That was the year that wasn't - my albums of 2020

2020. Where do you begin? No amount of pop froth can compensate for these 12 months just gone, which began with disturbing news of a flu-like virus in China and ended in dystopian misery with mutant strains, the economy in tatters, and families denied the basic tradition of being together at Christmas. I’d like to say that music has been the soothing tincture that eased the stresses and strains of COVID-dodging over this last year, but so many aspects of consuming and enjoying it have been curtailed in the process, whether it was concert going or the simple pleasure of record shop browsing. Even Record Store Day was different, postponed twice and then manifested as three ‘drops’ in as many months that were closer in form to booking an Ocado slot at the beginning of lockdown than buying music. All this doesn’t, either, take into account the releases and tours that were cancelled or postponed. 

However, that gloomy assessment belies the fact that there was, as in any ‘normal’ year, plenty of new material to enjoy, a lot of it recorded defiantly, stoically, resourcefully in home studios and bedrooms, as virtual house arrest both focused creativity as well as a well-I-may-as-well-do-something work ethic. By the same token, as we took to engaging our families and colleagues alike via FaceTime, Zoom and Teams, musicians - denied live audiences - switched to home performances. Probably the ultimate example of this was the Global Citizen One World: Together At Home telethon in April, which even managed to pull together the Rolling Stones in their respective living rooms for a virtual gig which, given the technical complexities of playing instruments in time via Internet connections, worked surprisingly well. 

Invention was everywhere, as those at every strata of the pop music economy eked out livings through webcams, some effectively singing for their suppers via Facebook, like Peter Bruntnell gigging from his front room in Devon, while Duran Duran’s John Taylor and Pink Floyd alumn Guy Pratt gave masterclasses in bass playing via YouTube. Arguably, Tim Burgess won the zeitgeist stakes, as his Lockdown Listening Parties on Twitter became the must-join musical commune, in lieu of gatherings like Glastonbury. 

You could, however be easily fooled into thinking that 2020 was a year without light, but that wouldn’t be entirely right. Even with the relentless nature of home imprisonment, self-isolation, distancing, shielding, quarantine and all the other curtailments of social normality, music has been a constant. Rarely has there not been something new or re-released to grace the turntable or CD player, which means that there’s still plenty to pack into this year’s list of the best listens. So here goes:

Reissues

I’m opening with the heritage trail because there’s been no shortage of archived albums repackaged and reissued, especially with audiophile temptations like 180g vinyl and, increasingly, coloured vinyl to make them that much more alluring to magpies like me. Thus, Coldplay celebrated the 20th anniversary of still their best album, Parachutes, with a yellow (geddit?) edition. There were reissues of live recordings, too - one of my weaknesses - in particular, Peter Gabriel putting out four of his engrossing performance albums with new sonics and higher-definition vinyl, while Pink Floyd polished up their Delicate Sound Of Thunder double live album with additional tracks and a very noticeable upgrade to the audio. An honourable mention should be made, here, for The Blue Nile, who completed their programme of remastering and reissuing their four studio albums with 2004’s High, nicely tarted up and with four extra tracks. David Bowie posthumously commenced the process of releasing live albums from his underrated 1990s tours, demonstrating further what an untouchable music god he always was. I won’t dwell more here as January is shaping up to be Bowie Month on this blog. Likewise, the Rolling Stones’ deluxe edition of Goats Head Soup proved what a worthy follow-up to Exile On Main Street it was, despite forever being in its shadow. And the fact that one of the package options came with a double live album was an absolute bonus, albeit one which came with the now expected Stones premium. 

However, the accolade for Reissue Of The Year goes by a very long chalk to Tom Petty’s Wildflowers & All The Rest, a lovingly-curated collection that includes his “incomplete” Wildflowers album, the tracks he’d originally wanted to include as a double-disc release, live versions and acoustic home demos that are like listening to a whole new album in their own right (the All The Rest elements). Put together by Petty’s widow, daughters and various associates, it’s a heartwarming tribute as much as a platform to reassess one of rock’s most understated figures.

New albums

10 - Bob Dylan: Rough And Rowdy Ways

An unexpected entry in this year’s albums list for the simple fact that I’ve never been that much of a fan of His Bobness. That might sound like sacrilege to some, and incredulous to others, but somehow Dylan’s deification has always passed me by. So what brought me to the 79-year-old’s latest release was, largely, a classic case of FOMO. Acts in their late 70s - no matter what their provenance - are not expected to turn in anything other than novelties, especially when that provenance is, by reputation, some of the most influential records of the rock and pop era. But being the sucker that I am to mob mentality, the universal acclaim that Rough And Rowdy Ways met from the music press (and, readers, this is never always the byword for the right opinion) led me to an album that affectionately captured an America that may no longer exist, but to many of us, who still hold an affection for the place, think it does. Thus, Dylan has written a love letter to the music of his upbringing, with hints of jazz, a splash of blues and a heartland appeal captured by a lyrical depth that, I now realise, few beyond him have ever been capable of, let alone at this stage of their careers.

9 - The 1975: Notes On A Conditional Form

If my previous entry indicated my susceptibility to mob opinion, then The 1975's fourth album merely compounds my weakness for being gradually ground down into acceptance of something. In fact, in this list is a reflection of my changing domestic life in 2020, having moved in with my partner and her teenage daughters, and then being slowly drawn into their world. Thus, I’ve succumbed in recent months to Gogglebox (my God, the show we schedule our entire Fridays around, which has proven to be the perfect tonic to this year’s nonsense), MasterChef, Bakeoff and even Selling Sunset and Tiger King. And the 1975, a band one of the teens speaks of nothing else (though her Christmas vinyl list did include Led Zeppelin II and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. She has just turned 16…). Whether it’s from a form of Stockholm Syndrome or something else, the brainwashing has worked. And the nice thing is, The 1975 strike me as old heads on relatively new shoulders. By that I mean that they are, as their name suggests, rooted in rock tradition, but as Notes On A Conditional Form explains, capable of breadth and depth, progressiveness and polished production. Musically you’ll find nods to Americana sitting side-by-side with lush strings, textures of the kind you’ll find U2 producing at their finest along with soulful 80s pop.

8 - Elvis Costello: Hey Clockface

My musical journey has always felt intertwined with Costello’s: as one of the vanguards of the New Wave, he was part of my real time introduction to music, as I reached double figures in the late 1970s. The problem with him, however, has been keeping up. Hey Clockface is, by my count, his 33rd release, and another roll of the personnel dice, having released 2010’s National Ransom under his own name, 2013’s fine Wise Up Ghost was recorded with The Roots, and 2018’s equally enjoyable Look Now brought Costello back together with The Imposters, the band only one member shy of the original Attractions. This year’s solo effort was, much like the previous 32 albums, a melange of whatever styles took his fancy. Some might find it a little scattergun (Daily Telegraph critic Neil McCormick called it, lovingly, a “hot mess”), but that’s its charm. And, hey, you don’t have to like every Quality Street in the box. This apparent rambling free spirit may be down to Costello surviving cancer before embarking on a tour that was subsequently abandoned part-way through due to COVID, confining him to home studio sessions in Vancouver and work on material recorded before the lockdown in studios as disparate as Helsinki, Paris and New York. This might also suggest a restlessness of approaches, and it’s certainly fair to say that Hey Clockface leaps about, stylewise, with punk-like anger alongside Broadway swing, ambient swashes amid jazz, and several stops in between. This might sound dilettante, but it has never bothered those who appreciate Bowie, who to the very end collected disparate styles and musical fashions like a rag and bone man collects junk. One of the reasons it works with Costello is that, regardless of the genre they’re attached to, his lyrics provide the continuity. The same pen that produced such rich words as those on Oliver’s Army, Watching The Detectives and (I Don’t Want To) Go To Chelsea is still on spleen-venting form, with highlights like the partially-spoken Revolution #49, No Flag and even the delightful piano ballad Byline.

7 - Kylie Minogue: DISCO

When I revealed, in a post about The Crown, that I was raving about DISCO (and, as memory recalls, even the new single from Steps), those around me started wondering if I was feeling all that well. After all, Kylie is, was and always has been pure pop, from her Stock Aitken Waterman arrival as the category’s tiniest princess (she is short - I once came close to treading on her in a nightclub, before realising the towering figure of Michael Hutchence glaring over me…) to the present day. She has never strayed far from the glitterball, and with this album she doesn’t so much embrace disco as cling to the sparkling orb like Miley Cyrus astride that wrecking ball. And, yes, it’s unashamed. Cast yourself (or, if you’re too young, your mind’s eye) back to a mid-70s episode of Top Of The Pops, and performances of Stayin’ Alive, Love Train, Never Can Say Goodbye or Disco Inferno, and you’ve landed yourself in the heart of what it says on the tin. Yes, it’s clichéd, but who cares? It’s done with authentic revelry and an earnest celebration - make that the emphasis - of the disco genre, which always was a lot more than the lazy trope trio of “flares, chest wigs and gold medallions”, and more about the combination of intricate jazz-funk rhythms blended with soul music and good times. So you’ll find all of that here. Why? Because Kylie, like most others in this list, wanted to enjoy themselves in lockdown. Just like Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Kitchen Disco, another online hit this year, Kylie embraced the mini disco revival of late by channelling it in her home studio. “It’s difficult even for me to explain,” she said when the album came out. “But even grown-ups need some pure pop fun.” And, so, on DISCO’s 12 songs she hammers home the point with track after track of flagrant, boob tube-wearing, hot pants-clad, blister-inducing heels worth of disco fever. If I said there wasn’t a standout like Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, I’d sound penurious, because they’re all good. Not that good, but not far from, and when you add them all up, you end up with a smile on your face, the likes of which have been in short supply this year. Even if you never move from your favourite armchair to listen to DISCO, let alone actually cutting a rug to it, it’s a pure, unadulterated joy.

6 - Paloma Faith: Infinite Things

Right, so what I was saying just now about Kylie - well, in your face fashion! I’ve had the same epiphany with Paloma Faith. And, I hear what you’re saying, I shouldn’t. Well, I am. In fact I’ve never had much quarrel before with Will Hodgkinson, the Marc Bolan-lookalike rock critic of The Times, who recently branded Faith’s Infinite Things “the same old boring Radio 2 fare”. On this, he’s just plain wrong. While it would never be judged in the same league of critical acclaim as Pet Sounds, Hunky Dory or What’s Going On, Faith's uplifting, infectious pop is a room-filling delight from start to finish. What’s even more remarkable is that it is another product of lockdown, Faith having taught herself how to engineer the record from home, working remotely with a variety of producers and co-songwriters including Ed Harcourt. My gateway to the album came via the promotional route: a big and brassy performance of Gold on Jonathan Ross’s chat show back in November that was infectious enough to pre-order the record for…er…’my other half’, and we, sorry, she wasn’t disappointed when we cranked up the entire thing one Sunday morning. There’s a point I’m trying to make here: musical taste is mostly bollocks. Just because you don’t, personally, like something, doesn’t make it bad. I’ve never been a fan of hip-hop, and won’t be so dumb as to make patronising remarks about it, but that doesn’t make it artistically bad. Especially if hip-hop’s your thing. But I digress. Here, across a dizzying combination of writers and producers, Faith has sat as the spider in a web of her own, pulling together ballsy songs which convey some of her own, noted personal dilemmas through a canvas of genuine soul. Clearly, her vocals are the shining beacon throughout, but the rest - the writing and the arrangement - are never bit part players. “Radio 2 fare” it may be, but it’s an album of radio-friendly tracks that you would have little issue with making the soundtrack of your day…especially if you spend it on the inside looking out at the gloomy goings on in British streets over the last year.

5 - Paul McCartney: McCartney III

There’s a danger that McCartney - like Dylan, a year older - gets on a list like this by legend default. Macca has, it should be said, produced some dodgy songs in his post-Fab career, but this should be read as individual tracks rather than entire albums. Even We All Stand Together has its whimsical value. The trouble is usually venerated acts of the classic rock era still trying to be cool (and the less said of McCartney this week being photographed sporting a 'man bun', the better). McCartney is, it must be said, somewhat beyond criticism, given his contribution to arguably the greatest pop band that ever was. But not even being a Beatle gets you a free pass. Thus, the common argument is that none of The Beatles had a 100% record as solo artists, not even John Lennon, though George Harrison came closest. And as for Ringo…well, bless him. But back to Sir Thumbs Aloft. If you’ve not been keeping up, McCartney III is clearly not his third solo album, but an attempt to reconnect with the simplicity of his 1970 post-Beatles debut (McCartney - recently re-released) and 1980’s McCartney II, which followed his split from Wings. Though III isn’t the result of any similar departure, it shares with both numerical predecessors the arch application of McCartney’s trademark songwriting ease. It’s the craft that sets him apart from just about anyone else in the last 60 years, an accolade that boggles the mind when you think about it. And then the fact that, at 78, he’s still restless enough in “Rockdown” (as the cover sticker reads) to go into his home studio and, by himself and playing every instrument, record an album as mostly good as III is, further testament to that unbelievable talent. I say “mostly” as it has its iffy moments, but to dwell on those would be mean-spirited when the overall product is such a load of Macca fun. And even if he was recording just for his own pleasure, there’s nothing self indulgent. In fact, the indulgence is all ours, as we revel in songs as good as Seize The Day, Deep Down and The Kiss Of Venus. There is also Deep Deep Feeling which, in six decades of writing, is as nailed-on McCartney as you could hope to find without being derivative of anything you’ve heard before. McCartney has never shied away from his silly side, his aforementioned collaboration with The Frog Chorus being the strongest case in point, but even when he’s at his most whimsical - and ever so slightly cheesily so - there is a purity to his writing and delivery of that writing that manifests itself so perfectly in terms of melody, rhythm and engagement. And McCartney III has it all.

4 - Paul Weller: On Sunset

Speaking of Pauls, Mr. Weller. While you might question my sanity for placing him in the same bracket at Kylie or Paloma Faith, in a year that needed the feelgood factor, On Sunset shipped it by the truckload. Weller’s 15th solo studio album continued an output that has averaged one every two or three years since his 1992 self-titled solo debut. Much, I suspect has to do with a restless spirit that appears to charge Weller’s creativity, and also leads to trying something else each time. On Sunset marks another change of course, veering from the folky vibe of 2018's True Meanings, to a decidedly sunny, open-topped outing. Again, unwittingly perfect for the time. It’s an excursion into the blue skies and easy living of 1970s Los Angeles: effortlessly cool, intriguing by turns, melodically pleasing and incongruously soulful for an album crafted in deepest Surrey. While Weller guarded that this wasn’t his “West Coast record”, an affection for California comes readily through, from the woozy funk of the seven-minute opener, Mirror Ball, with its nods to the Isleys' Summer Breeze. It’s there in the wistful thoughts of Old Father Tyme and other stabs of nostalgia. On Sunset even draws on the organ talents of former fellow Style Councillor Mick Talbot, who appears on Baptiste and Village. Earth Beat, while we’re at it, swings like the Council’s Speak Like A Child, with the giddiness of pristine ’80s pop wrapped in modern sonics. Nor is Weller afraid of casting a wide net into his pool of historic reference, calling on Slade’s Jim Lea to provide a rakish violin to Equanimity, one of several Beatley tracks which include the acoustic guitar-driven melancholic beauty, Rockets. It might be tempting to think that On Sunset points to the 62-year-old Weller winding down his career, but with Album 16 already on the sketch pad, he’s showing no signs of a 28-year solo career ending any time soon. Even if, for me, On Sunset is an absolute career high. Maybe, even his best to date.

3 - Tim Bowness: Late Night Laments

By the end of August, we had started to feel freedom again. The sulphurous months since March were over, and we could get out and enjoy life again, albeit while still wearing a facemark. Some of us even got away for a change of scene, in our case, the Isle of Wight, a relatively short hop down the A3 and across the Solent. Up until that point my daily vista had been mostly the view out of our living room window, which isn’t much - mostly hedge. A week’s holiday, with sun and without need for a passport was both fortunate and much needed. Further balm arrived in August in the form of Late Night Laments, Tim Bowness’s collection of nine songs evoking the intimacy - the claustrophobia, even - of late night, atmospheric music consumption via headphones. In the process, Bowness - one of the UK’s most respected singer-songwriters, even if not that well known - delivered an album of timely reflection. While written before The Thing became a thing, it bore some prescience to the events that unfolded as the spring wore on. Bowness even worried that some of the themes it covered, such as hate crime, generational division and social exclusion, wouldn’t be relevant in the midst of the pandemic, but at its release, he realised just how Late Night Laments tapped into the dystopian gloom. That, though, doesn’t make it gloomily dystopian, however. But it is an album of reflective, stripped back consideration, written from the perspective of an individual, late at night, enclosed in a living room, listening to noirish music of the kind John Barry did so well for the Bond and Harry Palmer films. With contributions from Porcupine Tree’s Colin Edwin and Richard Barbieri, as well as production work by Bowness’s good friend and long-term collaborator Steven Wilson, Late Night Laments taps into my own love of textured, less raucous music, drawing valid parallels with the brooding of The Blue Nile, Talk Talk and even Prefab Sprout. Significantly, for me, it recalls the wooziness of One World, one of my favourite John Martyn albums, and its eight-minute Small Hours, which had hitherto been my go-to source for late night listening. With this new work by Bowness, I found a successor.

2 - Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band: Letter To You

Another album recorded just in time is one made as they used to be - effectively as a live performance and over five days. Letter To You came together at the end of 2019 at The Boss’s Colts Neck ranch, a twenty-minute drive the Jersey Shore so steeped in Springsteen mythology, and reunited him with the E Street Band for their first collaboration since 2014’s High Hopes. That’s not a particularly wide gap, but then such is Springsteen’s industry that it was his fourth release in eight years, having made the wonderful Western Stars as a solo artist, along with writing his Born To Run autobiography, and the unexpectedly extended Springsteen On Broadway residency that ran for five shows a week from October 2017 until December 2018. That Letter To You was completed in a week might suggest a man in a hurry but, unlike the 14 complicated months he took to make the Born To Run album in 1975, this one came with ease. Perhaps because it was one that he didn’t overthink. Instead, with a combination of new songs and a few that had been left on the shelf for decades, Springsteen and his trusted posse rattled through the album’s 12 songs. The immediacy of them, too, is not necessarily the record’s appeal: while dealing with personal themes like ageing, the album addresses itself with the joy and liveliness that is so much part of any Springsteen live show. There’s a contentment to the 71-year-old’s songs, but also celebration, such as the brassy Ghosts and its acknowledgement of the simple pleasures of being in the company of the E Street Band itself. Even when addressing mortality on I’ll See You In My Dreams, there is an uplift to even a song about friends who’ve passed on, lifted even further by a stirring guitar solo. Some have argued that Letter To You is Springsteen’s best album. That for me is like picking a favourite child, but it’s certainly up there. And it is certainly at the very top of all the music that has brightened up this shitshow of a year.

2020 Album Of The Year - Doves: The Universal Want

Of the events that stood out in 2019, the one that stood out the most was seeing Doves headline the Teenage Cancer Trust show at the Royal Albert Hall. While it didn’t hint at a new album from the Cheshire trio, it certainly whetted the appetite, a desire sated more than a year later when, after an 11-year recording hiatus, brothers Jez and Andy Williams and vocalist Jimi Goodwin released The Universal Want. Now, absence does make the heart grow fonder, it’s true, but then a gap will only increase expectation levels and, so, the risk of disappointment. Thankfully, nothing would be the case. The Universal Want was just the Doves album I wanted, building brilliantly on its predecessors - Lost Souls, The Last Broadcast, Some Cities and Kingdom Of Rust. All contained a compelling cocktail of industrial energy, club roots and even jazz, coated in a somewhat northern bleakness, much the result of Goodwin’s languorous vocals, Andy Williams’ crisp rhythms and his brother’s jangling, reverb-dripping guitars. The Universal Want, recorded following freewheeling writing sessions in the Peak District, and healthily infused with new avenues of exploration developed during the band’s extended break, is, according to the trio, a “shapeshifting album”, tapping into influences as disparate as Bowie and 1970s soul. With more years under their belts, Goodwin and the Williams bring reflection to the deal, looking back wistfully over the acid house era with the title track, personal tragedies on Broken Eyes, and time’s own passage on Cathedrals Of The Mind. But rather than presenting a bleak picture, there’s a libertarian freshness from the outset, with opener Carousels, and its allusions to seaside amusements and a more innocent time, underpinned by a sampled loop of the late Nigerian drummer Tony Allen. Indeed, Allen’s rhythms provided something of a starting point for the album itself with the Afrobeat-flavoured Mother Silverlake amongst the first songs to emerge from the jams up on t'moors. I Will Not Hide - not the statement on the band’s absence that it might suggest - adds a brightness, with an uplifting poppiness, a carefree simplicity and a notable absence of the guitars of previous Doves songs, and more sonic experimentation in its canvas as a whole. Thinking back for this post, I realised that there are probably few other bands whose albums I’ve listened to as often and as comprehensively as Doves’. Remarkable, really, when you consider they’d only released four until this year. Not wishing to dwell on it, but let’s face it, 2020 has been ugly, and one we’re all happy to see the last of. I have plenty to feel happily rid of. But this album, like so much else over the last 12 months unexpected at their outset, has been a glorious highlight. And my undisputed Album Of The Year.

Running down his dream: Tom Petty’s Wildflowers reissued

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picture: Mark Seliger

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

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

End of the Q

On 8 September, 1986, I started my first proper, grown-up job after secondary school. It required moving from London to the quaint Shropshire town of Ludlow to join the staff of a soon-to-be-launched magazine, LM. Leaving home at 18, just as my school contemporaries were doing the same, but heading off to university instead, I became a staff writer on a publication aiming to tap into the so-called men’s lifestyle market, drawing on the apparent mid-80s young male obsession with music, fashion and culture.

The difference, however, between us and, say Face or i-D magazine - the-then big two - was that they were embedded in Soho, while we were trying to compete from a cattle market town in the middle of nowhere, backed by a publisher best known for computer games magazines for teenage boys. Worse was to come, however. A month after I arrived in Ludlow, EMAP - the stable responsible for the mighty Smash Hits - launched Q, the self-styled ‘Modern guide to music and more’. Founded by Mark Ellen and David Hepworth, who’d been responsible for turning ‘ver Hits’ and Just Seventeen into two of the best-selling magazines on Planet Earth (I’m not kidding - at one point Smash Hits was shipping more than four million copies a fortnight), Q instantly established itself as the magazine to aspire to.

For a start, it had advertising. Major advertising. The sort of advertising that publishers courted more than any other - lucrative, big-spending brands like Coca-Cola and TDK (this still being the nascent years of the Compact Disc). Secondly, Ellen and Hepworth - by now, stalwarts of British music journalism (they were the 'muso' Whistle Test presenters who anchored Bob Geldof’s sweary bit during Live Aid) - had credibility in the music industry. Not that my magazine didn’t: it had drawn writers from the pages of Melody Maker, She and My Guy, plus this former Boots the Chemist part-time shelf-filler and school magazine writer (i.e. 'inexpensive') and was aiming itself at a 17-plus demographic. We had plenty of music, from the Psychedelic Furs and Frankie Goes To Hollywood to Level 42 (my first big-name, Top 40 interview, y’all), but steered consciously into non-music topics, such as an entire issue focused on The Big Scary Thing of its day, HIV/AIDS.

Q, on the other hand, had a different brief. For a start, it was an out-and-out music magazine aimed at the older consumer (CD-buying types in - gasp! - their 30s who, yes, may have been into Dire Straits, but because of the CD, were repurchasing their record collections to experience them with pristine digital sound™). For many of Q's readers, it was about reconnecting with the artists of their teenage years. Hence Q’s first issue featuring Paul McCartney on its cover and an interview with Bob Dylan, with Rod Stewart, Paul Simon, Elton John and Genesis following on the fronts of the next two issues. We might look back upon this now as the emergence of Dad Rock, but as Hepworth himself pointed out in a recent eulogy in the New Statesman to the child he co-parented, Q was as much a reflection of the growing acceptance that the classic rock era was, in fact OK. Not that Q - which publishes its final edition today - was ever going to be a shrine to the hoary and the old. Over 414 issues and 34 years, it evolved into something more than a platform for wistful nostalgia, pushing into a more eclectic reflection of contemporary music, whatever labels that might draw.

Wrapped up in our own launch over at LM, we were, perhaps, somewhat market-ignorant as to what was going on in the very music press we’d all grown up on. Melody Maker, the NME et al had become, at times, a little outré for their own good, like bolshy students from ultra-middle class backgrounds just trying to be edgy. Q did it differently. If it interviewed Mick Jagger - an achievement in itself - it would do so with both reverence but also the gentle, impish fun Ellen and Hepworth had honed at Smash Hits. The writers they drew on - also EMAP regulars - bought into the philosophy. One of the magazine’s greatest features became the monthly Who The Hell Does XXX Think He/She Is? interview written by the genius that was Tom Hibbert. With each issue he’d meet - and ever-so gently rib - contemporary cultural figures of the '80s and early '90s such as Jeffrey Archer, Samantha Fox, Jeremy Beadle or Kate Bush (whom, along with Ringo Starr and Boy George wouldn’t take too fondly to Hibbert’s profiling). He even got Ronnie Biggs and Jimmy Savile, the latter clearly before the world knew better.

Ultimately, though, Q readers wanted to read about music. They were musically literate and, unlike the readership of Q’s junior sibling/forebear Smash Hits, looking for more than what colour a pop star’s socks were (though don’t mock it - such ephemera, alongside song lyrics, was absolutely core to the Hits’ phenomenal success). The core Q audience wanted to read about new albums from The Who or Ray Davies as much as hear them wax on about Won’t Get Fooled Again or Waterloo Sunset. They wanted to read about Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, but also about Hüsker Dü and the Beastie Boys. Pink Floyd going out on tour again mattered as much to them as some whipper-snappers from Ireland coming along with an album called The Joshua Tree. Yeah, whatever did happen to U2?

Humour was one of the key ingredients Ellen and Hepworth imported from Smash Hits. As someone who has, in recent years, spent an inordinate amount of time in their company at recordings of their Word In Your Ear podcast (itself salvaged from the now-defunct magazine The Word), I know what gentle fun they are responsible for. Pop music and pop culture in general is, to them, a thing of bemusement more than intense Guardian-style navel gazing. Thus, the Hits' comedy tagging that bestowed David Bowie with ‘The Dame’ moniker and McCartney as ‘Mr Fab Macca Whacky Thumbs Aloft’ found its way into Q. Such japery very often served to let the air out of the pomposity that rock music often attaches itself to. In his New Statesman piece, Hepworth recalled the unbridled joy at some of Q’s caption writing: “The picture of Led Zeppelin in full flight with Robert Plant howling into the microphone was headlined ‘The Hoarse Foreman Of The Apocalypse’. Of course it was. The one celebrating the unlikely pairing of Toyah [Wilcox] and Robert Fripp, ‘Mr Chalk Loves Mrs Cheese’. Couldn't be anything else.” Plant, for one, would have liked that. The Fripp/Wilcox view possibly less so.

The reason that Q always did well, though, was that it hired the very best music writers. As an aspiring schoolboy hack in the early 1980s, I looked up to the clique of music journalists whose bylines appeared consistently in the NME, Melody Maker or Sounds. Many found their way into Q, like Danny Kelly (now a colossus of sports radio, but editor of the NME when it ran my first ever live review). Later on, Q added extraordinarily entertaining writers like Andrew Collins and Stewart Maconie. Their appointment coincided with that glorious Britpop period, when it became OK to like guitar music again, as Oasis, Blur, Pulp and the like strode the world with a British swagger not seen in a generation. It would, though, still take a while before Q stalwarts like Eric Clapton, Sting, Springsteen and The Beatles disappeared from its covers to accommodate the new breed: The Stone Roses appeared on the front of Q46 in July 1990 (before subsequent editions falling back to the Stones, the Floyd and McCartney), with Suede the next cover stars of their time in February 1993. Q, though, has never since tried to be hipper than you, daddio. In latter years it has found space for Lady Gaga, Ed Sheehan and Jake Bugg, as much as maintaining a healthy recurrence of the Wellers and Gallaghers of this world. And while, under more recent editorship, it has sought to become less dependent on the tried and tested, and even delved into murkier waters than Q readers of my vintage might have found comfortable, it has never tried to be pretentious. As a good music magazine should be, it has always presented new acts and old equally as points of genuine editorial interest.

Strangely, though, it hasn’t been changing musical tastes and listening habits that has done for Q: it’s been - like half the economy - COVID-19. “The pandemic did for us and there was nothing more to it than that,” wrote Ted Kessler, the magazine’s final editor. German conglomerate Bauer, its latest owner, had evidently tried to sell the title, but in these times of waining interest in print media overall, Q has, from today’s final edition, gone the way of so many others. The long-term decline of print journalism is one thing, but so, too, is the future of music journalism. British music journalism came of age in the 1970s, when the NME, Melody Maker, Sounds and others moved the rock era on, embraced punk and New Wave, and then espoused the varieties of pop in the '80s. Sure, it became politicised by the Thatcher era, but then pop became politicised in the Cool Britannia era when Tony Blair hosted Noel G at No.10. Politics was, however, never core to the music press, even when movements like Red Wedge were trying to engage a disaffected youth. The fact remains that the youth today have found other things to obsess over, and it's not quite what direction the 1975 will take with their next album.

Gratuitous plug for a mate of mine who finally made it into Q in 2018

The demise of Q is, then, also a reflection of the demise of music journalism as a must-have in people’s lives. This is where the relevance of a monthly print magazine like Q is questioned. Even though it has, for some time, been readily available as an iPad edition, digital consumption is dropping off. Sadly, the traditions of print journalism - certainly the traditions that inspired me to sit down at a typewriter at the age of 15 - are ebbing away. The attrition is slow, but it is there.

Q, however, appears to have fallen victim to the accountants’ scourge, as publishers continue to find ways to offload venerable, traditional properties that might still have an audience, but not the kind of paying audience they once had (Q sold more than 200,000 copies a month at its peak, it’s circulation in more recent times just above 40,000). "Frankly, [Q] was never really built for the tappety-tappety world of digital," wrote Hepworth in his New Statesman piece. "When somebody put on a record by Aphex Twin, chief proof reader and leading Dylan scholar John Bauldie would look over his glasses and shout, ‘Will somebody get that fax?’ in gleeful emulation of a disapproving adult. That was the magazine’s secret sauce. Nobody was trying to be hipper than thou or younger than they were, and nobody was trying to pretend they liked things that they didn’t." And that was, indeed its charm. It was written for me by people like me. They knew what they liked, but weren’t afraid of reading about something they didn’t know they would like.

It’s here I should mention the reviews section of Q. As entertaining as the features always were, the reviews - actually, the thing that got me interested in music journalism as a career in the first place - were always well considered, evenly scored and mostly respectful. A ’three’, while clearly not a ‘five’, was still not a bad result. But while that remained Q’s constant, over 414 editions, other tides were shifting. The bottom line, then, is that its original brief could never be adapted to changing tastes.

Even after the McCartneys and Claptons had been swapped for the U2s and the Radioheads, and then the latter for increasingly more contemporary names, contemporary sources of information about music had changed, too. The sad aspect of this is that under its last editor, Ted Kessler, Q had moved so far away from its ‘old fart’ origins, that it was providing - for those who were interested - a still indispensable digest of what was on-the-money-sharp in music land. This wasn’t what Q was launched for, but it had evolved over 34 years into something that still represented the very best of music journalism. To quote Joni Mitchell - once as core Q demographic-interest as you could find - “Don't it always seem to go/That you don't know what you've got ’til it's gone.”

Thinking out of the box

Even if sales of physical music formats continue to decline - this year, for the first time, overtaken by subscriptions to streaming services - record companies show no signs of letting up in releasing pricey box sets aimed at, well, the likes of me. 

Amongst the lucrative trips down Memory Lane dangled before us so far this year, we've had packages from the likes of Bruce Springsteen (The Album Collection Vol 2 1987-1996 - a snip at £160 on Amazon right now) and the Rolling Stones' Studio Albums - Vinyl Collection: 1971 - 2016 - 'only' £370... As to whether any of this represents true value for money is a matter of personal opinion. Roxy Music's eponymous debut was re-issued in February as a four-disc 'super deluxe edition', which included a 5.1 surround sound remix by my friend Steven Wilson, and priced at £120. The bulk of that cost, I suspect, was the lavish coffee table book that came in the package. More fool me, you might say.

However, these things continue to appeal through a combination of clever marketing and consumers of a certain age susceptible to that marketing. In some cases, they're worth it: musos are drawn to higher quality vinyl formats, like 180g heavyweight and half-speed releases (delivering a superior experience than when previously purchased on vinyl, cassette or early CDs); completists will view box sets of multiple albums as an opportunity to own a comprehensive package of already-owned albums, even better if live recordings and other content are thrown in too.

This has been the principle behind re-issue programs by Led Zeppelin and David Bowie, the former's reissues being personally curated by Jimmy Page and usually including something to justify the cost. In the case of Bowie, the sets Five Years (1969-1973), Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976) and A New Career In A New Town (1977-1982) have been largely excellent value, chronicling arguably Bowie's richest period of studio creativity, along with live albums providing fascinating snapshots of the artist in varying stages of performance craft. Only a major mastering error with Heroes in the last box set, resulting in Parlophone having to replace copies of the legendary album, put a dampener on the package, which revolved around Bowie's Berlin period.

Now, Parlophone have announced the next release in the posthumous program of Bowie box sets:  Loving The Alien (1983-1988). Released on 12 October with both CD and vinyl options, the package covers arguably the weakest period of Bowie's career, but one which might invite new consideration. Let's Dance is sometimes seen as his last great album from the period between the 70s and 80s, chiefly due to the hit singles it generated, but its follow-ups, Tonight and the ironically titled Never Let Me Down (and its disappointing supporting Glass Spider tour) were never received with much enthusiasm. That said, the new package will contain a "brand new production" of Never Let Me Down, featuring new instrumentation by guitarist Reeves Gabrels and bassist Tim Lefebvre (part of the New York jazz collective who played on Bowie's final album, Blackstar).

Elsewhere, the 11-disc CD box and 15-disc vinyl package will include newly remastered versions of Let's Dance, the original Never Let Me Down, the previously unreleased live albums of the Serious Moonlight and Glass Spider tours, Dance, a collection of original remixes, and an album of rarities, B-sides and soundtrack music, RE:CALL 4. Both CD and vinyl packages will include an accompanying book featuring rarely seen and previously unpublished photos by photographers such as Herb Ritts and Denis O’Regan, as well as notes and comments from contributors like producer/guitarist Nile Rodgers and producer Hugh Padgham.

In general, the Bowie reissue packages have represented excellent value for money. With all, they've engendered the reappraisal of albums that have often been exalted unconditionally...with most coming out as even better than first encountered.

Bowie's death in 2016 quite rightly shocked and saddened a large swathe of music fans, a sudden event as enigmatic in some ways as the musician was in his creative life. Tom Petty's death last year was equally as sudden, and while never considered in the same realm of musical ‘art’ as Bowie, his demise at 66 brought the curtain down on a career as prolific as the British icon.

That is the core premise of An American Treasure, a 60-track collection of previously unreleased Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers material that will be released on September 28. The four-CD box set (along with a cutdown two-CD version) has been compiled by Petty‘s family and former collaborators, and will feature studio recordings, live versions of familiar songs, and alternate versions of other album tracks, selected from Petty’s particularly voluminous outputting the 80s and 90s.

While live versions of hits like I Won’t Back Down and Into The Great Wide Open will anchor interest from more casual buyers, it’s the richness of writing across the previously hidden Petty canon that will make An American Treasure so attractive, complementing affinity with his better known songs with a broad dip into the American heartland that he melodically captured via a fusion of pop, rock, guitar-jangle and country - Florida’s Springsteen if you will.

For Phil Collins, however, such exaltation will probably always go wanting. Some simply loathe him,  a sentiment I've never truly understood about one of the most gifted drummers of his generation. It doesn't take genius to work out that animosity towards him was built in the late 1980s and pre-Britpop '90s when he was, frankly, everywhere. As he explains in his brutally honest autobiography Not Dead Yet, he sort of stumbled into a solo career, but ended up becoming one of only three artists to have sold more than 100 million albums as a solo artist and member of a group (the others being Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney). By his own admission, he became ubiquitous, a familiarity that bred the contempt, especially from the likes of the music press.

But despite the over-exposure, Collins' total career deserves the reappraisal afforded by Plays Well With Others, a four-CD box set also released on 28 September that pulls together a long and surprisingly broad history of collaborations and contributions. Although, oddly, the compilation includes a few of Collins' own solo and Genesis tracks, there is a far more interesting variety over the four discs.

One of the least appreciated aspects of Collins' career is the amount of session work he did, reflected on Plays Well with cuts such as Argent's I Can't Remember, But Yes, Brian Eno's Over Fire Island (Collins was 'loaned out' to Eno as a reciprocation for the keyboard wizard's work on Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway), John Cale's Pablo Picasso, Robert Fripp's North Star and Robert Plant's Pledge Pin. Also included is Intruder, the opening track from Peter Gabriel's third solo album, and which, effectively, invented the 1980s with its distinct "gated reverb" drum sound - famously applied in the legendary fill on In The Air Tonight - and created by Collins, engineer Hugh Padgham and producer Steve Lillywhite after Gabriel requested that drummers on the record did without cymbals.

One of Collins' abiding professional and personal relationships was with my music hero John Martyn.   The pair's respective divorces - and their booze-sozzled mutual support - were the inspiration for Collins' Face Value and Martyn's Grace And Danger albums, and the latter's Sweet Little Mystery (featuring backing vocals from Collins), Could've Been Me, Ways To Cry, Suzanne and posthumous release Can't Turn Back The Years are all included. Pleasing to see Martyn so prominent, and I hope this mainstream exposure leads people to his back catalogue (much as Collins' work with Martyn led me to discover him for myself).

Despite his history as a prog rock drummer, as well as his love of jazz and jazz fusion (both represented in the package), Collins' 1980s pop ubiquity is also reflected - and sometimes surprisingly so. Everyone remembers him drumming on Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas?, but what about Adam Ant's Puss 'N' Boots, Tears For Fears' Woman In Chains and Howard Jones' No One Is To Blame, excellent hits all? Other collaborations, including work with Eric Clapton, David Crosby, Chaka Khan, ABBA's Anni-Frid 'Frida' Lyngstad and Earth, Wind & Fire's Philip Bailey are also faithfully reflected in the package, along with live tracks from the various big name charity concerts Collins became a regular participant in, pre- and post-Live Aid.

In all likelihood, Collins will never catch a break from the too-cool-for-school brigade. This is despite his drumming prowess, first developed as a young boy and which, until physical impairment caused him to stop, should be regarded positively regardless of people's tastes and opinions about Collins the pop star. For that matter, an artist whose career spans everything from progressive rock to jazz workouts with Quincy Jones, deserves the recognition afforded bigger luminaries. It's just unlikely that he'll ever get it.

Your move, Mr. Bond

As friends and family will attest, I have a ridiculous affinity for pop trivia. This only worsens when I find myself in, or perilously close to, a location with a strong pop culture connection. For example, I once spent an afternoon in Los Angeles getting shots of street signs on Mulholland Avenue and Ventura Boulevard just to make a short video set to Tom Petty’s Freefallin’. Later in that same LA trip I risked arrest for 'doing a Hugh Grant' by driving repeatedly through the ‘No Cruise’ zone on Sunset Boulevard, purely - and obsessively - to get the perfect shot of the sun setting in order to match it to Steely Dan’s Hey Nineteen (which begins with the line: “Drive west on Sunset to the sea. Turn that jungle music down, just until you’re out of town”).

In the Seattle suburb of Renton - principle attraction, the factory that makes the Boeing 737 - I spent a wet Sunday morning trying to find Jimi Hendrix’s grave. When I did I was astonished to discover that, at the time (1998), there was nothing more to mark the final resting place of rock’s greatest guitarist than a slab with the outline of a Stratocaster on it and the inscription “James Marshall Hendrix - 1942-1970”. I'm pleased to report that since then the grave has been appropriately ‘upgraded’ with a gazebo that now draws in fans to pay proper respect.

More recently in Paris, on discovering I was living right across the road from an apartment which featured in a pivotal scene in The Bourne Identity, I launched a tour of other locations from the film, mostly to satisfy myself that they were as seen. I’d already set a precedent for such film-nerdishness when I first moved to Paris, realising that I was just around the corner from Avenue d’Eylau, which appears in Thunderball as the HQ of SPECTRE.

Here in Florida this week I am equally doused in film and television trivia, especially due to how much the state has appeared in the Bond films, most notably Licence To Kill and Daniel Craig’s first outing, Casino Royale. Which leads me neatly - if highly tenuously - on to the prospect of whether Craig himself will put in another appearance as 007.

“I'd rather slash my wrists than do another one,” was the somewhat nihilistic statement Craig gave Time Out last year when asked. Even taking a little actorly petulance into account, Craig was reacting to the fact he'd taken such a physical punishing making Spectre. Perhaps, at the time, the prospect of a fifth outing as Bond was too much. Cue a flurry of rumouring and theorising as to who could take over, with Tom Hiddleston instantly installed as lead favourite, purely, it should be noted, on the back of The Night Manager (and despite the fact he would be too fey and too posh). In the same frame came Idris Elba (a good shout, actually), the bloke off Poldark who takes his shirt off a lot, Tom Hardy and Damian Lewis, and sundry other himbos on the Equity register. There were even some creditable attempts by the likes of Gillian Anderson and Emilia Clark to throw their respective hats into the ring.

But, while a female Bond or a black Bond might make for interesting change of direction for the 54-year-old series, it would still be regarded as tampering with the DNA of the most longest-running and lucrative franchise in film history, something producers Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson have had little room to play about with. Whether they or anyone else likes it or not, the mould for the screen James Bond was set by Sean Connery, and Craig apart, the Bonds that have followed - George Lazenby, Roger Moore (to some degree...), Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, have been more or less the same type.


Craig, of course, was the “wrong” Bond, when he was announced: five-feet-ten-inches and blond. And, yet, he has revitalised the franchise. Some would even say that he has finally unlocked the hold Connery’s legacy had over the character. For those of us - and there are many - who found the final Brosnan outing, Die Another Day an overblown and, frankly, ridiculous mess of CGI and ludicrous plot devices, the Craig films have restored Bond to the gripping spy adventures that Connery established in the first place.

“I got the best job in the world doing Bond,” Craig said on Saturday at the New Yorker Festival, sporting blond hair for a new film which recalled Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love. “The things I get to do on a Bond movie, there’s no other job like it,” Craig said. “If I were to stop doing it I’d miss it terribly. I get a massive kick out of it. And if I can keep getting a kick out of it, I will.”

So, is this a change of heart? Well, for one thing, Craig is believed to be contracted to do a fifth Bond film, but such arrangements are never absolute. However, when challenged about his wrist-slitting remarks, Craig joked: “They say that shit sticks, and that definitely stuck,” adding that: “It was the day after filming [had ended on Spectre]. I'd been away from home for a year,” adding that the physical strains of one of film’s most physically demanding roles had taken its toll.” But, not wishing to appear ungrateful, said: “Boo-hoo. It's a good gig. I enjoy it.”

Even if his comments to Time Out were somewhat in the heat - or the pain - of the moment, his quip about “It would only be for the money” may have a ring of truth about it, being reportedly offered up to £120 million to play Bond again. Officially there are no plans for ‘Bond 25’, but given the way these films are made, don’t be surprised if, next month or in December EON productions calls a press conference at Pinewood Studios.

“A Bond movie is by the skin of your teeth,” Craig explained in New York on Saturday. “You get it shot and six months later it’s released. There’s no time for focus groups. You make the movie and then you put it out. It’s one of the most thrilling things as an actor you can do. It’s the way Barbara likes to shoot.”

Ultimately, Broccoli will make the decision on Craig being offered the role again, or whether they move on. “There’s this constant debate about who's going to be the next Bond,” Skyfall and Spectre director Sam Mendes has said recently. “The truth is – and here’s the headline: it’s not a democracy, it's not The X Factor, it's not the EU referendum, and it's not a public vote. Barbara Broccoli chooses who's going to be the next Bond: end of story.”

Craig himself has confessed to being ambivalent about who might take over the Walther PPK if he did decide not to do a fifth Bond film, but has also suggested that the calibre of replacement needs to be high. “You’ve got to step up. People do not make movies like this any more. This is really rare now. So don’t be shit.” One thing is certain, there’s little chance that Bond 25 won’t get made - this is Hollywood, after all, and if anything, the four Craig Bonds have revitalised the series. Anyone taking over now would be stepping in to a golden opportunity. And for Craig himself? He’s only 48. Roger Moore was 58 when he ‘retired’ from the role, although by then it had become preposterous. Craig clearly has a strong sense of his own ability to play he role. It would be nice to think he’s got one more in him.

No Stairway? Denied!

Like finding the source of the Nile, identifying the true origins of pop music is not straightforward. We all know - or should know - that much of what we listen to today shares genetic code with the blues and its derivatives including jazz, rock and roll, country, gospel, R'n'B, soul, hip-hop and, of course, rock.

Identifying how these genres evolved would require a forensic examination of notes, scales, chord structures and all the things absolutely nobody is bothered with as teenagers posing in front of the bedroom mirror with a tennis racquet. What we do know, however, is that with every new iteration of the form as it developed out of spirituals sung in southern cotton fields to become the most important culture of the 20th century, and every teen transplanting his racquet for making an actual racket, that what came before has been infused in what came after.

All this said, it still baffles me how, given that there are only so many notes, octaves, chords and time signatures, we still get lawsuits by one songwriter claiming another has nicked their work. As early as 1954, Johnny Cash was forced to pay Gordon Jenkins $75,000 for the use of lyrics and even melody from Jenkins' Crescent City Blues which it was claimed found its way into Cash's Folsom Prison Blues.

Some cases are less obvious than others, some more so. For example, Jeff Lynne once tried to sue Paul Weller for allegedly stealing the descending guitar riff from ELO's 10538 Overture for Changin' Man. There's little doubt that the riffs in question are almost identical, but does that mean Weller went out of his way to steal from a band you would hardly charge him with as being an overt fan?

I'm no lawyer, but at what point do you prove a deliberate act of wanton plagiarism? Plus, while we're at it, you could argue that Lynne leaned heavily on The Beatles' Dear Prudence, given that the descending guitar motif is the same, just in a different tempo.

There are many, many more I could cite, and it's perhaps not surprising how often The Beatles would figure in such a list. Actually, I would argue that bands as varied as Oasis, The Chemical Brothers and Tears For Fears all dabbing their brushes at the Fab palette could be held guilty of musical pilferage, but then where does homage stop and petty larceny begin? After all, The Beatles themselves were once taken to task by rock'n'roll's pioneer, Chuck Berry, after his publishing company sued that Come Together contained elements of Berry's 1956 song You Can't Catch Me.

It's this assumption that playing the same set of notes, in the same or similar order, no matter how briefly, constitutes plagiarism. I've heard Sam Smith's Stay (not willingly, you'll understand) and not once did I think: "The scoundrel's gone and ripped off Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down" (co-written by Lynne, it should be mentioned). And, yet, Petty and Lynne have now been credited as co-writers of Smith's song because Petty's publishing company noticed "a likeness" between the songs. Even Petty himself didn't believed that Smith had ripped off his song willingly. The matter ended quite amicably, with Petty brushing the issue of as "these things happen". For their trouble, Petty and Lynne are now entitled to 12.5% of Stay's royalties. Not a bad result for one of the best-selling and most-played singles of the last couple of years.

There are, inevitably, examples of too much similarity going on for mere coincidence. Rod Stewart even held his hand up freely when Brazilian musician Jorge Ben took to the courts over a very distinct similarity between the chorus of If Ya Think I'm Sexy and his rootsy 1976 song Taj Mahal. While Stewart stressed that it hadn't been a cynical lift, he said: "Clearly the melody had lodged itself in my memory and then resurfaced. Unconscious plagiarism, plain and simple." Oasis may have fallen into the same trap when The New Seekers' noticed how similar Shakermaker was to their hippy-dippy Coke advertising I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing, a song from Noel Gallagher (and my) childhood. For that, they trousered $500,000.

But then we get to a case of blurred lines - literally. In March last year a California jury concluded that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines was too close - and therefore unlawfully close - to Marvin Gaye's Got To Give It Up, which resulted in the duo handing over $7.4 million to Gaye's family. At stake was the argument over whether Willams and Thicke copied Got To Give It Up notationally, or whether the production, vocals and overall vibe of the track were suitably similar to warrant the charge. Even now, it is still one that can be contested.

So step up Led Zeppelin and Stairway To Heaven, or specifically the distinctive notes picked out of an A Minor chord that, 45 years ago, Jimmy Page turned into the one of the most played riffs in guitar shops on Saturday afternoons the world over (alongside Smoke On The Water, of course). A US judge has ruled that Page and Zeppelin's Robert Plant will have to face a US jury trial over a claim that Stairway's opening chords were stolen from Taurus, a 1967 instrumental by the band Spirit, who toured with the British group at the end of the 1960s, when - it is alleged - they were exposed to the song.

The claim first surfaced in 1997 when Spirit's guitarist Randy California complained about the similarities in an interview, shortly before he drowned while attempting to rescue his son from difficulties in the sea off a Hawaii beach. His trustee Michael Skidmore decided to take up the case against Led Zeppelin, arguing California deserved a credit. Lengthily, this has now led to US District Judge Gary Klausner ruling that a jury could find "substantial" similarity between the sequences of Stairway and Taurus in question, which he called "arguably the most recognizable and important segments" of the songs.

Led Zeppelin have argued that the chords used were so "clichéd" that they did not deserve copyright protection, no doubt drawing on the oft-heard argument that it would be like copyrighting air. However, the judge, showing a certain degree of musical knowledge, ruled that: "While it is true that a descending chromatic four-chord progression is a common convention that abounds in the music industry, the similarities here transcend this core structure. What remains is a subjective assessment of the 'concept and feel' of two works ... a task no more suitable for a judge than for a jury."

And so Case No. 15-03462, "Skidmore v Led Zeppelin et al, U.S. District Court, Central District of California" will open on May 10 with a jury of 12 asked to make thedecision. You can judge for yourself, below: certainly there's a tonal similarity between the songs, and the contested guitar sequences do share the same notes, but that to me would be like arguing that any song in the key of D Minor ("the saddest key of all"), is the same as another. In fact, if anything the Spirit sequence sounds more like Is There Anybody Out There? from Pink Floyd's The Wall (interestingly, many of Roger Waters' songs have been written on an acoustic guitar in this same key).

The issue, then, is always going to be one of subjectivity. The Pharell/Thicke case did at least examine the mechanics of the songs in question, while others have held up their hands to admit to the subconscious at work. But in the case of Stairway? I think the mighty Zeppelin have a very strong case for dismissal on their hands.