End of the runway for the ‘Queen of the Skies’

Picture: British Airways

I’ve blogged before about the majestic Boeing 747 and how, after five decades in the air, its future was limited. Today, the era of commercial aviation that the original “jumbo jet” defined will come to something of an end when the final 747 rolls of the Boeing production line in the US.

The plane, a cargo version built for Atlas Air, will be the 1,574th production model built by Boeing since the programme began in 1968, the result of Pan American founder Juan Trippe challenging then-Boeing president William Allen to build a plane even bigger than the company’s 707 model, the original game changer to long-distance air travel. The 747, however, evolved things even further, providing a platform for up to 400 seats and the ability to cover vast distances relatively quickly. Significantly, it enabled affordable intercontinental travel: I’m sure most Brits’ experience of places like Florida and New York were the result of flying there in a 747. I know all my first visits to America were via the beautiful flying ocean liner.

Three years ago, as Covid started to wreak havoc, British Airways announced the immediate retirement of its 31 747s. The airline had, then, by far the largest fleet of the type still flying. However, even before the pandemic grounded airlines, the aircraft that democratised air travel had started to become an anachronism as more fuel efficient planes like the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 DreamLiner began replacing such an ageing gas-guzzler as the 747. BA’s decision to end use of the 747 was, romanticism aside, a rational one. It was planning to retire the 747 in 2024 in any case - 25 years after its first -400 models were introduced - and had remained remarkably loyal to the type. US carriers United Airlines and Delta ended their 747 operations in 2017, while Virgin Atlantic (with whom I took my first US trip, in 1992) retired their 747s in 2020. Lufthansa, one of the few airlines to buy the last 747 type, the -8, are planning the retirement of their fleet, as has KLM.

In those mad days of yore when I used to get on a plane as often as some board a bus, no journey would fill me with the same excitement as one in which I flew in a Boeing 747. When I left San Francisco to move back to Amsterdam in 2003, I got upgraded to a business class seat for the flight with the now defunct Northwest Airlines, who put a 747 on the route. That meant sitting in the upper deck cabin, with a window seat looking out on the Golden Gate Bridge as we soared out of SFO. I’m not too ashamed to admit that I shed a tear - but not because I was leaving California, just the shear romance of it all. I've been lucky enough to get seats on that upper deck on a number of occasions, and it never fails to enamour, not the least, the novelty of having side storage bins that follow the contours of the Jumbo’s haughty prow.

Picture: British Airways

Even ‘downstairs’, the 747 experience just seemed like no other. Despite its enormous size, the 747 was a very quick plane. While it could never compete with Concorde for speed across the Atlantic, seven hours in the air wasn't a particular hardship to get to New York (even less on the way back to London with a decent following wind). What let BA’s fleet down towards the end was the ageing interior of their 747s, which often lacked the basic connectivity that more modern planes offer as standard. But these were, ultimately, minor quibbles. On journeys to and from San Jose in a previous job, the sensible approach would have been to take BA’s direct flight from Heathrow in a comfy 787, but with the 747 still on the San Francisco route, I’d opt for the love of Boeing’s jumbo, even though there’d be an arduous hour’s drive down to Silicon Valley on landing.

The 747’s decline is sad but it had, to some extent, outlasted its relevance. It will, though, continue in a long-running build for the US Air Force of two specially adapted jets to be used for the President (as ‘Air Force One’), along with cargo versions like Atlas Air’s new addition, a popular option for freight carriers due to the plane’s vast interior. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is also using one of his airline’s old 747s, Cosmic Girl,  for its nascent satellite launch venture. 

Indeed, the idea of large jets is not entirely over, either. Although the double-deck Airbus A380 has now stopped production, it is likely to remain in use for the foreseeable future, despite being, like the 747, four-engined. Emirates bought 118 of the type to ship large numbers of passengers to and from its Dubai hub. British Airways has even brought its own A380s out mothballs, having put them into storage during the pandemic. While not as romantically appreciated as the 747, passengers love the A380 for its comfort and, for such a lumbering giant, efficiency in flying point-to-point. 

It is, though, clear that despite the A380 enduring, twin-engined jets like the A350 and Boeing’s 777 and 787 models do the job, with less passengers, and more efficiently, from a carbon footprint point of view. The days of flying in a plane with an upper deck, and more than its sense of aviation decadence are, without doubt coming to an end.

Picture: British Airways

 

Art of a diver

Just beyond the eastern extreme of California’s Yosemite National Park, not far from the border with Nevada, sits Mono Lake, a salty body of water formed three-quarters of a million years ago. I came across it considerably more recently than that - 1992 to be exact - but at the time had no appreciation of the cameo it had made in my musical adolescence when I stopped there for what Americans politely term a “comfort break”.

For context, I was midway through a month-long tour of the American West, albeit in December when the tourist hordes are elsewhere. Having driven from Los Angeles up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco, and then north-east to snowed-in Lake Tahoe, I was heading south towards Death Valley along the scenic Highway 395, with California’s spinal Sierra Nevada mountains to my right. Just south-east of Yosemite, I came across Mono Lake and its seemingly abandoned visitor centre. Making use of its facilities, I then took in a view of the lake’s eerie stillness, framed by unique tufa formations. It would be another 25 years - and several visits further to that part of California - before I’d come to realise where I’d seen that tufa before. On a display wall at London’s V&A museum, as part of the Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains exhibition, was a blow-up of the inner sleeve of the band’s ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here, depicting a perpendicular diver performing a handstand in, yes, Mono Lake. 

The image was the idea of Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, the photographer and co-founder with Storm Thorgerson of the Hipgnosis design studio which, from the end of the 60s to the beginning of the 80s produced some of the most distinctive album covers ever committed to 12 inches-square of cardboard. Over 15 years, they produced more than 250 sleeves for artists as varied as Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Humble Pie, 10cc, Leo Sayer, Genesis, ELO, Black Sabbath, Olivia Newton-John and XTC, as well as Pink Floyd, with whom they became most closely associated.

It’s the perfect subject, then, for Us And Them: The Authorised Story Of Hipgnosis, a new book by journalist Mark Blake, whose previous work includes arguably the definitive Floyd account, Pigs Might Fly. “I’d always been quite interested in the idea of doing a book about Hipgnosis,” Mark declares. “I’d interviewed a lot of their associates for Pigs Might Fly - particularly the people who were around at the beginning of their work, their contemporaries, their friends from Cambridge and London in the early days.” A book about the creative duo was a natural next step, especially as Mark had come to know Powell and, in the later years of his life, Thorgerson, in particular, working on the very V&A exhibition I’d been to see. 

Hipgnosis and Pink Floyd’s histories are intertwined: Thorgerson and Powell had been cohorts of the band’s founder members, Syd Barrett and Roger Waters, in Cambridge before they all migrated to London to attend universities. There they met Nick Mason and Rick Wright, eventually becoming fixtures of the capital’s underground music scene as ‘The Pink Floyd Sound’. 

A year after Pink Floyd - as they became - released their debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn in 1967, Thorgerson and Powell established their working relationship with the band. “Storm was attending the Royal College Of Art, studying film, and Po got a job designing sets for the BBC,” says Mark. “Then Po got sacked and fell into low levels of criminal activity - bank fraud, stealing cars and so on. He got into an awful lot of trouble. It was then that they decided to talk Pink Floyd into letting them design the sleeve for their second album, A Saucerful Of Secrets.” Released in 1968, and made amidst the deteriorating mental health of Barrett (whose departure midway through recording led to David Gilmour joining the group), the album was only the second time that label EMI had allowed an artist to use designers from outside their own in-house art desk. Thorgerson and Powell took it as an opportunity to exploit the changing nature of record covers.

A Saucerful Of Secrets led to the pair designing for Pink Floyd’s labelmates at EMI and, later, its Harvest subsidiary, at first making use of the RCA’s photography faculty (even though Thorgerson wasn’t studying the subject and Po wasn’t even at the college), before being rumbled and thrown out. Instead, they turned the bathroom of Powell’s then-girlfriend into a dark room. This was to change towards the end of 1969 when the pair upgraded: “They moved into a studio in Denmark Street where they began doing stuff for bands like Argent, Quatermass, Toe Fat - all these late-60s, early prog rock,” says Mark. They also took on photographic work came for magazines and book covers. 

“Much of their success can be traced to that of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” says Mark, referring to the grandaddy of progressive rock and its ambitious pop art sleeve designed in 1967 by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. That landmark inspired a decade of graphic design in rock which saw Hipgnosis, as well as their equally conceptual contemporary Roger Dean, taking cover art into new realms of creativity and expression. Prog bands like Pink Floyd, Yes and Genesis became fertile muses for such designers, turning cover art into an integral component of the narrative their records pursued, invariably conveying dioramic third dimensions through fantastical, somewhat lyrical and always unique imagery. 

For Thorgerson and Powell, getting their concepts across the line with some bands often owed more to the force of personality than creativity alone. “There was one slightly oddball character in Storm, and the slightly more measured character in the shape of Po,” Nick Mason tells Mark in the book. “And it stayed that way for the next fifty years.”

Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell

As their reputation grew, from 1968 and into the new decade, Hipgnosis became particularly prevalent working for artists sat on various degrees of the progressive spectrum, producing sleeves for myriad acts like Humble Pie, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Rory Gallagher, T-Rex, Wishbone Ash (for their album Argus, with its seminal cover) and even Syd Barrett, for his haphazard but still loved post-Floyd solo albums. At the same time, the relationship with Pink Floyd continued to bear fruit, with covers for the albums More, Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle and Obscured By Clouds.

However, the album that still defines the Hipgnosis legacy - and possibly the entire genre of LP art - came in March 1973: The Dark Side Of The Moon. Thorgerson and Powell’s brief from Pink Floyd was to produce something uncomplicated, a contrarian response to opinions amongst the suits at EMI that their previous sleeves for the band had been belligerently obscure and even unmarketable. What they came up with - with a little help from a school book - was the now singular black cover with its beam of light dissipating through a prism into a spectral rainbow.

“I don’t think there was so much foresight and forward thinking in it,” says Mark Blake. “A lot of the time it’s ‘We’ve got to get a cover out - there’s a deadline looming!’. The band wanted something simple so Storm and Po found the prism design in a physics textbook and ripped it off, getting their illustrator George Hardie to create a beautiful design.” To make up for the spartan outer cover, Hipgnosis included some visual extras. “You got the poster of The Great Pyramid and a load of stickers,” says Mark. ”That was Storm trying to shoehorn some bigger ideas in.”

Nowhere on the front or back was there any mention of Pink Floyd or the album’s name. Though not the intention, it reflected an undercurrent of growing distraction within the band (Roger Waters has, with customary misery, described Dark Side as “the beginning of the end”), and the lyrical themes of greed, fame, mortality and even the mental decline of their founder Barrett. Wrapped in a package not dissimilar to a box of Black Magic chocolates, The Dark Side Of The Moon became the standout release of 1973, a year which saw records like Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy (with a cover also designed by Hipgnosis), Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and Bruce Springsteen’s Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ amongst its pantheon.

Mark acknowledges Dark Side’s enduring success but doesn’t attribute it entirely to the legendary artwork: “I don’t think that it is just down to having the boldness of not having the band’s name anywhere on the cover. I know it wasn’t the first time Storm and Po had done that with Pink Floyd or, in fact, another band.” Music, he says, has clearly been the album’s defining character, but over time the cover has contributed to the record’s legend, albeit contentiously for Hipgnosis: “I think they got paid about 500 quid all-in for that. Years later, Storm tried to get more money out of Pink Floyd because he believed that the cover had contributed more to the sales.”

To date The Dark Side Of The Moon has sold more than 45 million copies worldwide - and continues to do so, even reaching new audiences. My 18-year-old step-daughter asked for a vinyl copy for Christmas two years ago, and even this last December the LP was selling steadily when I visited Fopp! in Covent Garden. While it contains some of the Floyd’s most revered music - Breathe, Money, Time, Us And Them, The Great Gig In The Sky et al - that cover art has found itself peppered throughout the zeitgeist of the last 50 years. “I think both Storm and Po had a complicated relationship with Dark Side,” says Mark. “It’s not their favourite work, but it is their most famous work. It’s a very simple design but doesn’t have the narrative quality that Wish You Were Here had a couple of years later, which I think was certainly one of Storm’s favourite Floyd covers.” 

That record, released in 1975 as a follow up to Dark Side, came with a significantly larger production budget for Hipgnosis, which is how Powell ended up in California for three weeks, an entourage in tow, taking the Mono Lake shot. At the same time, he captured the faceless bowler-hatted man for the back cover (shot in the Mojave Desert), and the front cover image of businessmen shaking hands on a Hollywood backlot, with one of the two stuntmen used for the picture actually on fire - a stunt that almost went very badly wrong.

The story of Hipgnosis isn’t, however, exclusively the Pink Floyd Story. Their work for other artists was equally as distinct, and sometimes just as complicated, though Mark feels they never came up with anything as singularly impactful as The Dark Side Of The Moon. “They became the hip guys to go to after Dark Side and Houses Of The Holy, and also, weirdly, Wishbone Ash’s Argus. That was the album Jimmy Page saw in a record shop: when I interviewed him for the book, he told me ‘I saw this album with a Viking on the cover. I never listened to it but I liked the cover.’ So he rang up Storm and said, ‘Come and do our next album’ [for Led Zeppelin]. After that they got the call from Paul McCartney, who asked them to do Wings’ Band On The Run.” That cover, Mark says, was entirely McCartney’s idea, and famously featured a Clive Arrowsmith picture of Paul and Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Michael Parkinson, Kenny Lynch, James Coburn, Clement Freud, Christopher Lee and John Conteh posing against a wall, illuminated by a prison searchlight. Still, it had a domino effect, bringing many more bands to Thorgerson and Powell’s door.

Genesis was another band that enjoyed a run of distinctive Hipgnosis-designed covers, commencing with 1974’s The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway - Peter Gabriel’s final work as lead singer and a concept album about a Gulliver-like Puerto Rican street tough descending into the New York underworld. Its literal cover - including a new band logo - was peak Hipgnosis. “Storm was incredibly principled about certain things,” Mark explains. “He would go to the ends of the Earth and spend his own money on getting a cover right. There were certain ideas he wanted to do for bands that they rejected because they wouldn’t have been able to afford it. Storm would do it anyway, just because he wanted to. But by the same token, if Pink Floyd turned an idea down, he’d have no hesitation in trying to fob it off on another band.”

10cc and Genesis were, in particular, beneficiaries of Thorgerson’s ‘generosity’: “The cover of 10cc’s Bloody Tourists is actually a picture of Powell with a map across his face in the West Indies. They pitched that to Genesis for …And Then There Were Three, with the idea that they’d just lost Steve Hackett [who’d quit the band in 1977] and they’re now looking for a new direction.” Genesis, Mark says, weren’t having it, so Hipgnosis took the concept to 10cc who did.

Peter Gabriel recounted a similar experience to Mark for his first three solo albums, which had Hipgnosis covers. Every time he met Thorgerson, he’d be told: “I’ve got a great idea for you, Peter,” to which Gabriel would say: “You’ve fucking tried that on Led Zeppelin, haven't you?”. Mark reveals: “Storm would reply: ‘Yes, but it's perfect for you!’ So, there’s this sort of reject pile that Gabriel would always be confronted by. With Storm it was a weird mix of being incredibly principled and that art is everything, to ‘just have this’.” The covers Gabriel eventually agreed to were markedly different to those Hipgnosis produced for his old band and their contemporaries. While still surreal, they featured distorted images of the singer himself, but to his American record company’s frustration, Gabriel was naming his albums simply ‘Peter Gabriel’, with their covers the only means of distinguishing them. Eventually, the American label would remarket them respectively as ‘Car’, ‘Scratch’ and ‘Melt’, based on the Hipgnosis imagery, just to help the hard of thinking.

If Sgt. Pepper changed the nature of album covers, the early 1980s brought two shifts in the medium itself with industrial developments that, indirectly, altered Thorgerson and Powell’s trajectories. In 1982 Philips and Sony heralded the digital music age by introducing the Compact Disc. The 12-inch canvas that Hipgnosis had made their own became increasingly redundant. Until Gen Z’ers discovered their parents and grandparents’ vinyl collections - and a new romance began with cover art, appearing on bedroom walls and irony-nodding T-shirts - the designs that stood tall in my teenage years became minimised to fit 12cm ‘jewel cases’. Later still, with the advent of streaming, cover art would be minimised further to fit the postage stamp-sized screen real estate of online services. 

Mark Blake

To Mark Blake, the CD’s arrival marked an important pivot away from the ‘long-player’: “That’s another thing that was appealing about doing this book,” he says. “The Hipgnosis story follows the arc of the LP as a medium, which really began with Sgt. Pepper, which was a game-changer in that sense. Suddenly the LP was king. Bands made albums and didn't have to do singles. But, as I’ve been told, the arrival of the CD was one of the reasons that made Hipgnosis decide to wind up the company and go into making music videos.” 

The arrival of MTV in 1983 was the next industrial change, providing Hipgnosis with a new outlet: “All the money that might have once gone into sending them to the Sahara Desert to photograph footballs in the sand for a cover was now being spent on videos,” says Mark. “So that’s why they wound up the company and decided make music videos, which they did for a few years quite successfully…until it wasn’t.” 

While one of their first forays was the clip for Paul Young’s Wherever I Lay My Hat, the video age brought Hipgnosis back into contact with some of their older clients, who were finding new fans through the medium. “They did stuff for Robert Plant and Jimmy Page’s bands,” says Mark. “Owner Of A Lonely Heart [the hit single that revived the fortunes of Yes] was another big one for Hipgnosis. They got in on the ground floor with these older bands trying to relaunch themselves and having to make videos. And obviously, the bands went to the very guys who’d made their album covers, because they figured that they’d feel comfortable with them.”

Although Hipgnosis, as an entity, was wound up in 1983, there is a coda to their greatest legacy in designing covers for LPs. Vinyl sales grew for the 15th consecutive year in the UK in 2022, reaching close to 5.5 million - the highest growth since 1990. What began as baby boomers looking to reconnect with their long-discarded copies of classic Beatles and Bowie records has been boosted by the record-selling phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, as teenagers, moving on from raiding their elders’ records, have adopted their own heroine in the Nashville star. Visit any record shop - from independents to the few remaining chains - and a miasma of album covers will greet you. 

So, is Mark Blake’s celebration of arguably the greatest purveyors of album art perfectly timed? Not necessarily, he says: ”The 50th anniversary Dark Side Of The Moon was the main reason for writing the book. The thing about [the resurgence of] vinyl is interesting, though. I’ve got a 17-year-old son, and when he was first looking through my old records, he said to me, ’Some of these covers would look great if you had them framed on the wall,’ which I think is quite interesting. He listened to Dark Side a couple of years ago, because he’d heard a lot about it - and probably because of the cover.” The vinyl upswing does help, says Mark: “It shows there’s an interest in it as a format, but I don’t think there would have been interest in [a book] ten years ago. We’re moving on to a time where people maybe are reassessing some of this stuff a bit more now, especially after the Pink Floyd exhibition at the V&A. It just feels a bit more timely now.”

Us And Them: The Authorised Story Of Hipgnosis by Mark Blake is published on 2 February by Nine Eight Books

Clarkson!

Picture: Amazon

Sometimes in the culture wars, events contrive to create the perfect storm. In the case of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex - Harry and Meghan, to you and me - the storm is a permanent state of enragement, much like that giant red cyclone near the equator of Jupiter.

For one newspaper in particular - obviously, the Daily Mail - it is ever-present. On any given day there are four or five stories about Harry, or Meghan, or both. At the height of the furore over Harry’s memoir Spare, you’d be lucky to find coverage of anything else. In recent days, though, the Mail’s apparent obsession with the Sussexes has died down to just four or five new stories a day. That, though, is still tempered by an injection of beatific pieces about Harry’s brother and sister-in-law, the Prince and Princess of Wales. It has been a prominent feature of the British media's editorial polarity that picture stories of the ever-smiling Catherine, her heir-to-the-throne husband and their adorable children get prominence in contrast to the prevailingly negative coverage of Harry and Meghan. Don’t tell me there isn’t an agenda going on there…

Back in December, before Spare came out, and in the wake of the royal couple’s exorcising Netflix series, Jeremy Clarkson stuck his size 14s in by writing a wholly offensive column for The Sun in which he suggested that Meghan should be paraded naked through the streets of Britain while having excrement flung at her by the public. He wasn't, to the best of anyone's knowledge, being literal, but in that oh-so Clarksonesque way, it was a clumsy reference to a scene from Game Of Thrones with which to emphasise the “hate” - his word – he had for the duchess “on a cellular level”. To hammer home his disdain, Clarkson placed the duchess above Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and even serial killer Rose West. Needless to say, the shit-slinging idea went down well with people on Twitter called “Daz” or “Barry” who suffix their handles with Cross of St. George flags, and whose timelines are regularly peppered with sentiment supportive of topics such as Brexit, defunding the BBC and bringing back Boris. Basically, anything starting with the letter b. 

This is the Clarkson fan base: ‘real blokes’ who like cars, football and probably still bemoan the disappearance of The Sun’s Page Three “stunnah”, which was, of course, always only “a bit of fun” and in no way a daily dose of sexist titillation (with the emphasis on “tit” – phwoar!). These are the self-styled anti-woke warriors, who feed - and feed off - the Daily Mail’s constant chuntering about anything remotely liberal, contriving a culture war angle out of anything. So, far from merely tolerating his occasional sexism and casual racism on Top Gear, Clarkson’s core demographic have fully bought into his reactionary schtick. Which means the egregious column he wrote in December was probably regarded by most of his following as grist to the mill.

Not so, everyone else. Within a matter of days the column had attracted a record 25,000 complaints to the press regulator Ipso. As a pile-on ensued, an apparently chastened Clarkson tweeted: “Oh dear. I’ve rather put my foot in it. In a column I wrote about Meghan, I made a clumsy reference to a scene in Game Of Thrones and this has gone down badly with a great many people. I’m horrified to have caused so much hurt and I shall be more careful in future.” 

It wasn’t enough. Even to his daughter Emily. “My views are and have always been clear when it comes to misogyny, bullying and the treatment of women by the media,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “I want to make it very clear that I stand against everything that my dad wrote about Meghan Markle and I remain standing in support of those that are targeted with online hatred.”

The broad view agreed. Clarkson senior had been deeply misogynist. Questions were asked of the editorial governance at The Sun to have allowed the column to have run in the first place, with former Sun editor Neil Wallis calling it a “dreadful failure of editing.” Immediately, questions arose as to the reputational damage Clarkson had done to the broadcasters who employ him, although while Kevin Lygo, ITV’s media and entertainment boss, described the column as “awful”, he said there were no plans to replace him as presenter of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. Amazon, which has paid Clarkson several millions to front the son-of-Top Gear, The Grand Tour, and the reality series Clarkson’s Farm, was less ambiguous. Described by Clarkson himself as “incandescent” over The Sun piece, the streaming service was reported by entertainment industry trade rag Variety as “cutting their ties” with the controversial presenter. This, in turn, set off the likes of the Daily Mail and its readers who predictably accused those offended by Clarkson of ‘cancelling’ the 62-year-old manchild. Except that he hasn’t, yet.

In fact, the Variety story said that it was only “likely” that Amazon would part ways with Clarkson, and following “the conclusion of existing agreements.” Those include one more series of The Grand Tour and two of Clarkson’s Farm. That will mean Clarkson remains onscreen with Amazon for at least the next two years. But, as we know with the tabloids’ obsession with woke-bashing, don’t let such practicalities get in the way of a good story.

Amazon has remained quiet on Clarkson’s future, although a “senior figure” connected with the company told the Telegraph that such talk of the presenter being cancelled because of his column in The Sun was “nonsense”. Another pointed out that Clarkson’s brand of gobshite controversy was hardly in the same league of offence-causing as some of the books Amazon sells, like Mein Kampf, or documentary series on Prime about serial killers. Actually, the storm only emboldens Clarkson’s brand. Ever since he started using strained metaphors in the ‘old’ Top Gear about cars “snapping knicker elastic”, he knowingly self-cultivated an image of being television’s actual Alan B’Stard, who comes out with mildly reactionary things just to get a rise. Boo!

It worked. Top Gear 2.0, with Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, became a juvenile version of Last Of The Summer Wine, pushing the tolerance envelope with obviously scripted routines that portrayed the trio as a group of overgrown schoolboys, rather than middle-aged motoring journalists. That was until the “slope” reference in a film the trio made in Thailand which was, we were assured, a statement about a camera angle. I don’t think the Thai gentleman in shot would have been amusedThe last straw, for the BBC, at least, came with Clarkson being sacked for punching a Top Gear producer while on location after being told that the crew’s hotel couldn’t prepare a late night steak for him.

Picture: Amazon

Thus, Amazon spent £160 million on luring Clarkson & Co over to Prime to develop The Grand Tour which was, blatantly, Top Gear 2.5. Same presenters, same schtick, same demographic. Except – and this gets to the bottom of Amazon’s possible tie-cutting - the blokeish Clarkson/May/Hammond humour is intrinsically British and, even then, quite narrow. The Telegraph revealed this week that Prime has around 200 million viewers worldwide, with three-quarters of them in America. In Britain, where The Grand Tour and Clarkson’s Farm will more or less exclusively resonate, Amazon can only command 12 million subscribers. All of a sudden, £160 million seems an awful lot of money. As the GT trio found with old-TG, their form of irony doesn’t always work in America. Clarkson’s Farm, too, is probably regarded as parochial (even though it is, actually, genuinely entertaining), but US ratings for it have been particularly poor. And with any poorly performing TV property, if it doesn’t rate, it gets the chop.

The beginning-of-the end for Clarkson on Amazon is, then, pure coincidence. But that won’t keep him out of the headlines. Last week it was revealed that he e-mailed Prince Harry on Christmas Day to apologise for his Sun column, saying that his language had been “disgraceful” and he was “profoundly sorry”. A spokesperson for Harry and Meghan were less than impressed: “While a new public apology has been issued today by Mr. Clarkson, what remains to be addressed is his long-standing pattern of writing articles that spread hate rhetoric, dangerous conspiracy theories and misogyny. Unless each of his other pieces were also written ‘in a hurry’ [as he apparently stated] it is clear that this is not an isolated incident shared in haste, but rather a series of articles shared in hate.”

Clarkson has, of course, not been cancelled. He will continue presenting Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? on ITV - for now - though the network has not confirmed anything more than another series. The Sun still employs him, though his columns have been conspicuously absent, and he still has a weekly appearance in The Sunday Times. So, no, the enfante terrible hasn’t succumbed to the tofu-eating wokerati. But maybe a period of abstinence - not just by Clarkson but the rest of the reactionary commentariat constantly searching for a new club to break over Harry and Meghan’s heads - might do us all some good.

Let them eat cake

On top of a filing cabinet at my company’s offices there is regularly an open tub of chocolates, inviting anyone passing to dip in and grab themselves an Orange Creme, a Golden Barrel, a Mini Flake, or all three. I pass the chocolates en route to the office kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. However, I don’t partake. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the gesture, but for at least the last three years I’ve been Type 2 diabetic and therefore chocolate in all its forms, along with bread, pasta and almost all the foods containing ‘complex’ carbs, are no longer my friend. 

It’s my own fault: I indulged too much in such things and gained a lot of weight that clogged up my pancreas until it stopped working properly. That’s the broad science of it. Now, like an alcoholic never touching another drop for fear of returning to addiction, I mostly avoid carbs to prevent myself going blind, losing my feet or needing kidney dialysis if I let blood sugar levels return to where they were when I was first diagnosed.

You can’t survive by not consuming carbohydrate, however. It’s just that I have to look out for things that contain too much of it and not eat them. Occasionally I’ll have a pint of Guinness, but I’ll stick to just the one before moving on to water or a diet drink. It doesn’t bother me. I can still be sociable, it’s just that I’d prefer to remain sociable for as long as I can. I don’t get resentful, either: I’ve grown used to my own family consuming chocolate around me (usually around nine in the evening), in much the same way as I’ve long rejected any envy over people eating sandwiches, pasta or naan bread in front of me. I know what it can do to me, so I let it go.

However, the chairwoman of Britain’s leading food watchdog has another view. People bringing things like cake into the office for colleagues should be considered, she says, as harmful to their health as passive smoking. “We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time,” Professor Susan Jebb of the Food Standards Agency said, speaking in a personal capacity. “I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”

Whilst not saying the two issues are completely identical, she has combined them into the same thinking. The Times reported her as saying: “With smoking, after a very long time, we have got to a place where we understand that individuals have to make some effort but that we can make their efforts more successful by having a supportive environment. But we still don’t feel like that about food.”

Frankly, I’ve never equated smoking and someone leaving a birthday cake in a communal area at work, even in working cultures where someone is always bringing in confectionary. As an ex-smoker, too, I’m also conscious of what my fumes did for those I worked with when I last smoked, almost 30 years ago (including - ugh - in a small office with two non-smokers). 

I get the point, though. Two-thirds of adults in the UK are classed as overweight and a quarter obese. Worse, Type 2 diabetes now accounts for one-in-twelve UK adults, with cases in children and young adults quadrupling in Britain since 1990 - a faster increase than anywhere else in the world (rubbishing the idea that it is a condition of middle-age). Type 2 diabetes is mostly lifestyle-induced, too and - to some extent - self-inflicted. And I’m more than conscious that my own lack of self-restraint now contributes to the £6 billion obesity-related health conditions cost the NHS.

Politicians have argued for and against other measures to curb unhealthy lifestyles, such as banning the advertising of junk food, much as cigarette marketing was outlawed years ago, or stopping retailers from offering two-for-one deals on treats. Jebb, too, has added to this debate, telling The Times: “Advertising means that the businesses with the most money have the biggest influence on people’s behaviour. That’s not fair. At the moment we allow advertising for commercial gain with no health controls on it whatsoever and we’ve ended up with a complete market failure because what you get advertised is chocolate and not cauliflower.”

At the end of the day it is all about choice. And that choice requires strength of discipline. The brain is also very clever in prompting temptation, or forgetfulness. We can too easily mindlessly graze our way through a plate of biscuits left in a meeting room, or that box of Celebrations passed around without thinking - if we let ourselves, that is. 

Food brands are obliged these days to include nutritional facts on their packaging, which for someone like me who has to make a smart decision is extremely helpful. But is the solution that bad foods should be outlawed altogether? Of course not. Even I can have that occasional Guinness, though with 18g of carbs per pint, your granny was right in calling it a meal in a glass. Moderation is key which, I know, is often easier said than done. Harder is finding healthier food choices when eating out, and here is where I’d like to see the hospitality industry do more. Some pubs and restaurants do understand: asking to remove potatoes or chips from an order and replace them with salad is increasingly easier. More and more establishments get the idea of ‘bunless burgers’ or ‘burritos-in-a-bowl’, too. But I appreciate that as a  diabetic I remain in the minority. Plus, you can’t vouch for the sugar and salt used in recipes - avoidance is, I’ve accepted, only a mitigation.

Actually, the worst place I’ve ever experienced for food is, counter-intuitively, a hospital. When I spent time as in-patient for a diabetes-related condition a couple of years ago my breakfast choices would either be cereal or scrambled egg on white toast. Every morning. I chose a small dollop of the egg every day, with the only bonus being an added sausage on Sundays. Dinner would be whatever meat and vegetables I could extract from a lasagne. 

While I’ve got on top of things, and smugly lost weight to, now, manage my condition, others aren’t so diligent. Obesity and overeating are diseases in their own right. There are psychological reasons why some people eat themselves into being overweight, despite longstanding public information about the risks. But a nanny state is not the answer. Of course, the NHS could be more interventionist, but given pressures on the health service and GP surgeries in general, for a doctor to instruct someone to lose weight probably requires an in-person appointment, and would usually only come about because the individual is there for something else. No one, I suspect, rings up their GP to say “I’m fat - help me”.

“If a doctor comes across somebody with high blood pressure, they would feel, culturally, by training, by guidelines, by practice, that they must offer this patient treatment for their high blood pressure and explain to them why it was important,” Susan Jebb told The Times. “At the moment, if a doctor comes across a patient who is overweight, they mostly ignore it. The status in medicine comes from treating rare diseases with very expensive medicine and technology, and obesity isn’t either of those.”

She has a point. Obesity has, weirdly, been accepted culturally. I used to watch the American sitcom Roseanne and never once thought that Roseanne Barr’s titular character or her screen husband John Goodman were putting their health at risk by being large people. It almost seemed like a blue collar badge of honour. The Sopranos was, more or less, about hefty, masculine men who ate mounds of spaghetti-and-clams, wore oversized untucked shirts, and were more likely to die from a rival’s 9mm bullet than heart failure. Thanks to these cultural references I, too, embraced the large untucked shirt look because they allowed me to be fat without, apparently, consequences. 

When I lived in America, and on my many visits there since, I embraced the drive-through culture that put me literally at arms-length reach of a supersized burger-and-fries combo from the comfort of a car. The contradiction here, though, is that in America there are, actually, plenty of healthy food choices, and healthy lifestyle opportunities are everywhere. In California, where I lived, you worked alongside trim-looking joggers, gym-goers and outdoor junkies whose cars had bike and ski racks permanently mounted on them. Even in “overweight America”, you had a clear choice.

I’ve clearly made some bad ones, and didn’t realise that I had. But today, I walk past that open tub of Roses because I can. It’s another choice. It just shouldn’t have to be everybody else’s.

Forget Blue Monday, it’s Blue Sunday I’m worrying about

© Simon Poulter 2023

The ascent to the seat I’ve occupied at Stamford Bridge for 26 years is an arduous one, but the view is worth it once you get up there. The decision I made in 1997 with a mate of mine to take out season tickets in the East Stand Upper section, just below the main commentary box, was a sound one. Like the media who sit a few rows behind us, we have the perfect vantage point, sitting just to one side of the centre line. 

The one downside - well, increasing downside - is that it requires a lung-busting hike up several knee replacement-inducing sets of stairs dating back to the late 1970s when the East Stand was built. It is now the oldest stand in the stadium, and constructed at tremendous cost to the pre-Abramovich (and pre-Ken Bates) Chelsea Football Club, which was almost bankrupted by the venture. However, I’m not as young as I was in 1997. But there is, still, a latent desire to make that climb “every other Saturday” (or whenever the Premier League and its television partners deem games should be played). Right now, though, it feels like some form of ritualised torture.

Chelsea are in crisis. There is no other way of looking at it. Perhaps the mist of optimism veiled the view in my last post on the club’s fortunes, but since then, I’ve witnessed back-to-back defeats to Manchester City and the God-awful nightmare that was last Thursday’s away fixture to Fulham (in which loanee João Félix made a genuinely refreshing debut, only to then get red carded, and fellow loan player Denis Zaharia - one of the other rare bright spots in the squad - withdrew through injury. Chelsea lost 2-1 to the noisy neighbours).

Picture: Chelsea FC

I’ve never been one to join sack-the-manager pile-ons, especially as high head coach turnover at this football club has only ever been an irritating carrot-and-stick incentive to successors, but you have to question whether Graham Potter is, now, the man to dig Chelsea out of the hole they’re in. It’s not, though, his fault. The trouble is, it rarely is the manager’s. 

For too long, Chelsea bosses have borne the brunt for players with too much power, too much money and too little incentive to produce their best for the team. Potter, though, is yet to display the ability, charisma and sheer strength of personality to turn this predicament around. Something needs to happen to move Chelsea out of the mid-table moribundity they’re settling into, despite the vast outlay by the club’s new owners since taking over last summer.

On that front, clearly, Potter cannot be blamed for players like Kalidou Koulibaly and Marc Cucurella being hopelessly at the wrong club (even if the latter played for Potter at Brighton). Nor can he be blamed for the serial underperformer that is Hakim Zyech, or the enigma that is Kai Havertz, who has now laboured for too long leading the line. It wasn’t Potter, either, who bought Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, when anyone else would have steered well clear of the Gabonese skipper, ingloriously ejected by an Arsenal at a time when they could least afford to lose him, but clearly had to. 

Picture: Chelsea FC

What, too, has Jorginho really contributed to the midfield, in seasons-numerous? Nowhere near his reputation, that’s for sure. And Kepa, bought for a £72 million record goalkeeping transfer fee, then usurped by Edouard Mendy because of poor performance, to be restored to the team only to regress back into the indifferent form. And, lastly, there is dear old César Azpilicueta, the club captain. He tries his best, but at 33, has legs that just can’t keep up. Yes, it’s the manager’s job to get the best out of these players, but you’d have to argue that even a coach as sainted as Pep Guardiola can’t work miracles.

The Fulham game highlighted a malaise that has beset Chelsea, in one form or another, for some time: spirit. On paper, the club isn’t bereft of talent but it does lack leadership. That’s not just down to Azpiliqueta or the bench, but highly rewarded players who, when their backs are up against the wall, apply some gumption. Easy to say, I know, but it seems equally easy to just not put in a shift, drive home to that mansion in Oxshott in the custom-fit 150-grand G-Wagon, and fire up a cigar with that week’s wad of notes.

According to the Daily Telegraph, however, change is coming. It may not be immediate, but the Todd Boehly-Clearlake Capital consortium that owns Chelsea is planning to drain the swamp, and clear out players who’ve been allowed to build up in the squad over successive transfer windows, but not perform. Hopefully, even, one or two known to have undermined management authority. 

Against the prevailing mood from the terraces, Potter’s job is safe for now (and it was noted that some fans outside Craven Cottage on Thursday night were making it plain that the squad is the problem, not the head coach). I’m still not 100% convinced that Potter is the man for the job, but in fairness, he may not have been given a chance - even this far into the season. Injuries, too, have been punishing - something no manager can mitigate, whatever his strategic and tactical tools. 

A squad refresh could certainly help, with the Telegraph suggesting that a new wage structure might be introduced to reset an inconsistent spend during the Abramovich era. The thinking might be to put players on more or less the same wages for their age and experience, and build new and lucrative causes into their bonus agreements for meeting individual and team objectives. An interesting development if so.

That, though, is for the future. Potter’s problem, however, is here and now. The mood tomorrow afternoon at Stamford Bridge for the fixture against Crystal Palace is likely to be sulphurous. And if it isn’t, it will still be a struggle to get a raise out of even the most boisterous mobs of the Matthew Harding end. 

Potter needs results to change the mood, which makes the Palace game a must-win. The numbers don’t lie - Chelsea are currently in their worst run of form since 1996 and lie 10th in the Premier League, well off the pace for Champions League requalification. Exits in both the FA and League cups to Manchester City means that their only hope of silverware this season is the Champions League itself, which seems only a distant prospect to the most optimistic of supporters.

With the transfer window still open, there is talk of yet more signings to address the injury crisis, with PSV Eindhoven’s Noni Madueke along with Borussia Monchengladbach’s Marcus Thuram being considered to inject some urgency into an otherwise anaemic Chelsea attack, one in which even the lively Mason Mount has looked lethargic. But with each new name linked to the club, the belief is that it is committing the same mistakes they’ve made in successive seasons - buying more players without a plan of what they can do and where they will fit. 

As I wrote in my last post on this subject, last summer’s splurge on £170 million-worth of defenders has so far looked downright foolish, when considering the performances of Cucurella and Koulibaly, and the long-term injury of Wes Fofana, who barely played for the club before heading to the treatment centre.

Picture: Chelsea FC

For Potter, even the most tribal, antagonistic observer of football must show some sympathy. It’s not, though, what he wants: “I can’t sit here and say that things are improving when the results are like they are,” he said during his press conference yesterday. “We do know more about the club, more about the players, a lot more about what we need to get the club back to where it could be, where it should be. But at the moment, it’s not there. Lots of things have happened over a period of time that manifests itself into the situation. We have to make sure we act well going forward, but at the moment it’s tough to see any light, it’s tough to see any green shoots because we’re still suffering from defeats.”

The injuries - both existing and new - have felt like the feet being dragged from beneath him, especially the loss of Reece James on his return to the first team against Nottingham Forest. “It’s almost like, ‘Back to the drawing board’,” Potter said of all the injuries that continue to rack up. “It felt like taking one step, like you’re making progress watching João Félix, then all of a sudden, whoosh, he’s not here for three matches. That’s where we’ve been.”

The pressure on Potter for tomorrow’s Palace game is palpable, but then his opposite number, Patrick Viera, is looking at a run of four defeats out of five. A win over could move them level with Chelsea on points. Even if Potter’s job is not immediately at stake, psychologically, a lot is. One win from eight for a club with Chelsea’s most recent history is not only bad, it’s hard to actually remember when it was last quite so bad.

A postscript to this is that the day after tomorrow is ‘Blue Monday’, so named as it sits furthest between paydays, post-Christmas credit card statements are arriving and (of particular pain for me), HMRC self-assessment tax bills are due. On top of that, Britain seems to be stuck in a permanent weather pattern of wind and rain. T-Bone Walker might have sung “They call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday is just as bad“, but potentially, Sunday could be much, much worse.

A gentleman to the end

I can’t remember the exact date, but it was in the early summer of 1996 that I was passing through the 8th floor of the Philips offices in Croydon when I heard, from within a desk cubicle, “Fuck me! They’ve signed Vialli!”. A marketing manager and fellow Chelsea fan had just received a text message telling him that Gianluca Vialli - who had, just days before, been the Champions League-winning captain of Juventus - had signed for Chelsea on a free transfer. 

It’s hard to describe, even now, how Earth shattering this news was. Even in 1996, with Manchester United in the middle of their imperious domination of English football, it was unusual for a proper European superstar to join a Premier League club, let alone a player who had just won the European Cup as captain of ‘The Old Lady’ of Turin. And now he was joining an apparently underwhelming club that hadn’t won a major trophy in 26 years. 

Vialli’s arrival at Chelsea can be seen as significant in the transformation of English football. It is inseparable from the rise of the Premier League as the world’s most lucrative football competition, attracting stellar talent and broadcasters willing to pay top dollar to watch them. A month or so before Vialli joined the club it had appointed Ruud Gullit as, initially, player-manager. The Dutchman was, himself, a glamorous, ‘sexy’ European idol whose own move to Chelsea - even long after his playing usefulness had evaporated - brought stardust to West London.

Vialli was Gullit’s first, and unlikely, signing. But even with the striker being presented to the press holding a Chelsea shirt, it was hard at first for fans to grasp the concept of such a European football giant in their midst. Gullit, who’d won three Serie A titles and two European Cups with AC Milan, had been brought to Chelsea by Glenn Hoddle the year before, at the start of the club’s change in fortunes. It still took some getting used to the idea of a Ballon d’Or and a two-time World Soccer Player Of The Year winner on the club’s books. The acquisition of ‘name’ players like Mark Hughes suggested that Chelsea were emerging from near calamitous times in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the club yo-yo’d between the old First and Second Divisions, and even flirted with financial collapse. Its relative resurgence was being part-propelled by millionaire Matthew Harding who became a director in 1993. With Gullit replacing Hoddle, his Filofax of international connections soon brought in Vialli, followed by fellow Italians Gianfranco Zola and Roberto Di Matteo. Suddenly, Chelsea Football Club looked glamorous again, even if they hadn’t actually won anything.

Italian football was very much in vogue in 1996. Italia 90 had made us all fall in love with the country and its footballing culture, aided also by Channel 4’s Football Italia in 1992, presented by James Richardson. By 1996, those who knew their football, knew Gianluca Vialli. Those who knew their Serie A, knew what Vialli’s arrival at Chelsea meant. My Philips colleague’s expletive exclamation was entirely justified. This was on a par with, say George Clooney joining the cast of EastEnders.

Having just turned 32 when he signed for Chelsea, there were the inevitable sniffy comments from rival supporters that the apparently nouveau riche Chelsea had acquired Vialli on a free because he’d exceeded his usefulness in Italy. Not so. In his time as a player at the club, he went on to score 40 goals in 88 appearances. Two of those goals came in his first season: in January 1997 Chelsea faced Liverpool at home in the FA Cup fourth round. 2-0 down at half time, Hughes and Zola clawed back a goal each early in the second half, even with Chelsea having lost defender Scott Minto to a red card. Chelsea’s comeback was completed by goals from Vialli in the 63rd and 76th minutes. His legendary status at the club was secured within his first few months as a player. Chelsea would go on to win the FA Cup that season, with Di Matteo scoring his famous goal against Middleborough after just 42 seconds of play at Wembley. I was there, and just as Vialli’s arrival had been somewhat other-worldly, to see the club I’d supported since childhood winning one of the greatest trophies in sport, for the only time in my conscious lifetime, was another moment to bewilder. 

When Gullit was sacked in February 1998, Vialli followed the Dutchman’s earlier transition from player to player-manager and took over. His first game in charge was a League Cup semi-final against Arsenal, before which he gave each of his players a glass of champagne in the changing room. Chelsea went on to win 3-1, reversing Arsenal’s lead from the first leg. It’s a small piece of the Vialli legend, but a compelling snapshot of just why his death, announced yesterday, has brought a palpable pall over football, and the Chelsea community.

People talk lovingly about footballing greats when they die, but I’ve never heard of a player as loved or as revered as Vialli. I once let him pass me on the stairs leading down from the East Stand commentary box at Stamford Bridge and felt a genuine presence, even if he was wrapped up in an ostentatiously Italian scarf, coat and hat combination. I’m not easily starstruck (I’ve met plenty of musicians and actors in my career), but to even stand in the same space as Vialli was a ‘moment’, simply because of what he represented in his relatively brief time at Chelsea. 

While the sort of success that came in the Abramovich era was still somewhat beyond the club’s reach when Vialli was in charge, he still took them to the quarter-finals of their first ever Champions League run (which included a 3-1 victory over Barcelona) and another FA Cup trophy in 2000, beating Aston Villa. In total, he won five trophies with the club in less than three years, including the European Cup Winners’ Cup, making Vialli - at 33 - the youngest manager to win a major European trophy. The silverware alone, in my mind, qualifies  him still as one of the greatest figures to have ever played or worked for Chelsea.

In its obituary the club itself wrote: “As soon as he walked through the door at Stamford Bridge, when already a global football star, Luca declared his wish to become a Chelsea legend. It is a target he undoubtedly reached, revered for his work on the pitch and in the dugout during some of the most successful years in our history. Loved by fans, players and staff at Stamford Bridge, Luca will be sorely missed not just by the Chelsea community, but the entire footballing world, including in his native Italy, where he was such an iconic figure.”

These are the words you invariably read when a much loved figure in football passes on. But for me, at least, laden with poignancy. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine someone in the game to endear himself so profoundly to fans and those he worked with. Everyone seems to note how charming he was, funny and, despite his prodigious achievements in the game, even long before he came to SW6, lacking the rampaging ego so many big names in the sport seem to possess today. His likeability, amongst the Chelsea fanbase, was enhanced by his wholesale embrace of London and the sense of Italian style he brought to it. For years I’ve worn black V-neck sweaters purely because Vialli did.

Nothing at Chelsea lasts forever, and after indifferent performances early in the 2000-2001 season, leading to a strained relationship between Vialli and his players, the club sacked him. The consensus was that Chelsea had, with Gullit and then Vialli, tried and failed with two legends of the game as young player-managers. That said, the approach had still managed to net silverware that had proven elusive since the 1970s. Perhaps, too, in appointing Claudio Ranieri, the club had learned that a foreign perspective and a little Italian charm went a long way.

News that Vialli had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer first emerged in November 2018, but after 18 months of chemotherapy - and out of the spotlight - he was given the all-clear. Still, though, the Italian remained typically modest, telling a TV interviewer in his home country, with remarkable honesty: “I cannot fight with cancer because I would not be able to win this battle, it is a much stronger opponent than me. Cancer is an unwanted travel companion, but I can't help it.” Defiantly, though, he kept going. “I have to go ahead and travel with my head down, never giving up, hoping that one day this unwanted guest will get tired and leave peacefully for many years because there are still so many things I want to do in this life.” 

In 2019 Vialli joined his former Sampdoria strike partner Roberto Mancini in the Italian national set up. But at the end of last year the cancer returned, and he stepped down from his role with the Azzurri. Presciently, in March last year, he’d told a Netflix documentary: “I know that I probably will not die of old age, I hope to live as long as possible, but I feel much more fragile than before.”

Picture: Getty Images

Vialli handled his cancer journey with humility, even devoting a book to it - Goals: Inspirational Stories To Help Tackle Life’s Challenges, a compendium of stories examining the human spirit. Reading it again now, it reflects both his courage and his sense of humour. “Illness can teach a lot about who you are, and can push you to go beyond the superficial way in which we live,” he said at one point.

“I can‘t tell you how good a guy he was,” a visibly moved Graeme Souness told Sky Sports yesterday morning, minutes after the news of Vialli’s death had been announced. Like Mancini, the Scot had played with Vialli at Sampdoria. “Forget football for a minute, he was just a gorgeous soul. He was a truly nice human being,” Souness added. “I went to Italy when I was 31-years-old. He was 20 and he was just fabulous to be around. Such a fun loving guy, he was full of mischief. He was such a warm individual and a fabulous player.“

“I think it’s so typical of him that he kept [his cancer] very private, very personal and he took it on as I’d expect him to take it on,” Souness said. “It was his fight, wanted to deal with it himself, didn't want to burden other people with it.”

Like so many successful sportsmen and women, Luca Vialli was a serial winner. The sight of him celebrating Italy’s success over England in the Euro 2020 final at Wembley brought no pleasure to me as an English supporter, but still brought a smile to my face - a footballing hero revelling in victory. Of course, it’s a sight you see with any sporting endeavour reaching a conclusive outcome, but somehow, the fact that it was Vialli made it more enjoyable. Satisfying, even.

Apart from that fleeting encounter on the staircase at Stamford Bridge, I never met Gianluca Vialli. Why would I have done? When he came to Chelsea he was a near-mythical football God. In real terms he may not have spent all that long at the club, but his death has affected me more than I expected. He didn’t know me, and I didn’t know him, but I feel compelled to make the same statement as did Carlo Ancelotti, Vialli’s former Sampdoria teammate and another effortlessly cool Italian who held the title ‘Chelsea manager’: “Ciao amico mio”.

Gianluca Vialli - 1964-2023

Light side of the moon - Peter Gabriel is back!

Picture by Nadav Kander

To those that believe in such things, the moon is, apparently, a symbol of femininity, a notion loosely related to the fact that the average length of a menstrual cycle matches that of the lunar phases. Thus, many cultures associate the moon with fertility. It’s fascinated Peter Gabriel for many years, even creating ‘The Full Moon Club’ on his website more than 20 years ago as a platform for monthly updates about the singer’s activities. Not that, in the 20 years since, there’s been much to update. 

That’s because Gabriel is a notorious dilettante. By his own admission, he is easily distracted by causes, projects and diversions that take his fancy. That has meant new music over the last two decades has been thin on the ground. Since his last studio album, 2002’s Up, there have been sporadic contributions to soundtracks, compilations, tours on his own and with Sting, but nothing as substantial as a brand new Peter Gabriel album.

To say that the gestation of a Gabriel record takes a while is an understatement. Hope was raised of new material in October 2021 when pictures appeared on Gabriel’s Instagram channel of work going on at the singer’s Real World Studios complex near Bath together with long-term cohorts Tony Levin on bass, David Rhodes on guitar, Manu Katché on drums. It would be another 13 months before Gabriel would announce plans to release a whole new album - i/o - this year, along with a tour.

Fittingly, then, on the day of a full moon, Gabriel has today dropped a new single, Panopticom. Reassuringly, this isn’t another random one-off release (his last, 2016’s I’m Amazing, which was partly dedicated to Muhammed Ali, appeared as merely a promotional tool for a tour, and had been been plucked from storage, having been written several years before). Instead, it is the first release, proper, from the new album, and significantly features Levin, Rhodes and Katché, as well as electronic noodlings from Brian Eno, reconnecting with Gabriel almost 50 years after Roxy Music ‘lent’ him to Genesis to provide “Enossification” to The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway album.

On first listen, Panopticom combines Gabriel’s customary layered approach with a sonic abstraction, building slowly on an electronic bed with an understated vocal that opens out into a rousing second half. Equally customary is that the single is based on some deep conceptual thinking, “an idea I have been working on to initiate the creation of an infinitely expandable accessible data globe: The Panopticom,” Gabriel says in a press release. “We are beginning to connect a like-minded group of people who might be able to bring this to life, to allow the world to see itself better and understand more of what’s really going on.”

Gabriel says the single’s lyrics are part inspired by the work of organisations like Bellingcat and Forensic Architecture, as well as the human rights group WITNESS that Gabriel himself co-founded. 

“Some of what I’m writing about this time is the idea that we seem incredibly capable of destroying the planet that gave us birth and that unless we find ways to reconnect ourselves to nature and to the natural world we are going to lose a lot,” he explains further in the press release. “A simple way of thinking about where we fit in to all of this is looking up at the sky...and the moon has always drawn me to it.”

Each new release from i/o be accompanied by a piece of art. For Panopticom it’s ‘Red Gravity’ by David Spriggs, an artist Gabriel noted for his recurring themes of surveillance. “David does this amazing stuff using many layers of transparencies so you get these strange creations with a real intensity to them,” says Gabriel. “Part of what he does is imagine what art might look like a few years in the future and then try and create accordingly and I think he’s done that very successfully in this particular piece.”

Concepts like these have been a constant for much of Gabriel’s 55-year career, even with his poppier songs, like Shock The Monkey or In Your Eyes. It is what has made him one of the most fascinating - if infuriatingly slow - creative forces in music. Nothing - even the hat-tip to Stax that Sledgehammer was - have sounded like anything else out there, and to that extent his solo work is timeless. However, the paucity of new material over the years has been largely the fault of Gabriel himself and his constant distractions. 

The one-offs and the Scratch My Back/New Blood projects, which saw Gabriel re-record his own songs as well as those of his favourite musicians with an orchestra, have provided moments of interest, but haven’t compensated for the lack of truly original new music, of the depth and richness of his de facto solo albums. Those, too, have been few and far between: his commercial breakthrough, So in 1986, was a fifth studio album in ten years (and the first not to be simply called ‘Peter Gabriel’). But since then there were only two additional non-soundtrack or live albums - Us in 1992 and then Up ten years later.

Pictures: Instagram/itspetergabriel/York Tillyer

Panopticom gives hope that i/o will fill the ever-widening gap since that last album, and my initial take is that it certainly gives reassurance that the work Gabriel has put in at Real World with Levin, Rhodes, Katché and others will deliver another gem which can genuinely be regarded as unlike anything else out there.

Listen to Panopticom via your preferred audio platform here

New Year, new thinking, old problem

Picture: Sky Sports

So I start 2023 with a post about football. Sorry if you were expecting something erudite about rock and roll, but there’s plenty of that in the pipeline, I assure you. It’s just that things need to be said about my football club. And being a Monday, home of the occasional ‘Monday Moan’ (see posts passim), it might as well be now, even if today is only the second day of the new year.

There was hope that the World Cup, which ate through most of the final six weeks of the old year, would allow Graham Potter time to figure out what wasn’t happening at Chelsea. Prior to last Tuesday’s restorative 2-0 win over Bournemouth, the club had suffered three straight defeats in its previous Premier League outings, running up to the tournament in Qatar. Potter had said that he would use the international break to get his head around why. In fairness, it was probably the first opportunity he’d had to fully get under the skin of the team he’d been somewhat parachuted into following Thomas Tuchel’s abrupt sacking in September, barely a month into the new season. That meant Potter had a steep curve to attain, even if it was softened by conciliatory noises from Chelsea’s new owners about a “project” that would give him time. 

The Bournemouth result, which saw goals from Kai Havertz and Mason Mount, with Raheem Sterling displaying a contributory form that he’d barely shown since his summer move from Manchester City, gave some hope that Potter’s pledge before the game, that improvement was coming, would ring true. “We’ve had a challenging time, some ups, some downs, in terms of the previous year which is normal at any football club,” the head coach said during his pre-match comments. “But we want to stabilise, try and improve and make our supporters happy, because we know the last few weeks before the break weren’t nice for us. Results suffered, performances weren’t where we wanted them to be, and we have to do better than that.”

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

The one negative in the Bournemouth result was the withdrawal of Reece James having put in a half during which he’d demonstrated, cruelly, what Chelsea had been missing during his absence due to a knee injury. When that injury occurred again, right in front of the dugout, a collective groan extended around Stamford Bridge. That was just how much difference James had made. If, then, you add his left-sided wingback counterpart Ben Chilwell to the injury list, a picture emerges of why Chelsea have looked pedestrian without the pair, marauding forward to cut in, or providing flank protection to a central defensive trio that includes the 38-year-old Thiago Silva. It’s worth noting that since the start of last season Chelsea have won 82% of the games James and Chilwell have started together, and lost just once. Given that both players have been injured for varying periods of that record, you have to wonder what could have been with them fully intact.

So, move on a few days to yesterday’s New Year’s Day visit to second-from-bottom Nottingham Forest, whose manager Steve Cooper knew exactly where to exploit weakness. The resulting 1-1 scoreline flattered Chelsea with, perhaps, the one bright spot being Raheem Sterling’s long overdue sixth goal out of 17 appearances. Full credit, then, to Cooper for inspiring his side into not lying down. But questions must be asked as to why Potter was unable to eek another three points out of a squad in which the club’s new owners invested an additional £270 million last summer. Word is there’s even more expenditure to come. Money, as we all know, doesn’t necessarily solve problems. 

“I think Potter needs time,” was the conclusion of Graeme Souness after the Forest game. “This is not a squad equipped to go and win big games of football. Their goal difference is plus-two.”. Which raises the obvious question: if not, what does £270 million buy you, then? Not a lot, it would seem. None of Chelsea’s summer purchases have exactly set the world alight.

What is emerging are doubts about co-owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali’s buying strategy, which has appeared more urgent largesse than tactical solution finding. £170 million of that spend went on defenders. By any measure of expectation, Kalidou Koulibaly (a £33 million buy from Napoli), Marc Cucurella (£56 million from Brighton) and Wesley Fofana (almost £70 million from Leicester - and has only made six appearances due to injury), should have made some difference. But, it would seem, no. Koulibaly was meant to resolve the departures of Antonio Rüdiger and Andreas Christensen, both of whose contracts had run down amid dissatisfaction with successive managers, and then exploited the vacuum caused by Roman Abramovich’s forced disposal of the club.

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

Against Forest, Chelsea were exposed at the back. Playing a four, with Koulibaly and Silva flanked by club captain César Azpilicueta and Cucurella, Chelsea looked leaden through the middle, with Jorginho labouring despite loanee Denis Zakaria putting in a decent shift. As wingbacks, Azpiliqueta and Cucurella are no substitutes for James and Chilwell, either in terms of guile or agility. Which means more is expected from the midfield. But here questions must be asked about Jorginho’s viability. In turn, the forward line of Pulisic, Havertz and Sterling look somewhat anaemic, with the American blowing hot and cold (frustratingly, he was outstanding for the USA in Qatar) and the German still unsure of whether he is a false 9 or an actual 9. Hakim Zyech doesn’t seem to have Potter’s confidence as a starting option, despite an outstanding appearance for Morocco at the World Cup. That seemed to merely confirm that he wanted to remain in the shop window, because God knows he hasn’t appeared to be interested in playing for his club when he’s been given the chance.

What this all ladders up to is that Chelsea are, after all that outlay, lacking from front to back. Even if you factor in a lengthening injury list that includes N’Golo Kanté (who surely must be reaching the end of his contract and usefulness, anyway, given that he spends more time on the treatment table these days than a football pitch), the project must surely be about a wholesale blood transfusion rather than more purchases which essentially paper over cracks that have existed in the plasterwork for a long time. 

As one Twitter wag noted yesterday after the draw with Forest, Chelsea have burned through Antonio Conte, Maurizio Sarri, club legend Frank Lampard and Tuchel as managers in the last six years, but some of the same players that engendered their sacking are still on the books. A harsh assessment maybe, but it is perhaps why the appointment of RB Leipzig’s Christopher Vivell as technical director could be the most important signing of the Boehly era (replacing the American chairman himself who’d been fulfilling the role ad-interim). 

Maybe that will stem the apparently naive acquisitions of players like striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, bought in an act of transfer deadline day desperation, presumably in the belief that he could reconnect with former Borussia Dortmund manager Tuchel, only for the coach to be fired five days later. In fairness, Chelsea have been staffing up behind the scenes under the new ownership, especially within its much-vaunted academy, but the attention - and expectation - will always fall on the first team.

And so, we enter another January window. Received wisdom is that player signings at this time of year smack of shotgun wedding, and often end in disappointment (case in point: Fernando Torres). So far, the club has brought in 20-year-old Ivorian striker David Datro Fofana to cover for Armando Broca’s long-term injury, and central defender Benoît Badiashile has joined from Monaco for around £32 million. As is now the custom, Chelsea are being linked with just about every other player who performed with distinction at the World Cup in the belief that the Boehly-Clearlake chequebook contains endless blank pages.

This does bring the spotlight back to Graham Potter. Whether he gets time remains to be seen, but compared to his predecessors, the threat of a P45 isn’t as immediate under the new owners as they had been under Abramovich. But even that doesn’t insulate him. Potter’s challenge - which he hitherto hasn’t encountered in his managerial career - is to turn a squad that still contains Champions League-winning players from only May 2021 back into Top Four competitors. Which on yesterday’s evidence and today’s view of the Premier League table, in which Chelsea sit eighth, seems unlikely.

The impending period will, though, pile on the pressure. Potter’s next two games are against Manchester City - the first, at home in the league, the second, three days later, at the Etihad in the FA Cup. There’s little respite beyond that, either, with a trip down the Fulham Road to upbeat neighbours at Craven Cottage, before returning to Stamford Bridge for Crystal Palace, and then back on the road to Anfield, all before the January window shuts. No wonder fans are anxious. Some have become openly hostile to Potter, though these tend to be keyboard gobshites offering little more than Mauricio Pochettino’s name as an alternative, and who patently haven’t read the situation that the Chelsea coach found himself in when he drove up the A23 from Brighton to his new job in September.

Fresh blood might help - sorry, fresh blood should help - but the bottom line is that Chelsea have too many players who are, to varying degrees, underperforming in seemingly untouchable positions. Some might be doing so because of the players around them, while with others it’s because they simply lack the winning mentality required at the club. 

It’s often said that Chelsea have never been as good as the team that won trophies repeatedly under José Mourinho with a spine of serial winners - and leaders - that ran from goal (Petr Čech), through central defence (John Terry), central midfield (Lampard) to the front (Didier Drogba). The club has, of course, won silverware since that quartet’s retirements, but in its current line-up, it’s hard to identify where the strengths are. Capabilities are there, no doubt, and I’m certainly not suggesting that Chelsea are currently a collection of individuals. But there’s something patently missing.

It doesn’t need to be found immediately, though. A period of purdah from open-top buses might allow the club to re-establish the imperiousness of the early Abramovich era, and the success that had eluded it in the preceding 34 years. The trouble is, success is a very demanding mistress. And a lucrative one, too. Which might tip the weight of expectation on Graham Potter’s shoulders against him in the months ahead.