that the pictures, which accompany a cover feature in the women’s magazine Trendi, are perfectly tasteful, and you’d have to have a particularly skewed moral bent to find them anything less. Inevitably the socially conservative nature of the photo’s criticism is directed at the 34-year-old Marin’s youth and somewhat alternative background. 

In the interview she makes the case for people to focus on her policies rather than her appearance. Unfortunately, the “plunging” (Daily Mail™) picture has had the opposite effect. The magazine’s editor, Mari Karsikas, responded by saying, very sensibly, that the comments about Marin’s picture said more about those making them than the prime minister herself,  adding that it was hard not to interpret the criticism as anything other than misogynistic. Finnish actor Kiki Kokkonen wrote on her Instagram account: “Everyone should be allowed to live in such a way that their character, dignity and professional skills are not determined by clutching at irrelevant straws.”

Still, this didn’t stop entrepreneur Aki Pyysing criticising Marin for “attention-seeking” in a blog post that attacked her economic policies and even mocked the dimensions of her barely visible cleavage in the apparently offending photograph. The post was tweeted by centre-right opposition party MPs Elina Lepomaki and Juhana Vartiainen, though their tweets were later deleted, with Lepomaki admitting: “My mistake. I shared it carelessly and did not read the entirety of the text, which got personal and mocked the prime minister’s appearance.”

Marin’s rise to the top in Finland - when elected in December she became the world's youngest serving head of government (a title conceded in August when 34-year-old Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz returned to power) - has been accompanied by inevitable attention to her youthful image, a point accentuated by her prolific use of social media, especially Instagram. Observers claim that she knowingly would have chosen the outfit for the Trendi shoot…but if so, why should that be a problem? Theresa May’s Amanda Wakeley leather trousers for a Sunday Times interview four years ago was seen as an otherwise dull politician trying to look more interesting, but no more, and yet the fact that the strides cost £995 was enough to generate a vacuous news cycle for days.

Picture: Austin Hargrave/Sunday Times Magazine

Anu Koivunen, Professor of Gender Studies at Tampere University in Finland said the social media storm over Marin’s outfit wouldn't have come as a surprise: “These politicians know very well what kind of discussions they are starting. They are very media savvy. Marin's actions are done with full cognisance.” During her pregnancy, Marin used her Instagram account to chart progress, posting selfies of her baby bump and even a candid breastfeeding shot once her daughter Emma was born. In August she married her long-term partner Markus Raikkonen at Kesäranta, the Finnish prime minister’s official residence, with Hello!-grade pictures of the couple posted to her account. Again, hard to fault a 34-year-old woman doing that, highly progressive prime minister or not.

Imagine Lennon at 80

Picture: Iain Macmillan/Yoko Ono

Today would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday, which would have been a curious prospect at the best of times. The thought of him today, in the age of Trump, coronavirus, Twitter and any one of the myriad cultural earthquakes since his murder on 9th December, 1980, is somewhat mouth-watering to consider, and mind-boggling at the same time.

The most startling reality, however, is that it is indeed almost 40 years since Lennon was taken from us, three months after his 40th birthday, by psychotic fan Mark David Chapman who shot the Beatle four times in the back, outside his Dakota Building apartment in New York. Plenty of our greatest rock and pop icons have been taken too soon - no need here to reel off membership of The 27 Club - but with no disrespect to, say Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix - Lennon was out there in an echelon of his own. Being one of The Beatles, alone, made him a deity: even if you disregard his arguably patchy post-Fab solo career, the body of work Lennon contributed to in just the briefest window of time that he, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were a creative entity transcends almost any other recording act I can think of. A grand statement, I know, but sometimes consideration of their contribution to music history is so awe-inspiring that it can make your head spin. That's not to say that anyone else isn't good. It's just that very little comes close, whatever your viewpoint or degree of objectivity.

The tragedy, here, is that in terms of time, Lennon would only live a further ten years after the breakup of The Beatles. Ten years. Some artists go that long without releasing anything. He would, though, like all three of his former bandmates, continue to be productive, producing the albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, Some Time In New York City, Mind Games, Walls And Bridges, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Double Fantasy (the posthumous Milk And Honey was released in 1984). Each contained no shortage of memorable (if slightly derivative) songs like Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) and the perennial festive hit Happy Xmas (War Is Over). These can all be reassessed today with the release of Gimme Some Truth, a sumptuous, reissued greatest hits selection which now contains multichannel, high-definition remixes of Lennon's best solo work, from Jealous Guy to the withering, McCartney-targeted How Do You Sleep?, as well as rockers like Whatever Gets You Thru The Night (featuring Elton John) and one of my all-time favourite Lennon solo pieces, Watching The Wheels.

The conventional wisdom, such is the perennial journalistic need for competitive comparison, is that the post-Beatles creative spoils were shared by McCartney and Harrison (let's leave poor old Ringo alone), and that even as a foursome, the sum of the parts was never greater than the whole. But that belies the truth that revolutions generally only happen once. The legacy of that whole is immeasurable, given how much of music since 1970 still owes a debt of gratitude to what the Fabs delivered in the eight years between Please Please Me and Let It Be. Lennon's own legacy becomes, often, complicated by his personality, his passions, his interests. And that makes contemplating how he would have spent the last 40 years such a head-shrinkingly impossible task.

One thing is for certain, and that is that he wouldn't have been able to escape his former band. Just as McCartney and Starr, today, and Harrison until his death in 2001, can't (or shouldn't) escape the its shadow, it would have been interesting to think of how Lennon would have dealt with The Beatles never-ending tail. The wide hypothesis is that a reunion, of sorts, would have taken place, perhaps at Live Aid, though this is not a forgone conclusion. Led Zeppelin have had vast sums of money dangled before them to reform, but Robert Plant, mainly, has not given in. Likewise Pink Floyd - with Roger Waters - reformed for Live 8, but with Richard Wright's demise, and little signs of Waters and David Gilmour's frosty relations warming up, that ship has probably sailed. McCartney and Starr have reunited regularly, usually at all-star charity events, but it's not quite the same. Not that McCartney hasn't sat still, creatively, which makes you wonder what it would have been like for him and Lennon to have returned to writing together, even as they reached their respective dotages.

By the time Lennon was giving his final interviews in 1980, seemingly more contented with life, living with Yoko in New York, there appeared to be a mellowing. While traces of his acerbic, sometimes cruel wit remained, you could imagine an eventual reparation in his relationship with McCartney. He is, though, unlikely to have eased up on the social injustices that fired him so. Even at 80, he would have a point of view about the environment and Black Lives Matter. He would have opposed both Gulf Wars. He would still be maintaining that we should give peace a chance. It would have been fascinating to hear his thoughts on the death of his great friend and fellow-adopted New Yorker, David Bowie. Conceivably they would have worked together several times beyond their collaboration on Bowie's Young Americans album and the hit Fame in particular. The pair first met at a party in Los Angeles in 1974, and hit it off. Bowie revealed in 1995 that he thought they'd be "buddies forever", drawn to a similar sense of humour as much as anything else, though strangely they had differing views on each other's work ("I asked [John] what he thought of what I was doing, glam rock, and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s great, but it’s just rock and roll with lipstick on’.").

Lennon was, in Bowie's view, "probably one of the brightest, quickest-witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life," qualifying the statement with: “Socialist in its true definition, not in fabricated political sense, a real humanist." In the same interview, Bowie - of all people - nailed what it was that kept the Beatles' legacy in universal consciousness. "They gave the British the illusion we meant something again and we love hearing that, boy do we love hearing that.”

Like Bowie, it's probable that Lennon's career would have dipped in the 1980s and early 1990s. Even with the patronage of upstarts like Liam Gallagher, with his allusions of being Lennon himself (even naming his son by Patsy Kensit after the Beatle), the creative fires within are unlikely to have dimmed. Contemporaries, like Paul Simon, for example, have continued to produce intelligent while hardly radical music long into their 70s. McCartney himself is still making albums which, but comparison with younger, lesser acolytes, are still on their game. The flames of anger, too, would continue to flicker, just as Roger Waters continues to rail at pet causes.

The most obvious touchstone here are the Rolling Stones. In the 60s it was a binary choice between them and their Fab rivals (which, like most battles in pop was entirely confected, and they were all, actually, good friends). But whereas The Beatles came to a halt, the Stones have rolled on, doing their thing and doing it well. They still hold the title "Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band In The World" with aplomb, and with little sign of relinquishing it, even as their eighth decades on this planet beckon.

And that's a good place to leave this. John Winston Ono Lennon was, from the outset, a rock and roller: "I only liked simple rock and nothing else," he told Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in an interview published in his book Lennon Remembers. Rock and roll - even at its most essential, with Little Richard screaming "a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!" - was, for Lennon, a vessel that got directly to the point.  It's quite possible, that at 80, he'd be still getting directly to the point on many things.

This is no time to die for cinemas - and they won’t

Picture: Twitter/James Bond

"Saturday night at the movies, who cares what picture you see. When you're huggin' with your baby In the last row in the balcony." So sang The Drifters in a song that perfectly captured the cinema experience of 1964, which arguably is no different 56 years later. "Well, there's technicolor and cinemascope, and a cast out of Hollywood. And the popcorn from the candy stand makes it all seem twice as good."

Except, more than half a century on, we're not going out to the movies, on Saturdays or any other night of the week. The coronavirus has, evidently, put paid to a British tradition dating back to 1896 when Auguste and Louis Lumière brought their Cinématographe technology to London to show off the short silent films they’d made. In the decades that followed, cinema became both a source of welcome escapism and a window on the world. By the end of the 1920s, just as the silent era gave way to the first talking pictures, cinemas had become fixtures in most major towns. Almost 100 years on, and last year some 176 million cinema tickets were sold in the UK, the second highest on record since 1970. And then COVID struck.

Six months on since the lockdown came, that Saturday night tradition is, like so many businesses, apparently in ruins. An industry that had remained surprisingly resilient in the face of widening home entertainment choices (compare this with, say, the impact of streaming services on the physical media music industry - we still valued that big-screen experience) has been forced onto its knees. Yesterday, the Odeon chain - a name synonymous with cinema - announced that it was cutting the opening hours of some of its UK and Ireland screens, with a quarter of its theatres only now opening on Fridays and Saturdays. Worse came from Cineworld, the chain which controls around one in seven of the UK’s screens, which announced the temporary closure of its venues.

Picture: Twitter/James Bond

The culprit? Well, obviously the coronavirus, but the repeated villain in the piece appears to be James Bond. Last Friday’s announcement from MGM and Eon, the ‘home’ of 007, that No Time To Die was to be delayed - again - to next April, one whole year after it’s original release date, sent a chilling shudder through the cinema industry. It had been counting on the 25th Bond film to fill coffers emptied by months of lockdown closures, followed by restricted openings with reduced seating due to social distancing requirements. That, though, only tells half the story. To blame Bond is not entirely fair. True, No Time To Die would have been an extraordinary draw, but in many respects, this is more to do with Hollywood as a whole. At the end of the day, there’s been an overall dearth of new, high-volume blockbusters to draw in the multiplex crowds, even those prepared to endure distancing and mask-wearing throughout screenings. Without the audiences, studios are reluctant to release the big-draw titles. Without the big-draw titles, punters are reluctant to venture out.

No Time To Die, Robert Mitchell of Gower Street Analytics told Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, “is the straw that broke the camel’s back”, pointing out how release dates from the bigger studios - an industry dominated by just a handful - have been moving for some time. “Ultimately the cinemas need a pipeline of regular content to draw cinema goers in,” he added. The trouble, here, is that the cinema industry has become over-reliant on the blockbusters. Bond may have been seen as the industry’s Autumn saviour, but this year we’ve seen delays to guaranteed seat-fillers like Fast And Furious 9, Marvel's Black Widow, Wonder Woman 1984 and Top Gun: Maverick. What has been released hasn’t exactly inspired confidence amongst the major studios: Christopher Nolan’s Tenet only earned $45 million in the US market. If a cinephile release like that can experience such miserable box office returns, the coming months of a second spike of the coronavirus and local lockdowns simply means that for the studios, releasing a high-budget film simply makes no economic sense. Not even streaming - such as Disney’s live-action Mulan being made available via the Disney+ service on a pay-per-view basis - can truly replicate the cash generated by box office receipts. “If going straight to streaming was a slam dunk, then all studios would be doing it,” one former industry executive told The Times. "The theatrical and studio worlds are interdependent,” they added saying that Disney’s experiment had proved far from conclusive, pointing out that for a film to be a hit on streaming services it “generally needs a good result at the cinema” as well.

This, though, highlights a point that many critics of the film industry have been saying for some time, that the industry’s reliance on a handful of franchises, be it Bond or the Marvel ‘universe’ to sell Saturday night popcorn by the bucketload, is a false economy. A $200 million-budget action movie still needs to cover its costs, as much as it promises to satisfy an audience’s need for the instant gratification that a $50 million independent production might not deliver, even if it would satisfy a more cultural nutrition, not to mention balance the books with a healthy return. One irony of all this, if you can call it that when thousands of people are facing redundancy, is that the UK is consolidating its status as a global production centre for film. Film and ‘high-end’ television production in the UK has become one of the country’s biggest industries, with studio capacity increasing all the time. According to the BFI, the value of UK production activity last year was £1.95 billion, representing 93 new homegrown films and 23 co-productions, with films carrying budgets of £30 million or over accounting for 78% of total UK film production spend. High-quality television production represented another £1.67 billion last year, a 29% increase from 2018. Comcast, the owner of Sky, recently announced plans to build 14 production stages at Elstree, creating 2,000 skilled jobs in the process. Seren Stiwdios - formerly Pinewood Wales, near Cardiff - is planning to add a further 150,000 square feet of stages and other facilities to cope with demand, which has even seen normally US-based productions move to the principality.

Picture: Twitter/James Bond

Arguably the constant demand for television series is understandable, and won’t diminish while we’re all staying at home. Film won’t be going away though: some optimists believe that despite this week’s gloom across the cinema industry, the experience of China, where repeated lockdowns have been ridden out, and cinemas have rebounded, points to a dam-burst of cinematic life next spring. That won’t comfort any of Cineworld’s 5,000 employees facing a bleak Christmas, or for those delightful independent picture houses who differentiate locally from the multiplexes. But for those - like me - who still value the big-screen experience significantly over living room consumption, the industry that has sustained Saturday nights out for more than 100 years is merely going into hibernation. And I will still be at the front of the queue next April for that Bond film.