Bella forme: architecture’s urban rock stars

Picture: Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners

I have, on this platform, devoted vast quantities of words to the aura of actual rock stars and the impact of their work, rather than their reputation. Heck, I even named this blog and its predecessor after David Bowie. Almost most of this devotion is the result of the visceral enjoyment of music, as unquantifiable and subjective as that is (Stairway To Heaven might grab you by the balls as equally as it might bore another rigid. Bohemian Rhapsody could well be the most exhilarating six minutes of your life, or it could be the most ridiculous). “I know what I like,” is and should be the philosophical approach to any art form. I bristle at any opinion that takes a superior view of one thing over another. It really doesn’t matter if you enjoy it and someone else doesn’t. Good art is supposed to be divisive. Pop music, photography, sculpture, painting - it’s all the subject to the same individual opinion as architecture. 

35 years ago Prince Charles drew fire for describing a proposed National Gallery extension as a “monstrous carbuncle” at a speech to the Royal Institute of British Architects on its 150th anniversary, providing further evidence of the prince’s then-growing tendency to speak out on pet peeves. It was at the time considered an audacious attack on modern architecture, especially as Charles was largely at the event  to ceremonially doff his titfer to the profession. Instead, he sparked a continuing debate about modernity, leading to inevitable whinges about the legacies that contemporary architects were creating (i.e. anyone veering away from classicism). Notably, Ahrends Burton Koralek’s proposed addition to the National Gallery never materialised.

The reason I bring this up is the death, announced over the weekend, of Richard Rogers - Lord Rogers - part of that triumvirate of rock star architects comprising (Lord) Norman Foster and Renzo Piano who, apart from being great friends and frequent collaborators, made something more out of architecture than simply functional building design. Their work is the creation of monuments to vivid creativity more than merely envisaging rectangular boxes for people to dwell, work in or visit. And yet, collectively and individually, they’ve done more to challenge and enrich contemporary cities than any amount of urban planning. Not always, it must be said, to universal acclaim.

Picture: AEG UK

Of the Rogers/Piano/Foster trio, I’ve probably experienced more of Rogers’ work than any of the others. Indeed just on Saturday night, as his family were processing news of his death, I was at the O2 Arena in Greenwich watching Squeeze and Madness on stage while ruminating on the incredible structure of what, at first glance, looks like a giant tent. 

The Millennium Dome, as it originally was known, was designed by Rogers. It, too, drew the ire of Prince Charles’ aversion to modernism, once calling it a “monstrous blancmange”. Built to celebrate the dawning of the 21st century at a cost of more than £1 billion, it was frequently derided for its cost but also its extravagance as, essentially, a seemingly temporary attraction to celebrate the progress of time by being built in the very place where Greenwich Mean Time was introduced in 1884 (for those who know the area, the Dome/O2 Arena was built on the site of the old Greenwich gas works, at which the father of Squeeze’s Chris Difford worked all his life). But that hasn’t stopped it being one of Europe’s best - and biggest - event venues (and, latterly, a retail centre), which provides a spectacular sight for anyone flying west out of London City Airport, made a memorable appearance in the opening sequence of the Bond film The World Is Not Enough, and several times a week shows up prominently in the EastEnders titles. Some might say Rogers did the job he was brought in for. Even by his standards, however, the Dome was not his most strident creation. 

That probably still falls to the Pompidou Centre in Paris, a building that never failed to fascinate me from the outside as much as its inside when I lived in the City of Light and would frequently walk past it on the way to a nearby shopping district. The building, with its exoskeleton of pipes and what looks like permanent construction scaffolding, was to Paris what punk was to classical music. Paris doesn’t really do modernity (the La Défense financial district was punted north-west of the Périphérique ring road for a reason...). So, in the early 1970s when the process began to design a building in honour of former president Georges Pompidou, the eventual design that Rogers and partner Piano came up with was (and, to some extent, remains) as Marmite as it gets. 

Picture: Amélie Dupont - Architecte: Richard Rogers & Renzo Piano

“Bold” doesn’t even cover the dazzling, colourful and distinctly industrial paean to adventurous thinking, which inevitably drew accusations of consecration from conservative Parisians and snobby critics alike. “Paris has its own monster,” wrote Le Figaro, “just like Loch Ness”. Vindication followed after it opened in 1977, becoming one of the city’s most-visited attractions, drawing seven million people in that year alone - the year of punk, it shouldn’t be forgotten - more than the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre combined (and in marked contrast to the art contained therein). The thing with the Pompidou Centre is that once you get past the avant garde exterior, it serves a practical purpose, providing space for art, music performances and a library. How very liberté, égalité, fraternité. We’re back to rectangular boxes again, but with a clear difference. 

It’s this combination of the practical and the fanciful that fascinates me about the likes of Rogers. Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and Terminal 4 of Madrid’s Barajas Airport are buildings I have spent plenty of time in, sometimes with the freedom to take it all in, at others in a desperate rush to get from check-in to gate. But on no occasion have I ever felt like I was encased in a box. Indeed, without succumbing to hyperbole, these aviation hubs have more than a sense of wonder about them. This is where the jury of the 2007 Pritzker prize, architecture’s most prestigious award,  praised Rogers for his “unique interpretation of the Modern Movement’s fascination with the building as machine,” calling out his transformation of buildings that “had once been elite monuments” like museums “into popular places of social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city.” 

Cities are where Rogers made his mark, along with Foster and Piano, whom he regarded as brethren, with a shared vision for high-tech architecture that took cues from machinery and technology more than the shaping of stone. All born in the 1930s, they took their influences from the post-war world, in Rogers’ case the ultra-modern house designs of 1950s Los Angeles, which he visited after graduating from Yale (where he first met Foster). Collectively, they transformed  London, New York, Paris, Hong Kong and other cities with a similar outlook. “He is my closest friend, practically my brother," Rogers once said of Piano in a Guardian interview, acknowledging - jokingly - how the Italian behind London’s Shard made him one of “the bad boys.” Foster is another, with his stunning designs for the new Wembley Stadium, Apple’s new space-age HQ in California, and the glass dome addition to the Reichstag in Berlin.

You could argue that architecture stopped being sexy in the 1960s and 1970s, just as rock’n’roll was becoming so. Of course, this is a gross generalisation, just as there was as much naff music in those decades as there was era-defining material. What Rogers and his cohorts achieved, as they got to work on urban skylines in the ’80s and ’90s, was the transformation of ‘boxes in the sky’ into something memorable, fascinating even, something to marvel at before entering, and then on leaving, looking back at and marvelling once more.

Today, London’s skyline is still the topic of furious debate, as you peer upstream from Tower Bridge at City Hall and The Shard to your left, ‘The Cheesgrater’, ‘Gherkin’ and ‘Walkie Talkie’ (of which Rogers was not a fan) to your right, even if they controversially obscure Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, one of London’s defining symbols. But one thing you can’t say is that the capital has disappeared “under a welter of ugliness”, as Prince Charles branded modern architecture in a 1984 interview around the same time as his RIBA speech. He also spoke of the “mediocrity of public and commercial buildings, and of housing estates, not to mention the dreariness and heartlessness of so much urban planning”. The irony of Charles’ statement is that these were the very environments that spawned some of rock music’s greatest moments. Transforming them, Rogers - along with Foster and Piano - have injected the sort of progressiveness to architecture that The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Bowie brought to rock. An enduring legacy, in other words.

Banks statement

© Simon Poulter 2021

As a statement of the somewhat bleedin’ obvious, digitisation has changed everything. Want that new album? Amazon will have it on your doorstep by 1pm tomorrow (though there’s no guarantee it won’t have been nicked by 1.30…). Can’t be arsed to go out to the supermarket? Don’t worry, your groceries will come to you! And as for banking, well, you can do all that with your thumb and your iPhone while perched on the sofa. 

Digital technology, the Internet and, specifically, the smartphone, have transformed modern life beyond all recognition, but along with it - and these last couple of years have brought this into sharp focus - have increasingly made our high streets look threadbare, with retail chains disappearing online (or disappearing altogether) to be replaced by the ubiquitous coffee outlets, charity shops and fast food outlets. In many towns, the banks that were once local community fixtures - and in a large number of cases are even listed buildings due to their heritage - have been repurposed into pubs, restaurants and even homes.

Digital commerce has also led to a reduction in cash being used. Before COVID-19, its use in the UK was in decline, according to the Bank of England, which found that only 23% of all payments in 2019 were made using cash, down from close to 60% a decade earlier, as debit cards and digital payments became more commonplace for everyday purchases. Withdrawals from bank machines have dropped to less than £100 million a day, which sounds a lot, but not for a country of 67 million people. The pandemic has seen cash usage fall even further, as people work from home, shop online and continue to hold concerns about handling paper money. On average, people now go to a cash machine less than twice a month, down from three times a month before the pandemic hit, according to the ATM operator Link. All of this reflects the banks’ progressive retreat from our high streets. Five branches have been closing for good every two working days since 2015, and last week it was announced that TSB plans to close another 70 of its locations, leaving just 220 remaining next year, down from 536 only a couple of years ago. 

For many - but not all - online banking has changed the traditional consumer banking experience, and the move to cashless, contactless payments - especially during the pandemic - has made the idea of entering a bank branch to grapple with an inadequate ballpoint pen on a chain and quaint old paying-in slips seem archaic. But that doesn’t mean that cash hasn’t disappeared altogether, and nor does it mean that people have stopped writing cheques. There are still legitimate trades that only take cash (or, at least, prefer it), and just this month I received a cheque from the DVLA for a car tax refund. So where do you go to pay all that in?

© Simon Poulter 2021

Like everywhere else, our local high street has been gradually losing its banks over the last few years. Once it was resident to all the main clearing banks and building societies, but the Barclays and Santander (which, as Abbey National, was where I held my first ever savings account) have gone and in February the Lloyds will join them. For cash, along the half-mile stretch of our high street there are machines outside NatWest, HSBC (when it works - that one has been out of order for three weeks) and Nationwide, plus one inside a Tesco Express and another outside a convenience store at the opposite end.

According to recent research by the Mail On Sunday, the biggest clearing banks have closed down 2,766 branches over the last five years - a decline of 36% - and those that remain are increasingly staff-free, relying on indoor self-service machines for most transactions with a single employee to help out with any questions. Gone are the days of having a conversation - difficult or civil - with your friendly local bank manager. According to the Mail, Barclays and HSBC have been closing staffed counters for their combined 32 million customers in the UK, leading critics to say this is all part of a cost-cutting exercise intended to drive up online operations. All very well, but even in 2021, not everyone is online. Like my 92-year-old mum, who still writes cheques. It’s not just people like her: there are those who aren’t familiar with technology, or have physical impairments, such as blindness, which makes the use of technology near impossible, and welcome the ability to speak to someone face-to-face.

That’s not to say that digital banking isn’t a good thing, for those who can access it. I’d be happy if I never received another paper statement again (and it’s still bizarre that one bank I use still issues paper communications as a default, unless you switch it off). But clearly there are, still, situations which require the ability to speak to an actual human being. Given the time it often takes to wade through multiple levels of menus when you try and call a bank, you can’t fault people for wanting to do their banking old-school, and walk into a bank branch to speak to someone behind inch-deep armoured glass. Research for Consumer Intelligence recently found that, in a poll of 1,027 adults, nearly half preferred a face-to-face service, countering the argument that banks put up that people prefer to do their banking digitally. As with all aspects of the retail economy, COVID-19 has impacted banking, but according to the Financial Conduct Authority, many banks’ opening hours haven’t been restored to pre-pandemic schedules. One in three still shut at 3pm, which has also been cited as part of the effort by banks to push customers online.

I suppose, though, I should consider myself lucky to live near a high street that at least still has some bank branches: increasingly, rural communities aren’t so fortunate. Even worse if you live in the Falkland Islands, where the only cash machine in its capital, Port Stanley, is due to be closed down  in the coming weeks.

Picture: ING

While banking has become increasingly dehumanised in the UK, digital banking hasn’t totally taken over elsewhere. I recently went to Amsterdam to sort out some personal banking issues which had to be resolved in-person (don’t worry - I don’t operate a drug or diamond business on the sly. This is a legacy of having lived in the Netherlands for almost ten years). The Dutch have been one of the most digitally-advanced nationalities on the planet, and seemingly introduced online banking long before anyone elsewhere. But not being Dutch, and no longer living in the country means that when communications break down, and a measure as simple as changing my postal address needed to be finally taken care of (having been prevented by more than a year of pandemic-induced travel restrictions), the only option was to sort it out in person. To their credit, my two banks - ABN AMRO and ING - treated me well, not the least of which being that my appointments were conducted in fluent English (gratefully appreciated, given my atrocious Dutch language skills), with friendly but business-like staff taking care of me. And the bank branches in Amsterdam that I visited were smart, modern, comfortable and attractively designed. Welcoming, even.

Even if we accept that banking is adapting - or reacting - to the digital revolution, not every bank is retreating to the virtual world completely. In Italy, the Ligurian regional bank Banca Carige is introducing what it calls “NextGenBranches” that are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but run entirely by computers. Each branch features plush-looking workstations at which customers can plonk themselves down and conduct all their banking, from opening new accounts to applying for credit cards and loans, and even getting mortgage advice via a video links to a human adviser. Scanners, printers, card readers and other tech enables other types of bank interaction. From a customer point of view, this is all about convenience and modernity, but you can’t help feeling that it’s another nail in the coffin of the banking sector being a career choice,

Auriga, the company behind the Banca Carige concept, is even talking about rolling out these desks in other locations, such as supermarkets. In the UK, too, banks are also looking at setting up banking facilities in other retail settings. Fintech business OneBanks has developed a pop-up ‘kiosk’ that can be installed almost anywhere instantly, requiring a single staff member to supervise its use, but it also uses a combination of a smartphone and a traditional bank card to work. Three OneBanks kiosks have been installed so far in Co-op branches in Scotland, in towns without any traditional banking outlets, and the company plan to install another 150 within the next three years. And, despite dwindling numbers of high street post offices, some of the major banks are believed to be evaluating installing mini branches inside postal centres, probably in lieu of them closing main branches in town centres.

Perhaps we can be reassured that local banks aren’t going to completely disappear for good as digitisation continues, but there’s no ignoring the fact that banking is dwindling. On top of the elderly and digitally disenfranchised, there are still the very real needs of small businesses to be taken into account, enabling them to pay in cash takings safely, which often can’t be facilitated by hole-in-the-wall machines which have cash limits and security risks, although banks are considering the introduction of new machines that can handle larger sums. That said, machines can go wrong and, despite the banks’ best intentions, can and do get hacked. Perhaps George Banks, the constipated financier father in Mary Poppins, was onto something when he encouraged his son Michael to bring his tuppence into the Dawes, Tomes, Mousely, Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, where it “will compound”.

Getting back to when they really were Fab

At risk of appearing late to the party, I’ve finally found the time to consume all eight hours or so of Peter Jackson’s sumptuous Beatlesfest, Get Back. You’ve surely heard about it by now: the first part appeared on Disney+ last Thursday, with parts 2 and 3 released progressively over subsequent days, and given its collective length it’s been quite a challenge to find so much time to indulge it. 

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m not trying to confect an image of a busy urban sophisticate with little room for frivolities like a mammoth documentary about a pop band, but you find anyone with so many spare hours with which to sit exhaustively through as much 52-year-old footage of musicians sitting around smoking and strumming. 

That last statement, however, fundamentally misses the point of Jackson’s incredible project. It also brushes aside the justifiable deification of the four musicians themselves, but I’ll get to that later. Because Get Back transcends any experience or expectation you may have of a music documentary. It is more than a biopic, more than a concert film, more than a retrospective. It is, perhaps inadvertently, a near-forensic examination of a band, but conducted through the narrowest of apertures - just 29 days in January 1969. 

To this end, it is no more than a blood sample drawn over the course of one month in the entire lifetime of The Beatles, so it shouldn’t be construed as an attempt to tell their story in its entirety. It's like carbon dating an oak tree by a tiny sample of one of its rings. But in capturing even a brief window of time in The Beatles' history, Get Back depicts the state of a band that would, officially, split up just 15 months after Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot the original footage, 56 hours of which have been distilled by Jackson down to the eight.

From one angle, it depicts the mundanity of life in a band (there are plenty of shots of Ringo Starr watching on while John Lennon and Paul McCartney finesse a new song, reflecting the famous Charlie Watts quote about life as the Rolling Stones’ drummer comprising of five years’ work and 20 years spent hanging around). From another angle, Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras capture the dynamics between the quartet. There is the still-symbiotic relationship between Lennon and McCartney, with one scene depicting them discussing leadership of the group, the seemingly unspoken hierarchy that relegated the younger George Harrison to a lesser writing role, and the older Starr to, at times, merely making up the numbers (which isn't true, but there goes another well established Beatle trope).

In this mix we see Yoko Ono, rarely not at Lennon’s side, and studio visits from Linda (Eastman, as was) and a delightful cameo from her daughter Heather. Maureen Starkey and Pattie Boyd, then wives of Ringo and George, also make appearances. They provide, somewhat, glimpses of normality, of domestic maturity in stark contrast to the screaming adulation that met the formerly fresh-faced Mop Tops with their cherubic smiles, bum freezer suits and polite bowing after each number. Now, they’d become shaggy-haired men in the second half of their 20s (Lennon was 29 at the time), with kids and a collective business interest, Just seven years separate these two images.

Picture: Apple Corps Ltd

In case you’ve missed the memo, or have been self-isolating to hermit-level media avoidance, the premise of Get Back is that it depicts the band supposedly writing, rehearsing and recording what was meant to be their eleventh studio album, while - perhaps not explicitly - opening themselves up to the possibility of live performance again. It opens on 2 January 1969 with the band assembling at Twickenham Film Studios where, on a chilly, cavernous 7,500 square-foot sound stage (the same space where they had earlier made Help! and A Hard Day’s Night) they sit in a semi-circle and attempt composition in a ‘live‘ setting. But the atmosphere appears febrile, not helped by the cold of the studio, with Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras and microphones picking up every comment, every sideways glance, with unrestricted access.

To some extent, the exercise was envisaged as a tentative return to the live performances they’d given up at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August 1966. That had left them jaded, but the net result was that concentrating on work as a studio band alone focused The Beatles on what is now considered their most creative, free-wheeling phase, which led to the critical high of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the childishly enjoyable Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine, their retreat to India, the supposed ‘grown-up’ step of forming Apple Corps, and then the eclectic brilliance of The Beatles, better known as ‘the White Album’.

As Get Back captures, Twickenham proved to be unfulfilling, even if there is oodles of output (and embryonic snippets of songs that would eventually find their way into solo repertoires, such such as Lennon’s Jealous Guy and Harrison’s All Things Must Pass). However, Twickenham established the principle of returning to a more stripped-back rock sound, with a simpler set-up in the film studio - Lennon, McCartney and Harrison sat in a semi-circle, Starr completing the arrangement, with guitars plugged into amps. No embellishments. But, as transpires, there’s an uneasy vibe, which culminates in Harrison standing up and declaring “I’m leaving the band,” and walking out muttering “I’ll see you in the clubs.”. The remaining Beatles respond by going for lunch. “We may as well get in Clapton,” jokes Lennon uneasily as they return to work, unwittingly and ironically referencing the-then hottest British guitarist who would eventually fall in love with, and marry, Harrison’s wife Boyd. 

Productivity shifts up a gear when they leave south-west London and reconvene in Mayfair, in the basement studio of 3 Savile Row, their ‘corporate’ headquarters. Harrison returns (Savile Row was his condition for doing so, along with the inspired addition of augmenting their sound with keyboard player Billy Preston, who not only relieves any residual internecine tension, but adds soul to the music, giving it a looser feel).

That, then, is ultimately what Get Back is about: the music. Before our very eyes, we get a unique insight into the gestation of what would much later become the Let It Be album. We see and hear McCartney inadvertently strum the opening chords to the song Get Back on his iconic Hofner Violin bass, and he and Paul spar gently over various attempts to arrive at the line “Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner…”. But what’s even more remarkable is that we are ultimately watching something of a failure. Even after the work at Savile Row had ended, the album ended up on the back burner, and here might lie the source of the popular belief that it was a process beset by acrimony.

Much myth and falsehood has been generated about The Beatles’ demise. Even now, Fabologists debate the sequence of events and who said what to whom during the denouement. There is, though, little-to-no traces of true discord in Get Back. If anything, it depicts the dull normality of life in a band making records. No wild and crazy drug and booze-fuelled sessions - just endless cigarettes, and copious trays of tea and toast. Band members turn up for work in the morning, break for lunch, go home in the evening. They chat, they joke, they play endless arrangements of their songs, adopting Goon-like funny voices (Peter Sellers makes an awkward appearance in the Twickenham scenes) and lark about with much the same banter you find in any office. There are tedious repeat attempts at playing songs, with arrangements being tweaked and phrasing adjusted, interspersed with impromptu jams of rock’n’roll standards like Twenty Flight Rock and the ribald Liverpudlian folk song Maggie Mae. Even when looks are cast at each other, the body language suggests nothing more sinister than the mild irritation of disagreeing with a colleague over how a PowerPoint presentation might be structured.

Picture: Apple Corps Ltd

In fact, amid the clouds of cigarette smoke, the Fabs looked like they were having fun. Towards the end we see the infamous rooftop concert, staged at 3 Savile Row in lieu of an earlier plan to perform the new songs at an open -air show on Primrose Hill. The performance is, notoriously, interrupted by fun-free PCs Ray Dagg and Ray Shayler (other christian names were available in the 1960s to Met officers…) from West End Central nick to shut down what a couple of local numptys had branded a breach of the peace. It marks the end of The Beatles as a performing entity, but you can see in that footage of them, carefree and taking them back to Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller and Liverpool’s Cavern almost a decade before.

If there were cracks, Get Back doesn’t really depict them. But something was up. Glyn Johns was given the task of assembling the album from the combined Twickenham/Savile Row sessions, but things started unravelling. The album was abandoned (although the single Get Back was released in April 1969). Four weeks after the rooftop concert the band reconvened at Abbey Road, to make the record that would take that studio’s name. In the orthodox chronology, Abbey Road became the final album to be recorded by The Beatles, but the product of their work in January 1969 would eventually be released in May 1970, nominally one month after McCartney had declared himself out of the band. To boot, the tapes Johns had worked on had been handed over to Phil Spector to ‘re-produce’, adding elements that McCartney would eventually strip out with the Let It Be…Naked album released in 2003. Some - me especially - will maintain that it’s the better album as a result.

There is, though, probably more to The Beatles’ end story than Jackson’s epic captures. John Lennon, for example, had brought in the New York businessmen Allen Klein to manage the band’s affairs, against McCartney’s knowledge. Klein gets no attention in Get Back, which leads to some suspicion of Apple Corps’ creative control over the project. Then again, Get Back is not about the break-up of The Beatles. either. Ultimately, it’s a snapshot (albeit a gargantuan one) of 29 days in January 1966 when the Fabs got together and produced music of a richness and longevity that can be enjoyed almost as new today. We get to appreciate, through raw, unedited scenes, unencumbered by voiceovers or cutaway interviews, just what John, Paul, George and Ringo brought individually to the band, arguably dispelling some of the convenient, cartoon-like tropes that we’ve conditioned into accepting down the years. That Lennon was the caustic rocker, that McCartney was the benign, anointed one, that Harrison was the ‘Quiet One’ with the uncanny gift for song, and that Starr was that drummer’s cliche, the class clown who sat at the back and didn’t get involved. 

Get Back shows them all in a much more engaging light: Lennon was cool and surprisingly warmer than we’d expected (his interaction with the young Heather McCartney is delightful, as is Ringo’s). McCartney was and is blessed with a unique ear for melody that comes out with The Long And Winding Road and his improvised Get Back riff. You see how Harrison contributed far more than the few songs that made it onto the albums, but you also see a somewhat diffident soul. Starr was (and could still be) a remarkably exquisite drummer, capable of fills and improvisation equally as good as the more lauded tub thumpers of the rock era.

“We only think we know The Beatles,” director Peter Jackson recently told Uncut magazine while discussing the project. “We’ve seen A Hard Day’s Night and Help! We’ve seen them perform on stage in The Cavern [Club] and Shea Stadium. We’ve seen interviews or press conferences. When you think about it, those are all performance situations.” Get Back, he says, presents things differently. “When they don’t know they’re being filmed you are getting a 100 percent pure look at the real guys, which doesn’t really exist on film, particularly, anywhere else.”

Pictures: Twitter/@TheBeatles

Ultimately, Get Back is a masterclass in music making. The Beatles are or were musical deities, and over the 29 days Jackson has condensed into his film, even the most seasoned fan will come to appreciate their music even more. I won’t, though, leave it just there. Because the other thing about Get Back is that it shines a light on the accelerated timeline that The Beatles’ career ran on. When they walked into Twickenham Film Studios on the second day of January in 1969 it was less than seven years since Love Me Do. Seven years. Don’t know about you, but I wasn’t all that different in 2014 to how I am now. But in October 1962, The Beatles’ music, their haircuts, their suits, everything was in stark contrast to the beards, long hair and maturity of the men seen approaching their 30s in 1969. 

Paul McCartney and his daughter Mary at the London premiere of Get Back
Picture: Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Disney 

Stretch their timeline to its full extent, and just ten years, more or less, separates their formation in August 1960 and McCartney’s announcement in April 1970. Ten years in which they evolved from chirpy beat poppers into prototypical rock stars, a transition that, arguably, enveloped the most remarkable library of popular music that the genre has ever experienced.

51 years on, we’re getting to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, what a band of brothers The Beatles were. You could argue “So what?”. Five times more years have elapsed since they split up as they were together. But the influence The Beatles have still today is almost immeasurable. Some misanthropes will still dismiss them as purveyors of children’s songs, but in the grand scheme of things, their body of work remains beyond comparison with anything past, present and, probably, future. Get Back is not the key to understanding that bold statement, but over eight utterly engrossing, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck hours, it goes a long way to reinforcing it.

The Beatles: Get Back is streaming now on Disney+

David Bowie: the Brilliant Adventure

This isn’t the first and won’t be the last time that I offer you, dear reader, thoughts on another posthumous David Bowie release, but since the old girl’s untimely demise on 10 January 2016 there hs been no shortage of reminders of why, musically, he was one of the most intriguing figures of the rock era. It’s an interest that inevitably appeals to the committed fan like me, but also provides the opportunity of discovery to those who’ve hitherto been indifferent throughout the six decades in  which Bowie spent time in recording studios.

Cynics will argue that the box sets and remastered reissues are exercises in reselling what's already been bought, but within each new package marketed since Bowie’s death there has usually been something to justify the outlay (always a tough ask - pricey editions of classic albums, offering alternative mixes and outtakes barely different from the established tracks rarely bring anything new). For some of us, of course, no justification is required, but the latest package - the fifth in a series of retrospective gatherings of original and live albums plus extras - is genuinely enticing. 

Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) covers a period in which Bowie had to compete with Britpop, a not always fruitful exercise, despite his exalted status and the fact that many of that era’s bands were consciously doffing caps to the very era from which Bowie sprang forth. Brutally, he simply wasn’t  fashionable any more. That extraordinary run of albums, from Hunky Dory to at least Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) meant nothing. By the time the 1990s came along, David Bowie was simply another middle-aged rock star, one of those superannuated Live Aid veterans with nothing new to say. In fairness, the albums that comprise Brilliant Adventure would never match the creative zenith of the 1970s, but they don’t come up short for eclecticism - as did, frankly, every album he had committed to tape. What confounded critics at the time was there appeared to be an attempt by The Dame to look relevant, with the drum’n’bass of singles like Little Wonder suggesting cultural appropriation. The truth is, being the music magpie that he was, Bowie had always drawn influence from whatever genres took his fancy.

And so, Brilliant Adventure - which includes the albums Black Tie White Noise, Outside, Earthling, Hours and the Buddha Of Suburbia soundtrack - skips through a varied palette, from conventional pop to rock, electronica and other more ‘urban’ sources. They also reflect a maturing and, at times, more reflective Bowie, celebrating his marriage to Iman, and starting to loosen any residual hangups that may have been lingering about Being David Bowie. That is also reflected in Bowie’s live performances at the time, reflected on Brilliant Adventure with the terrific live album recorded in June 2000 at the BBC Radio Theatre in London as a companion to that year’s legendary Glastonbury headline performance. It was originally only available as a third disc in a limited-edition version of Bowie At The Beeb, which contained featured BBC sessions from the ’60s and ’70s. Notable to these live sets in 2000 was the breadth of ‘classic’ Bowie songs from his imperious phase, reflecting a relaxed reconnection with the big hits from that time that he’d try to move away from.

But the big draw of Brilliant Adventure is Toy, a semi-mythical album of new versions of songs from the very beginning of Bowie’s career, reworked by the singer and the touring musicians he was working with as the new century began. Recorded shortly after Glastonbury, the album was originally intended to be released in 2001, but the record company decided against it, for reasons probably best explained by them at the time. Returning to and revising early-career material is nothing new: Nick Mason put together his Saucerful Of Secrets outfit with Gary Kemp, Guy Pratt and others to perform the music of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, shedding remarkable light on the band’s early psychedelia with surprisingly current impact. Toy follows a similar philosophy, featuring new interpretations of tracks first recorded between 1964 and 1971, when Bowie was - pun intended - toying with a variety of musical styles, from Anthony Newley-style vaudeville to beat pop. 

He consciously returned to this era in 1999 when he appeared in an episode of VH1’s Storytellers and resurrected the frenetic Can’t Help Thinking About Me, the first time it had been performed in 30 years. This inspired the idea for Toy, taking his then-stage band (which included Gail Ann Dorsey, Earl Slick, Mike Garson and Sterling Campbell) into the studio and playing the old songs ‘live’, selecting the tracks with the best takes for the album. “The songs are so alive and full of colour,” Bowie said in 2001. “They jump out of the speakers. It’s really hard to believe that they were written so long ago.” 

Despite his enthusiasm, the Toy tracks didn’t appear until 2011 when they were leaked online, but from today we get to hear them - for most of us - for the first time. Toy is not revelatory: it may be a ‘lost’ album, but the songs are ultimately and obviously not new. But they do represent a phase of Bowie’s life that I have taken inordinate pleasure from, when he was happy in his own skin, happy in life, and comfortable with his legacy.

“I’ve pulled together a selection of songs from a somewhat unusual reservoir and booked time in a studio,” he wrote at the time Toy was originally due to be released. “I still get really elated by the spontaneous event and cannot wait to sit in a claustrophobic space with seven other energetic people and sing till my tits drop off.” That in itself indicates the carefree nature of Toy, seemingly - and, simply - having fun, a notion that rock stars, and especially rock stars with Bowie’s history - are not normally known for. For those weaned on Let’s Dance, Heroes, Life On Mars?, The Jean Genie, Changes and more, only the utmost completist will already be familiar 1967’s Silly Boy Blue, the groovy I Dig Everything from 1966, or the cover of Here Comes The Night recorded in the early 1970s. It still gives some sense of hearing new music. Even if it’s new-old music.

You could argue that, like 1973’s Pin Ups album, a stop-gap of questionable covers, retreading old material was nothing more than an exercise in rehashing but, at risk of sounding blinkered, it doesn’t feel like that. As his statement suggested, he was really having a laugh, the side of ‘Brixton Dave’ that has endeared him to me almost as much as the music. After the Toy sessions there were two more new albums, Heathen and Reality. And then, on the German leg of the tour for that last album, Bowie abruptly disappeared from view amid health concerns, only resurfacing, seemingly out of nowhere, with the incredible The Next Day in 2013, and then the semi-mystical event that was Blackstar, released on Bowie’s 69th birthday. Two days before his death.

Toy might, then, have a sentimental value, as all of the posthumous releases have. But it does plug a hole in our knowledge of David Bowie’s work. It certainly doesn’t feel like a scraping of the barrel, but it hardly represents a collection of missing gems. “Toy is like a moment in time, captured in an amber of joy, fire and energy,” says co-producer Mark Plati, who worked closely with Bowie in the 1990s. “It’s the sound of people happy to be playing music.” And he adds: “From time to time, he used to say ‘Mark, this is our album’, I think because he knew I was so deeply in the trenches with him on that journey. I’m happy to finally be able to say it now belongs to all of us.”

Toy is released today as part of the Brilliant Adventures (1992-2001) box set. An expanded three-CD edition, Toy Box, will be released on 7 January next year, the day before what would have been David Bowie’s 75th birthday.

Call the bank manager: it’s new release Friday!

I wouldn’t be the first and probably not the last to say the music industry is totally out of touch, but that this particular Friday falls shortly before most people’s monthly payday, means that many bank accounts are currently running on fumes. Which calls into question the scheduling of a whole slew today of blockbuster albums. I’ve counted at least ten, including the likes of Adele’s unimaginatively-titled 30 (for which vinyl pressing resources have reportedly been consumed, allegedly causing production problems for everyone else). 

I’ll spare you any further consideration of the Adele album - you’ll be hearing enough of it until she releases 35 or 40, or whatever will be her next maudlin confessional - and instead cock a learned ear to the new offerings from Elbow, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and Sting, simply because they’re the three of today’s release tsunami that actually interest me.

Elbow - Flying Dream 1

As regulars to this blog will hopefully recall, barely two months ago Elbow dished up an evening of sublime comfort food listening with what was, for many of us at the Hammersmith Apollo, the first gig in almost two years thanks to the pandemic. It was, in any case, the perfect return to gigging, delivered by one of the UK’s finest live acts, anchored by their avuncular lead singer and a set of trademark “soaring” singalong anthems that have brightened many an outdoor summer festival. The set included a cameo from this new album in the delightful What I Am Without You. It gave a glimpse of the somewhat album’s somewhat warmer direction than 2019’s Giants Of All Sizes  (and a song vaguely reminiscent of Clive Dunn’s Grandad…) Dream 1 completes this evolution with what can only be described as an absolutely gorgeous album, a cosy, comforting duvet in a winter’s morning that comprehensively taps into Elbow’s undoubted craft for tenderness, both musically and, inevitably, in Guy Garvey as principle lyricist.

Garvey is a core part of Elbow’s “value proposition”, to use an excruciatingly wanky marketing phrase. His immensely likeable persona pours forth from his words and those mellifluous Bury tones that adorn his delivery on radio and TV outings. But it would be wholly wrong to depict Elbow - and Garvey’s presence - as a schmaltz act. They’ve just come up with a formula that allows for melodicism, romantic escape and, yes, even a prog rock sensibility. Flying Dream 1 has the not original precept of being a lockdown album (as, it would appear, are most examples of the current slew), but comes from a performance premise, having been recorded live at Brighton’s Theatre Royal while it was shut to audiences during the pandemic. Of course, all recordings are “live”, but here is an old-fashioned approach, harking back to the days before endless overdubs and, latterly, the digital recording of entire albums on iPhones. Bruce Springsteen’s recent Letter To You was thusly done, and it gives an immediacy without any excess ambience due to the venue. Perhaps, though, it’s what makes Flying Dream 1 sound tight and efficient, genuine even, painting beautiful landscapes about love (The Only Road), hope (After The Eclipse), childhood (Calm And Happy) and the tenderness of the title track. Inveterate romantics might be, as I write, beating a path to their local record emporium/streaming site to wallow in Adele’s latest collection of mawkishness, but as I become ever more reflective myself and, just a little soppy as I prepare for marriage, I know which album I’d rather be immersing myself in. And Flying Dream 1 is its name.

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raise The Roof

Like Peter Gabriel, it’s still impossible - annoyingly, perhaps - to separate Robert Plant from the band he fronted many years ago, despite both putting considerable distance between the outfits they once fronted more than 40 years ago. It shouldn’t be necessary, in both cases, considering the bodies of work they’ve generated in the decades since. In Gabriel’s case, singer and group parted company, albeit amicably, and in Plant’s, the entire enterprise ground to an abrupt halt in the wake of its drummer’s misadventure-fuelled death in 1980. But with an uptick in Led Zeppelin activity, as their seminal fourth album recently reached its 50th anniversary, with the obligatory box set reminding everyone of rock’s most archetypal viking marauders, it’s hard not to be drawn on Plant’s legacy as the honey-tressed stage god. 

If, though, I could be afforded further licence to compare Gabriel and Plant, their post-band careers have followed similar paths, with both finding their groove in music drawn from a more eclectic palette of cultures than the pop, blues, soul and rock that fuelled their youthful ambition. Plant, in particular, has tapped authentically, post-Zepp, into Americana, reaching a particularly credible, Grammy-hoovering high in 2007 with Raising Sand, his first collaboration with bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. Working with roots authenticity’s go-to producer T Bone Burnett, Raising Sand shifted in impressive quantities, demonstrating an audience acceptance of a music form that Plant has approached passionately and with credibility as a solo artist, digging deep into a version of the blues that his Earth-conquering old vehicle at their core. The formula is reapplied by Plant and Krauss on their follow-up, 14 years later. With Burnett once again overseeing things, Raise The Roof continues where its predecessor left off with a delightful stroll through covers of bluegrass, rockabilly and folk, each balanced by Plant’s gentler singing side (no screaming "Valhalla!" here) and the more arguably more authentic rural voice of his junior partner, raised in small-town Illinois. 

Aided by a cast of faithfull sessioneers, Plant and Kraus work through a terrific hour’s worth of rug-cutters, including a lively reworking of Lucinda Williams’ Can’t Let Go (on which Williams appears herself), and a somewhat darker interpretation of the Everly Brothers’ The Price Of Love. Americana has found its way into British folk in many forms over the years, and here the duo take on the late Scottish folkie Bert Jansch’s Don’t Bother Me, with Krauss rather than Plant taking point (he reciprocates on Go Your Way by Anne Briggs, one of the legion of British folk stars to emerge in the late ’60s and early ’70s (along with John Martyn and Sandy Denny) who became huge influences on early Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page in particular. Speaking of which, a pleasantly courageous cover of Jimmy Reed’s High And Lonesome by Plant and Krauss has an almost prog rock feel, due to its use of a mellotron to add a string canvass very different from the original’s boogie. There’s always, in my mind at least, a thin line between the various American roots music forms, be it blues or bluegrass, country or western (“We got both kinds!” to quote Bob of Bob’s Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers), but what you get with Raise The Roof is a loving nod to these genres without ever falling into parody of cultural appropriation. As we come closer to this year’s end, it’s already a very strong candidate for inclusion in the end-of-annum lists.

Sting - The Bridge

Lastly, we come to an artist with whom I go back a long way. Not in any personal capacity, you understand, but the second album that I ever bought with my own money was Reggatta de Blanc by The Police. Come to think of it, Sting falls into the same category as Gabriel and Plant, having once been the focal point of a recording unit for only a handful of years, before going solo, in Sting’s case with the release of The Dream Of The Blue Turtles in 1985. I slavishly bought its follow-ups before the law of diminishing returns started to kick in. Like many a mainstream artist in the upper quartile of superstardom, Sting basically became boring, to me at least. I was never fussed by all that tabloid tattle about tantric activities, or the perma-smugness of a wealthy man with his own Tuscan vineyard and one of the most envious lifestyles in pop. It was just that his music stopped doing anything for me, which is not the case with those other two frontmen who went on to do equally interesting things with the longer branches of their careers.

Which is why The Bridge is a bit of a punt. Will it reconnect me with Sting’s songcraft? Will it provide me with something new and engaging? Actually, it does, with a breadth of styles encompassing pop and rock, the jazz his solo career has frequently embraced and even folk and electronica. Songs like the opener, Rushing Water, even hark back to The Police in their pomp, while the genuinely tender lyrics of the lively (if slightly MOR) If It’s Love and For Her Love (vaguely reminiscent of his Shape Of Your Heart from 1993’s Ten Summoner's Tales) draw on a reflective, romantic side that Sting has always been able to call on with heart, when not busy trying to demonstrate the contents of his bookshelf with pretentious references to Jungian philosophy and Shakespearian sonnets. The Book Of Numbers shows that Sting can still rock out, while the electronic beats of Loving You - arguably the album’s highlight - evokes a contemporary feel, with a distinctly dark soulfulness. He has, in the past, looked slightly twattish for his collaborations with hip-hop artists and the appropriation that entails, but here, Loving You gets the balance between modernity and intrigue absolutely right.

Amazingly, The Bridge is Sting’s 14th solo album, and while it lacks some of the edge of his earlier career, it’s entirely enjoyable, even if it falls, musically, into a category of records that will inevitably find their way into the Christmas stockings of grannies, bought for them at the Asda checkout. Yes, that puts The Bridge in a similar cadre as the likes of Coldplay and Ed Sheeran (and obviously Adele) but without wishing to sound ageist, you can’t help but feeling that Sting has earned the right to be so preeminent. As much as Sheehan, in particular, gets regularly feted, Sting has just fired off a warning reminder that he is still an absolute master of this stuff. As David Crosby demonstrated earlier this year with his masterful For Free, not all pop chops fade with age. Sting, who turned 70 in October, has shown, too, that age is not only just a number, but if you apply yourself, continuing to write and record new music long after the teenage posters have been torn down doesn’t have to be an exercise in mediocrity. Sting, consider me back! 

                                                                                                                                               

Hey-hey Mama: 50 years of proper Rock and Roll

I don’t know what your memory of 1971 is, but mine’s pretty hazy, mostly because I was 4. But, as David Hepworth’s terrific tome 1971: Never A Dull Moment argued, it was a pivotal year in music - even more so than my own birth year, 1967 (for music, you understand) due to its profound confluence of significant album releases. 

1971 was the year that saw the long playing record, in old money, find its place as one of the major artistic mediums, alongside books and cinema. There had been albums before, of course, and ground-breaking ones, too, like Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper, that had made ‘album artist’ a thing in its own right. But 1971 generated an  unprecedented slew of milestone releases, including David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, The Who’s Who’s Next, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Carole King’s Tapestry, Elton John’s Madman Across The Water and at least 20 more that played their part in defining not just the year but the decade itself (for a more comprehensive list and examination of Hepworth’s book, here’s my post from when it was published).

50 years on, one of those albums stands out, arguably more than any of the others: Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. Colloquially known as ‘Led Zeppelin IV’, the officially untitled record could - should, even - be described as a touchpoint for classic rock as a genre. A bold claim, I know, but within its eight distinct tracks, over a run time of 42 minutes and 34 seconds, it remains a remarkable piece of work by a band that, with it, truly hit their stride. Yes, it contains Stairway To Heaven, a song worthy of discussion all on its own, but within its octet of tracks lies a breadth of hard rock (Black Dog, Rock And Roll), ballsy stompers (Misty Mountain Hop) and those rooted in traditional blues (When The Levee Breaks), mystic, 12-string folk (The Battle Of Evermore, Going To California) and pastoral country references. It’s legacy extends well into its 50-year history, too, with John Bonham’s distinct drums - captured by virtue of the cold, damp stairwell of the Hampshire country house they recorded it in (latterly sampled and used by seemingly everyone, including the Beastie Boys and Beyoncé. 

“It’s like there was a magical current running through that place [Headley Grange] and that record,” guitarist Jimmy Page recently told Mojo’s Mark Blake. Like it was meant to be. Perhaps this comes somewhat from Page’s singular vision. The former teenage guitar prodigy from Epsom, the third of that remarkable trio of Surrey sons to join The Yardbirds (after Eric Clapton had handed the six string reins to Jeff Beck, who in turn handed them to his friend Page) had largely been the architect of Led Zeppelin, the band renamed from The New Yardbirds in 1968. 

Their first three albums had built their profile and credibility on both sides of the Atlantic, riding the post-Beatles wave for British bands with a harder rock tendency in parallel to the early progressive bands that were coming through at the turn of the decade. Notably, Zeppelin built their reputation through, largely, word of mouth and electrifying live performances at events like the Bath Festival Of Blues And Progressive Music and relentless touing in America, playing legendary venues like Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York and its counterpart Fillmore West in San Francisco. 

Notably, too, they had deliberately shied away from releasing singles, the primary promotional vehicle of the pop era. This defiance of convention would remain with Led Zeppelin to the band’s abrupt end in 1980, brought about by Bonham’s untimely death. But in Zeppelin’s fourth album, this belligerence found a particular outlet, led by Page’s own wariness of the way the music industry dictated things, leading to the record being as intentionally enigmatic as the band’s reputational rise had been unconventional. 

For a start, the album would go untitled, a notion obliquely referred to in This Is Spinal Tap by the band’s insistence on releasing Smell The Glove with an all-black sleeve and no lettering. While that was a gimmick, Page had another intention: “I didn’t want anyone, including Rolling Stone, making a judgement before they heard the music,” he told Mojo. “I wanted to prove our music wasn’t just selling because of our name.” 37 million album sales may have proven his instincts to be correct, but that wasn’t how Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary boss of Atlantic Records saw it, telling the band it would be “professional suicide” to not even have the band’s name on the cover. “We weren’t backing down,” Page recalls.

So, for a band that had been feted on both sides of the Atlantic as the Second Coming, Led Zeppelin IV arrived with anonymity, not just lacking cover text, but also photographs of the band anywhere in the album artwork. Instead, the front cover featured a 19th-century agricultural oil painting singer Robert Plant came across in a Reading antiques shop, while the rear featured a drab Birmingham tower block, an attempt to highlight themes of urban and rural living. In place of band pictures, Plant, Page, Bonham or bassist/multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones. Instead, Page came up with the idea of the quartet being represented by four rune-like symbols. “That whole cover was a Jimmy and Robert production,” Jones has said, somewhat sniffily. “I didn’t quite get it myself.”

Page’s own self-designed symbol, ‘ZoSo’, has itself been a source of much debate, with some pointing to the guitarist’s apparent interest in the work of occultist Aleister Crowley as being its inspiration. Collectively, however, the entire approach of IV’s graphic design is probably just one of those rock band gimmicks which, in 1971, meant that anything went and record company marketeers couldn’t say no. Conventions of album design weren’t broken as few had yet been established. “It’s not something to be questioned or dissected,” Page said of the artwork in his interview with Mojo. “Like the album, it was something that was just meant to be. You listened and made up the pictures in your own mind.”

Which brings me back to Stairway To Heaven, a song commanding a cultural mythology all of its own. As Bohemian Rhapsody is for Queen, Led Zeppelin were so much more than this one song, but Stairway will always be their opus, regarded for it’s sheer expanse and complete defiance of pop tradition. Stairway will also never be regarded as a pop song, but that’s what makes it’s lasting endurance even more extraordinary. It was also, famously, never released anywhere as a single, and yet it has received close to three million plays on American rock radio, according to official figures (it was the most requested song on FM radio stations in the US in the 1970s. By a more contemporary measure, it has been streamed more than 600 million times on Spotify. 

To some extent, too, Stairway is the quintessential early ’70s rock album track, and one that - whisper it - comes closer to prog rock than blues-rooted heavy rock. Broken into three sections over its eight minutes, Stairway commences  with the pastoral, arpeggiated A-minor chord so beloved of guitar shop wannabes everywhere (remember the “No Stairway To Heaven” sign from Wayne’s World?), rolling into a folkier groove before rocking out in the final third, Page committing an excoriating solo to it with his vintage Telecaster (a Yardbirds gift from Beck). While this structure clearly creates the attention, its lyrics - penned by Plant while, apparently in a bad mood - have been the subject of intense debate. “Depending on what day it is,” Plant once said, “I still interpret the song a different way - and I wrote the lyrics.” The general consensus is that the “lady who's sure all that glitters is gold” is about a woman who accumulates money, only to find out - badly - that life is meaningless and she wouldn’t get into heaven. Beyond that, Stairway is no more profound than the product of a band at the peak of their chutzpah indulging in the early ’70s penchant for album tracks that got a tad widdly-widdly. 

Jimmy Page has suggested that when Zeppelin started working on the song in October 1970 it was envisaged as being as long as 15 minutes (still quite brief compared with some examples of the prog genre, such as the 23-minute Supper’s Ready by Genesis), with a construct built on a mystical story that leads to a romping climax. Rumours about hidden satanic messages, contained in reverse-recorded passages, have led to some with too much time on their hands to suggest that Stairway was the Devil’s work. Page’s flirtations with the work of Crowley haven’t helped, either (he did, to be fair, buy Crowley’s house near Loch Ness, which only added to the association). Plant has wisely dismissed the suggestions in pragmatic terms. “There are a lot of people who are making money [out of these suggestions],” he has said. “If that's the way they need to do it, then do it without my lyrics. I cherish them far too much.”

While, though, there is some sense of Stairway being something of a millstone for the surviving members of the band, its place is rock music history hasn’t been lost on them, least of all Page: “I thought Stairway crystallised the essence of the band,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975. “It had everything there and showed the band at its best - as a band, as a unit.” Page called it a milestone for the band, and remains proud that it was never released as a single, a point that only adds to its enigma and its lasting significance. That, though, hasn’t indemnified Stairway from critics (even Plant once said in an interview with Q magazine: “If you absolutely hated Stairway To Heaven, no one can blame you for that because it was so pompous” (he has also branded it a “wedding song”). 

Its appearance on Led Zeppelin IV drew no shortage of accusations of being pretentious and bloated. For a song so eulogised now, it wasn’t always so loved by the music press, but then again, they were never the most receptive audience to anything deemed progressive in the early ’70s (although, in my experience, even the most pro-punk/anti-prog journalists all had plenty of art rock in their record collections…).

With John Bonham’s death in 1980 Led Zeppelin came to an abrupt halt. Plant, Page and Jones were persuaded to play at Live Aid five years later, using both Chic drummer Tony Thompson and Plant’s friend Phil Collins on drums (Collins and Page have since traded barbs, with the latter saying the drummer was unrehearsed, and Collins suggesting the guitarist was somewhat out of it on the day. Stairway To Heaven closed the 30-minute set, which also included Rock And Roll and Whole Lotta Love. The song was performed again in 1988 at the Atlantic Records 40th anniversary concert, with Jason Bonham playing drums. The performance wasn’t great, with Plant even managing to forget some of his own lyrics. A better rendition appeared - for the last time - in 2007 when Plant, Page, Jones and Bonham Jr agreed to play at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute at London’s O2 Arena, the final time Led Zeppelin as a band performed on stage. Stairway was a part of Heart’s tribute set in 2012 at the Kennedy Center Honor show, attended by Barack Obama and intended to take a hat off to artists who’d made an important contribution to American culture (the only other British recipients have ever been Cary Grant, Sean Connery and Paul McCartney).

When it was released on Monday, 8 November, 1971 Led Zeppelin IV went to Number 1 in the UK, only narrowly missing out on the top spot in the US. It is still regarded as one of the greatest albums of the classic rock era, and you can take from it what you want in terms of its legacy. It wasn’t Zeppelin’s first and it wasn’t their last, and certainly wasn’t the only memorable entry in 1971’s lengthy parade of classics. But with so much of the music produced that year, it was the work of a group of young men for whom anything went, creatively (though as numerous biographies have revealed, the same could be said of Zeppelin’s touring antics). Unlike today’s somewhat over-curated, packaged pop, it comes from a time when bands had licence to do what they liked, and weren’t dictated to by popular taste or the need to appeal to radio airplay algorithms. Led Zeppelin IV can also be broken down into the individual DNA of the four proponents - the very people depicted by the inner sleeve’s runes - in so far as it draws, in different degrees, from all the different musical interests Plant, Page, Jones and Bonham had at the time - blues, rock, folk, heavy rock and more. “I think that was the beauty of the players, of all of us, that maybe the style went over here, and then over there, and we could cut it wherever,” Plant told Mojo. “But we were in a really fluid creative place.” 

That manifests itself in the album’s eight tracks: in Black Dog’s riff; Rock And Roll’s nod to the musical revolution of the 1950s that set everything in train; The Battle Of Evermore hippy-dippyness (enhanced by Sandy Denny’s co-vocals); Stairway To Heaven’s sheer audacity; the bonkers groove of Misty Mountain Hop, Four Sticks’ rhythmic veracity; the wistful beauty of Going To California; and those signature, pounding drums of When The Levee Breaks, which consciously made the genetic link between original Delta Blues and hard rock. 50 years on, what it lacks in the innovations of more revered albums like Sgt. Pepper before it, or The Dark Side Of The Moon which followed two years later, over 42 minutes it remains an utterly compelling album. 

These days albums seem designed to be dipped in and out of, with tracks extracted for streaming playlists rather than complete, start-to-finish playback. Led Zeppelin IV, over its eight tracks, defies that. It’s also, by the way, much, much more than that one song that closes Side 1.

Be careful of what you wish for

There’s a tale - apocryphal or not - about Eden Hazard’s relationship with Antonio Conte when they were both at Chelsea. Such was the eardrum-bothering volume with which the Italian coach would bellow instructions from the touchline, the mercurial winger would arbitrarily switch wings if Conte’s seal-like barking got too much. I must admit, from way up in my East Stand Upper eyrie at Stamford Bridge, Conte’s vociferous chuntering - with Tannoy-strength projection - could be equally as irritating.

There’s no question that the new Spurs coach is effective, decisive even, and may just be the thing that chairman Daniel Levy needs to shock his embittered, lethargic and indifferent players into performing. Nice guy as Nuno Espírito Santo is, he came across as too casual in his authority at Tottenham, running into the perfect storm of Harry Kane angling for a move to Manchester City, impacting his previously symbiotic relationship with the otherwise dependable Son Heung-min, while allowing the ego-on-legs that is Dele Alli to retreat even further into his own agenda, which seemed to be as much about having a good time as knuckling down with the job he gets paid handsomely for.

Should I care about any of this? Well, obviously not. Football’s laws of tribalism ensure that not only do I not care about any team other my own, but also that the ongoing existential drama of what it is to be seemingly permanently “Spursy” is only to be laughed at. Which I do. I also don’t care about the idea of Conte taking charge in N17. He won Chelsea the Premier League in his first season in charge, and then the FA Cup in a somewhat insipid final at Wembley, before parting company with the club (and then taking it to court). The same was the case when José Mourinho joined Tottenham (and, indeed, Manchester United) - we had the best out of him, won titles and enjoyed the psychodramas that come with his involvement in a club, but moved on with gratitude. 

Conte is, by turns, likeable and charismatic, but also by reputation, difficult to handle. And, let’s face it, Chelsea get through managers with a higher frequency than I buy underwear, so it’s hard to get too attached to any of them, even a club legend like Frank Lampard. Thomas Tuchel will, I’m sure, at some point, fall out with the club hierarchy, and the revolving door will spin again. So we enjoy things while we can. Conte, on the other hand, has a different challenge at Spurs, namely to deliver success to a club that has spent longer than I care to remember believing it should be hoovering silverware, but consistently falling short. Unlike Liverpool or Manchester United, who have the Shankly and Ferguson legacies to draw on, Spurs have never had an imperious phase, even if their fans believe - from what and where, I have no idea - that they do. 

The agreement to appoint Conte as new head coach, on an 18-month contract worth up to £15 million a year, will need to deliver. Unlike Nuno, Conte has a somewhat more substantial track record, having won five league titles as a club manager (and over seven campaigns). Even if his last appointment, at Inter Milan, ended with the sack, he still managed to take the nerazzurri to their first Serie A title in more than a decade. He therefore arrives in north London with his work cut out, and even though the opening overtures from the club hierarchy have been positive, it won’t be lost on many that Spurs’ original approach for Conte in the summer, to replace Mourinho, ended after Conte allegedly expressed concerns about the club’s strategy and funding for recruitment. Tottenham suggested that they didn’t see eye-to-eye with Conte on squad strengthening, and a perception that he wasn’t interested in working with youth players (a hangover from his Chelsea days). Clearly, then, these red lines have been removed. 

Conte has since made a statement that the summer was “too soon” to take over at Spurs, but that doesn’t bely the fact that, wherever he goes, he has high expectations of clubs spending to match their ambitions. Daniel Levy is not known for his largesse (especially as he’s going to be paying for the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for many years to come).

“The terms must have changed,” Chris Sutton said last night on BBC Radio 5 Live. “[Conte] isn't going to go to Spurs unless he feels he can win something or come close because he is not that type of manager. He is not coming to the end of his career. He wants to come in and transform the club.” In that, Sutton said, Conte will be doing Spurs a favour, rather than the other way around, helping out an unemployed top-tier coach. It won’t, though, be an easy ride. 

From Day 1, Conte faces plenty of challenges. Principal of those will be getting Harry Kane scoring goals again, which also means restoring the 28-year-old’s love for the club badge. No mean feat, that, when his head was so publicly turned by the prospect of City. The second challenge will be to restore a sense of team unity. It was notable that no player gave any statement of sympathy for Nuno, not even a patronising “wishing the gaffer well”. Rumours spilled out from Tottenham that team spirit had been allowed to fray by a head coach who was not a great interpersonal communicator, whose vision wasn’t well translated to the 11 on the pitch, and for those players not considered to be in Nuno’s immediate thoughts, a sense of being frozen out or ignored. 

Football management is about squad engagement as well as managing disappointment - just look at what happened to Frank Lampard when he started to work with a core of younger players at the expense of older heads. I hate the notion of player power: the manager should be respected otherwise discipline breaks down, but it’s worth noting that so far, Thomas Tuchel has been able to keep a large squad happy with tactical rotations to cope with the various competitions Chelsea are currently in without any obvious disquiet in the ranks.

There is, though, also a tactical challenge that Conte will face. Spurs fans have a tradition of expecting their team to play a certain way, and while this isn’t as bad as it sounds (i.e. coaching from the terraces), it does play into the club culture, one that has become ever so slightly entitled. If there’s one aspect of this I’d say, as objectively as I can as a supporter of a despised rival (and, therefore, what do I care?), is that Spurs need to get back into a more attacking frame of mind. That doesn’t just lean on Kane’s shoulders (though he could help), but on the entire formation. So far this season they’ve been far too tentative - and the results have shown. That might come through the physical intensity Conte will put the team through. At Chelsea he was notorious for the punishing training routines at Cobham, and during his single full pre-season put the squad through the kind of ‘beasting’ ordeal that SAS recruits might baulk at. Conte is also a disciplinarian (just look at his fractious relationship with Diego Costa), and that will come into sharp focus with Alli, who’d been all but abandoned by both Mourinho and Nuno, and even Mauricio Pochettino, suggesting that it wasn’t them, but Alli himself who has been the problem.

Another challenge Conte will encounter is longevity. No one is naive enough to think that any job in football is for life, and the fact that the Italian has only been signed until the summer of 2023 suggests that his appointment is more of a project than the start of a legacy. From a Spurs perspective, there is also Conte’s reputation for managing for the short term, not always through choice. “He left Inter [at the end of last season] because they couldn't invest money and they sold his best players,” points out football writer Gabriele Marcotti. “He left Chelsea because he couldn't get owner Roman Abramovich to spend more money on players he wanted.” Marcotti says Conte has form in this area, recalling a tale about him leaving Juventus saying that “they wanted me to eat out in a 100 euros restaurant with 10 euros in my pocket”. Marcotti believes that Spurs, with its notoriously profligate attitude to buying players, might leave Conte short-changed.

For his part, Conte has spun the inevitable PR line about why things didn’t work out between him and Spurs just four months ago. “Last summer our union did not happen because the end of my relationship with Inter was still too recent and emotionally too involved with the end of the season,” he said in a statement. “So I felt that it wasn't yet the right time to return to coaching.” But added: “The contagious enthusiasm and determination of Daniel Levy in wanting to entrust me with this task had already hit the mark. Now that the opportunity has returned, I have chosen to take it with great conviction.” Just as well, then, that Nuno sleep-walked into his P45.

The managerial merry-go-round is a constantly baffling thing. The minute a manager is fired, a list of runners and riders tipped to replace him is quickly assembled, even if you can’t help feeling that they’re all red shirt-wearing crew members of the Starship Enterprise being summoned to the transporter room (you might need to look that reference up). Managers like to talk of “relishing the challenge” and “opportunities too good to miss” when they sign up for the most poisoned of football’s chalices. Conte is far from cannon fodder, but it’s hard to imagine that Spurs will be any happier an environment to work in than anywhere else he’s been and subsequently walked away from. You kind of wish him luck, but then that wouldn’t be a rival football club fan’s sentiment, now would it?

Lost and found: tomb raiding or celebration of a legacy?

© Simon Poulter 2021

My entry to the blogosphere happened by accident: a foul mood one Monday morning resulting from England’s latest humiliating exit from a football tournament led to a 1,000-word rant written on a train and in need of an outlet. Thus, this blog’s predecessor, What Would David Bowie Do? was born. It was never meant to be about The Dame (it’s title came from a throwaway remark by a former girlfriend) but over the course of its lifetime, my love of David Bowie’s music was progressively rekindled as I found myself dipping into the extraordinary body of work he had recorded. His death on 10 January, 2016, brought that blog to an abrupt halt. It just didn’t seem right to continue with that title, which was simply a nod to a throwaway, Jägermeister-fuelled quip in a Yosemite boozer. So I wrote my own obituary and WWDBD? ended there. 

Of course, I wouldn’t stop blogging, and there was only going to be one source for the new one’s name, hence the reference you see at the top of this page. Even now, people think I’m a Bowie blogger, but I haven’t actually written anything specifically about him for a couple of years. Today might change that, as I kick off what I’ve presumptively declared David Bowie Month, for no other reason than the 26th will see the release of the latest box set of Bowie reissues, Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001). The package will feature remasters of output in a period where Bowie may have struggled, remarkably, to fit into the Britpop wave that was going on at the time, but in Black Tie White Noise, The Buddha Of Suburbia soundtrack, Outside, Earthling and Hours, still produced utterly compelling material. 

The period also covers a phase of live performances, where Bowie had a white-hot band and was seemingly comfortable in his skin performing all the old classics. Thus, a BBC Radio live recording from 2000 (originally released as part of the limited-edition three-disc Bowie At The Beeb) - a warm-up for his legendary Glastonbury headline performance - is included in the set, along with a collection of odds and sods called Re:Call 5. The true draw to the package, however, is Toy, the semi-mythical record featuring new versions of Bowie songs from the very beginning of his career, but which wasn’t deemed by the record company to be releasable in 2001. I can assure you there will be more on Brilliant Adventure nearer its release date.

© Simon Poulter 2021

Last week I indulged my fandom with a visit to the new ‘Bowie 75’ pop-up shop in London’s Heddon Street, opened (along with a sister branch in New York) to provide an outlet for devotees to gorge themselves on merchandise, music and other paraphernalia (such as a Stylophone with which to recreate the iconic middle-eight of Space Odyssey). I won’t deny that purchases were made (high-quality vinyl reissues of the ‘second’ David Bowie album and The Man Who Fell To Earth, plus the scintillating Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 recorded on the Station To Station tour - Bowie in his absolute ’70s pomp). 

In the shop’s basement you can listen to vintage songs spruced up with ‘360 Reality Audio’ (Sony’s new ‘spatial’ audio technology), as well as play around with magnetic lyrics stuck to a pillar, composing songs as Bowie once did with cut up newspaper headlines. There’s also a red telephone box in which you can have your picture taken, a hat-tip to the shop being located across the road from the building featured in the cover art for The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars, setting the scene for the alien Ziggy’s arrival on Earth.

If people think all this is fan gouging, then that’s up to them. After all, people appear to be paying significantly north of £80 for Adele tickets next summer, so no one has the right to judge what people spend their money on when it comes to pop music. Most of the merchandise on sale in the shops is available on the official Bowie website, but there’s more to it than simply a couple of glorified souvenir kiosks. The London and New York stores (the latter located close to Bowie’s SoHo home of 20 years) have been opened for a strictly limited period, leading up to what would have been the artist’s 75th birthday, on 8 January next year. 

“I’m really emotional,” 35-year-old fan Nikky Smart told The Times the other day while visiting the Heddon Street store. “It’s kind of like they’ve brought him back again.” I can’t say that it was really like that for me, but it was all very tasteful. And seeing most of a back catalogue of 27 studio albums, live sets and compilations on sale, alongside the T-shirts (yep, I bought one), baseball hats, jigsaw puzzles and all the rest, was a poignant reminder of the sheer body of work Bowie left behind when he succumbed to cancer in 2016.

Picture: The Rolling Stones/Bravado

The Bowie 75 shops are just the latest retail ventures opened by heritage acts to interact with fans. The Rolling Stones opened their own ‘Official UK Store’ in London’s Carnaby Street in September last year - a brave move given that it was that brief period of 2020 when normality resumed and people went shopping again, albeit tentatively. The Stones previously had a limited-period concession at Selfridges in Oxford Street to provide the template for the Carnaby Street shop, making it largely a platform to flog somewhat expensive T-shirts bearing the legendary ‘lips’ logo and various pieces of Stones album art. The Bowie shops also arrive a few weeks after Queen opened their own store, also in Carnaby Street, and dedicated to the band’s five-decade career, selling limited edition music releases, fashion collaborations with brands like Champion and Wrangler, Johnny Hoxton jewellery and other ‘lifestyle products’, whatever that means. 

All these band-based retail concepts appear to have two types of punter in mind: tourists that (in theory) throng to London’s West End, and in particular, social media-savvy youngsters looking to post their visits to Instagram and TikTok (that said, the Bowie shop seemed to be mostly customised by middle-aged blokes…er…like me). “We’re really looking at two things,” entertainment consultant Lawrence Peryer explained to The Times last week when talking about how the Bowie shops came about. “We wanted to create a place for the long-term Bowie fan to come in and find out something about Bowie that they didn’t know before, and have an experience they’d not had before, but also to connect with a young audience. David was always ahead of his time, always changing to connect with the younger crowd, and we’re hoping this will carry on the tradition.” 

Bowie certainly was ahead of his time: many will have seen on YouTube his highly prescient interview in 1999 with the BBC’s Newsnight in which he told a sceptical Jeremy Paxman that the Internet - then in relative infancy - would affect society beyond all recognition. “The potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable,” he declared. The year before, Laurence Peryer had helped Bowie create his BowieNet website, widely considered one of the earliest pioneers of online music. It’s just one facet of Bowie that makes him still fascinating today, even before you start delving into the myriad characters and guises he quite consciously invented as avatars for his music. That was something he effectively did up to his dying day, with the morbid, out-of-body experience that was Blackstar, with its conscious references to impending death, which eventually occurred, uncannily, two days after his 69th birthday and the album’s release.

Bowie had a history of prescience. Invariably depicted as an inveterate Mod magpie throughout his life, appropriating music and fashion from wherever and whatever took his fancy, he also kept an unearthly beady eye on technology trends. In 1997 Bowie hatched a plan to monetise the master tapes of his recordings, foreseeing the rise of online streaming services that, as we now know, would only generate paltry revenues for artists compared to what they were used to with sales of physical formats. In the end, Bowie struck a deal with insurer Prudential to issue ‘Bowie bonds’ which used future royalties from his material as collateral, effectively enabling him to borrow against his back catalogue. The deal raised $55 million - shortly before Napster and the file-sharing boom came along, heralding the online music revolution that the industry has been coming to terms with ever since.

Today, as the online platforms Bowie predicted in his Paxman interview have eaten dramatically into sales of physical music formats, many artists have turned to striking deals with companies like the investment vehicle Hipgnosis. In the last year it has bought the rights to the catalogues of artists as diverse as Neil Young, Beyoncé and Blondie. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon have also sold their songwriting for eye-watering sums. Now, the Bowie estate is looking to get in on the act, with the Financial Times reporting last week that it is negotiating a deal for the artist’s albums that could raise anything up to $200 million, to be distributed between the artist’s widow Iman, son Duncan Jones and daughter Lexi, an agreement that would complement another signed recently with Warner Music for the recorded music catalogue.

Posthumously, Bowie continues to merchandise his work with a steady stream of reissues and deluxe packages, including the compilation box sets Five Years (1969-1973), Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), A New Career In A New Town (1977-1982) and Loving The Alien (1983-1988), each containing respectfully tarted-up versions of original studio albums along with recordings that encapsulated Bowie’s stage magic. There has also been a series of live albums, released one by one to build up a box set of their own, Brilliant Live Adventures, and drawn from Bowie’s so-called ‘wilderness years’ in the 1990s when he was, incredibly, not in vogue (all these recordings had been officially available online previously, but lucratively making the available physically, with a limited edition slip case drew in the likes of me - and I haven’t been disappointed, either). Indeed, I’ve had no problem buying any of the these Bowie packages, even if they mean owning the same albums over and over again. Each - as will the forthcoming Brilliant Adventure - contain enough trinkets of genuine appeal to the fan and, if bizarrely, such people exist, provide an entry point to the work of one of popular music’s most richly artistic and charismatic figures. Yep, I know: I’m a record company marketing manager’s dream. Sue me.