One giant leap

Picture: NASA

The timing was perfect. Tuesday night’s partial lunar eclipse on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission blasting off from the Kennedy Space Centre couldn’t have coincided better. It was as if our closest extra-terrestrial neighbour was doing its best to remind us why humans went to the Moon in the first place, given mankind’s lengthy - some might say unhealthy - obsession with it. There is, perhaps, more than a coincidence that Luna, the Roman goddess of the Moon, shares her name with the modern word “lunacy”. Theories have existed for centuries linking the full moon with everything from psychiatric episodes and suicides, to murders and even traffic accidents, along with other tropes about vampires, werewolves and full moons as the cause of eccentricity.

When, on July 20, 1969, the Lunar Module Eagle landed on the Moon’s surface, four days after Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins had left the launchpad, strapped to the 363 feet, 2,800-tonne Saturn V rocket, they weren’t about to simply satisfy ancient curiosity about the Earth’s only natural satellite. The astonishing feat of engineering that the Apollo missions represented were, ultimately, about Cold War brinksmanship, a demonstration of virility in the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. It had begun with the Russians launching Sputnik, continued with the Americans sending up Telstar (enabling, amongst many other more important things, football matches to be beamed across the Atlantic), went further with the Russians launching an unmanned lunar lander, and both countries launching manned missions into Earth’s orbit as precursors to the manned missions to the Moon.

Some will suggest that there was a military objective, that putting boots on the Moon was a demonstration that, with the right capability, the successful nation could land anything, anywhere - humans on the Moon, a nuclear warhead on the other’s capital city. Some even surmised, wildly, that the Apollo landings were a precursor to establishing a lunar military base from which to launch pre-emptive strikes on the rival. And, of course, even with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually walking on the Moon a few hours after landing there, conspiracists have continued to chomp at the bit, arguing that it was all a hoax, filmed in a Hollywood studio, either to save money or simply fulfil some CIA plot to fool the Soviets that the United States had successfully beaten them to it.

While some of these theories sit somewhere between science fiction and further lunar lunacy, history shows that US-Soviet rivalry and paranoia was rampant during the decade in which President Kennedy declared “we choose to go to the Moon”.  By September 1962, when he made that famous speech at Houston’s Rice University, the two superpowers were already on a course towards nuclear conflict. Under Kennedy, South-East Asia was becoming the site of a proxy war; in April 1961 he suffered the political and military ignominy of the Bay of Pigs debacle, the attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. More global tension was to come a few months later with the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles being deployed to Cuba.

Political and social change was afoot in Kennedy’s America, too, and with a growing belief that the country was also falling behind the Russians in terms of technical superiority in outer space, the Rice speech delivered more than just rah-rah: “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people,” he thundered. “For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theatre of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.”

Like the current White House tenant, Kennedy knew full well what what he was doing. In invoking the debate about space presenting an opportunity for mankind, he was lighting the fires of what would become the largest national ego trip in history. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard," he intoned. "Because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.” A year and two months later, Kennedy was dead. Assassinated in Dallas, so we’re still led to believe, by Lee Harvey Oswald. Or forces unknown controlling him. But the blue touch paper had been lit on what is, still, one of mankind’s most dazzling technical achievements.

It is, today, something of a cliche to compare modern technologies with those that put man on the Moon. Digital computing, in modern parlance, was still in its infancy, but the computers used to get Apollo 11 up to the Moon and back were absolutely state of the art for their day. The comparison with the power of the smartphone in your pocket isn't particularly valid. That said, the Moon landings didn’t add anything technologically or scientifically, according to James Burke, the legendary science presenter and journalist (and one of my broadcasting heroes), who was a part of the BBC’s commentary team on the night Eagle landed on the Moon’s surface.

Picture: NASA

“The rocket was made of stuff that already existed, the computer already existed,” Burke told the BBC this week, pointing out that the Saturn V rocket itself was largely the work of Wernher von Braun, the German ‘father of rocket science’ who’d created the V2 missiles that rained down on Britain towards the end of the war. What made it unique was the 400,000 people at 2,500 companies producing five and a half million components for it: “Each one [of those components] had to be absolutely flawless and perfect and wouldn’t break down.” Burke said. “That kind of management is something that NASA invented and I think has changed the world more than anything else.”

The Saturn V was - and remains to this day - the largest and most powerful rocket ever made. It had enough thrust to send 43 tonnes to the Moon - the equivalent of almost four London buses - delivering a payload comprising the command, service and lunar lander modules, along with the astronauts. Sending it all into orbit, however, was only the start of the challenge, however.

Putting anything on the Moon wasn’t a simple task of pointing a rocket at it: as anyone who has seen the wonderful film Hidden Figures will know, leaving the Earth and returning safely requires highly complex mathematics. This task, then, fell to a group of women NASA had employed as ‘human computers’, one of whom being Katherine Johnson, who was the basis of Hidden Figures. Johnson - who initially had to deal with many of the inequalities and prejudices suffered by black women in America at the time - had worked as a NASA technologist since 1958 (and would retire in 1986 having been involved in every mission up to and including the Space Shuttle). In 1961 she’d calculated the trajectory for the flight that made Alan Shepard the first American in space. When John Glenn went into orbit, aided by early mainframe computers, Johnson was again asked to verify the numbers, a condition the astronaut made before he’d step into the capsule. Her story alone is one of the most remarkable associated with the space race. As any rudimentary knowledge of space travel will inform, the easy bit is getting up there. Coming back down, safely and without burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere is the hard part. The work of Johnson and her team was essential in calculating the angle at which the module containing Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins should make re-entry. There were, however, other hazards that risked the astronauts coming back at all. The trajectory calculations also included complex formulas for fuel burn. As it was, when Armstrong the Eagle landed on the Moon’s Sea Of Tranquility there were just 19 seconds of fuel left. “Now that is what you call nerves of steel. It still makes me get goosebumps,” says James Burke.

Over this weekend of anniversary much will be made of the statement made by Neil Armstrong as he stepped down from the landing module: “That’s one small step for [a] man…one giant leap for mankind.” Few humans in all of history will have uttered a phrase so memorable. No human being before, arguably, had been watched by 650 million people live on television making such a giant step forward for humanity. The superlatives were, however, thoroughly justified. There would, by 1972, be six further Apollo missions to the moon - five of them successful (Apollo 13, the third attempt, infamously aborted). And then nothing. Buzz Aldrin has recently ranted about how, while this weekend's 50th anniversary of the first manned mission to the Moon should be celebrated, it is 47 years since the last mission and, apart from NASA Space Shuttle programmes, the International Space Station and assorted probes to Mars and beyond, what has been done to build on the Apollo programme?

Picture: NASA

NASA has launched the Artemis space exploration programme that will include a manned mission to the Moon in 2024, but not everyone has been excited about it, not least of whom being Donald Trump who, in customary fashion, publicly questioned NASA’s priorities, writing in a tweet: “For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon. We did that 50 years ago”. Seamus Tuohy, the lead of space exploration programmes at the Draper institute of MIT, one of NASA’s partners in the Artemis programme, says: “If we were just going to repeat what we did 50 years ago I would agree. But unlike the geopolitical drivers behind the Apollo missions, the new project comes with big commercial goals, including the beginnings of space tourism.” Tuohy adds that space exploration offers more to humanity than the bragging rights that drove the Apollo missions. “At some point the Earth becomes a finite resource,” he explains. “There are things to be done in space that may not be kind to the Earth – natural-resource extraction, refining, cracking – things that we require to maintain our what we do and what we would like to do in the future.”  Scientists believe that any major missions further into space, particularly any involving humans, will need to use the Moon as a base camp. Ice known to exist at both lunar poles contains hydrogen and oxygen, both of which would be used in fuelling a longer distance mission, to Mars, specifically.

Nor has space travel stagnated. Mankind may not have travelled further than the Moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972, but space travel has grown closer to mankind, with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX commercial ventures taking manned spaceflight beyond a small elite with 'the right stuff'. Travel to the Moon could, too, one day be “no more than a commute”, says Draper's Tuohy, “not the main event, but a routine, safe procedure” for mining it to further technology on Earth. That said, a visit to the Moon, in terms of space exploration, is little more than the equivalent of nipping to the corner shop for a pint of milk: bigger objectives abound, not the least of which being a manned mission to Mars, the next closest full planet and one which has, largely due to its proximity, generated an equal amount of fascination. So, unless new Moon landings become part of the preparations for taking humans further into outer space, the value of a new mission remains questionable.

Picture: NASA

James Burke believes there is little political appetite to return to the Moon. “I don’t have any feelings about going back to the Moon or not. [But] I think going back to the Moon is a waste of money,” he says. Mars, however, might be a different proposition: “Where there is [an appetite], or rather where public opinion doesn’t matter, and where there’s loads of money, is China,” he says. “My bet will be we’ll see a Chinese landing on Mars within the next 10 years.”

Whatever Apollo 11 did or, ultimately, didn't achieve, its technological and engineering achievement should not be underestimated. Indeed, you’d place it up there with the invention of the wheel, the mechanisation that launched the Industrial Revolution and, perhaps, the discovery of flight. Scientists will question what the giant leap for mankind actually achieved in terms of scientific progress. Space travel, then, was still in its infancy, and even though in the intervening decades unmanned probes have reached the very edge of our solar system, providing incredible data about the planets immediately around us, the Apollo missions must still be viewed as high watermarks of  advancement. “Many homes still didn’t have an inside toilet or a bathroom in 1969,” James Burke said this week. “Most families didn’t have a car. Yet here we were going to the Moon. The astronauts, with all their gleaming technology, were like people from a different planet. Watching them was like leaping into the future for a few hours.” To roll out an other hackneyed expression, science fiction had become science fact.

Picture: NASA

Parklife

Picture: Twitter/British Summer Time

It was one of those days when it was peculiarly fun to be British. Or English. Or something between the two. The middle Sunday in July, with events conspiring to schedule the Cricket World Cup Final between England and New Zealand at Lord's, the British Grand Prix at Silverstone and the Wimbledon Men’s Final on the same afternoon as the last of six British Summer Time events in London's Hyde Park. For there, 65,000 people - with a notable skew towards women - convened for a guiltiest-of-pleasure line-up consisting of Feeder, Texas, Keane and the Black Eyed Peas on the main stage, leading up to the headline act of one Robert Peter Williams, a "singer-songwriter and entertainer" (so says Wikipedia) from Stoke-on-Trent. 

Being peak Britain, peak British summer, the crowd was largely good natured and progressively sozzled as the extended afternoon's drinking bore on. With no football to cheer on, some male sections of the crowd attempted a chorus of "Cricket's coming home" as news of England's victory just over a mile away in St. John's Wood came through. For others, it was a bonding experience. Mother-and-daughter combos - one couple wearing T-shirts identifying themselves as such - worked their way through bottles of rosé, others daringly sank pints. No surprise that, by the end of the evening husbands were doing sterling work holding some wives upright.

It was, however, enormous fun. This year's British Summer Time line-up has been low on edge and high on entertainment. Over two weekends Hyde Park has hosted headliners Celine Dion, Stevie Wonder with Lionel Ritchie, Barbra Streisand, Neil Young and Bob Dylan, and, last night, Williams, with Saturday night's Florence + The Machine arguably this year's most left field entry. But here lies a point: whether Streisand is your thing or Dylan, the chance to commune with your like-minded music fan is what this sort of thing is all about. I've long admired Glastonbury for the same thing: it's not just or even necessarily about the artistic eclecticism of grooving to pure pop, heavy rock, hip-hop or folk in the same afternoon, it's about the shared experience of having a good time. Music snobbery is left at the gate.

Which will bring me, in a moment, to Williams. Building up to his arrival, Feeder, Texas and Keane did sterling work warming up the crowd. As is often the case at these shows, it's a slowburn thing - many were still queuing for pizza when Feeder played their set, while Sharleen Spiteri (whom I discovered is four days older than me) and band created a pleasing wedding party singalong vibe with feelgood hits like the disco Let's Work It Out, I Don't Want A Lover, Black Eyed Boy and Say What You Want. Keane, often dismissed as being somewhat fey, were anything but, though the contrast between frontman Tom Chaplin's credentials and, say, a Liam Gallagher barely needs highlighting when the singer from the charming Sussex parish of Battle asks if anyone knows the cricket score. Theirs is, like Texas, a crowdpleasing set, prompting the audience half already crammed in front of the Great Oak stage to sway their arms and groove gently to proper festival sing-songs like This Is The Last Time, Everybody's Changing, Bedshaped, Is It Any Wonder? and Somewhere Only We Know. 

I'll confess, of the entire day's line-up, Black Eyed Peas interested me the least. I've seen them before - in Paris, no less - and while their on-stage energy is relentless, their music leaves me somewhat unmoved. That's not meant to be curmudgeonly, just a statement that, even at a pop-driven show like this one, there are different branches of the church that will.i.am, apl.de.ap and Taboo preach at. That, though, thankfully doesn't prevent the crowd getting into pre-Williams mode with some now well-oiled frugging to the likes of Let's Get It Started, Rock That Body, Hey Mama, Just Can't Get Enough, Don't Stop the Party and Where Is the Love?. Half the fun of these outdoor megagigs is people watching, and by 6.30 in the evening there are plenty of people to watch, especially those for whom the well organised refreshment facilities have enabled conversations to open up between random groups of people. The mother and daughter, for example, in front of us who were having a whale of time gabbing away with the lesbian couple who just happened to be parked on the grass next to them.

If there had been any doubt, however, as to who everyone had come to see, the Hyde Park engine stepped up several gears with the arrival of the main event, the main act: Williams. I'd hardly call myself a fan on the same scale as many around us, but the outset of Williams' solo career and his collaborations with Guy Chambers in particular, stood him out from the crowd. Take That did nothing for me, but the infectious Williams/Chambers partnership came closest to the naturally appealing pop-rock that Elton John and Bernie Taupin used to craft. And then Williams went a little LA. He still is, but here in Hyde Park we had a front row seat (well, metaphorically speaking, seeing as my other half and I were occupying a patch of turf some way to the back) on a unique entertainer. Yes, entertainer. That might conjure up some ITV Saturday night game show host who sings a bit, but Williams is blessed with charisma, and a great voice, too. Now, I know you might think I'm now selling out my rock cred, but there is a degree of perfection about Let Me Entertain You, the obvious set opener (even if it does still whiff a bit of The Who). There is also that schoolboy cheek that, even at 45 years old, Williams shows off with every opportunity, from his trademark opening, "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Robbie 'Fucking' Williams", to the roaring amusement of everyone in the crowd. Before he'd even arrived, he'd fanfare himself with The National Anthem Of Robbie Williams, containing the self-depreciation of "Yes he went to rehab, drugs and drink took him low, but would still make Rudebox and gave rap a go".

Parts of the show reminded me of those Seaside Special summer TV extravaganzas from the 1970s, where various light entertainers - some, probably, now doing time - would introduce Showaddywaddy or The Three Degrees, along with The Dad's Army cast from a carpark in Torquay. Thus, the lovely Leslie from Scotland was scooped up out of the crowd and onto a red sofa for Williams to loon around, serenading her with Something Stupid. A man with 'Gay Best Friend' on the front of his T-shirt is singled out for a partially reworked She's The One. And in another Williams concert staple, his pub-singing crooner dad Pete is brought out for a duet of Sweet Caroline, eliciting maximum audience participation on the "bap-bap-BAH!" brass parts.

Millennium, featuring John Barry's gorgeous, sweeping string arrangement from his theme to You Only Live Twice, takes us back to that period of Williams' career when he could get away with anything, including a Bond-themed video, followed by another strong item from the I've Been Expecting You album, the glorious No Regrets, Williams' cathartic flushing of the Take That experience, co-written with Neils Tennant and Hannon. By now, Williams could be doing Three Blind Mice and the crowd would not complain. In fact, the crowd would probably encourage him to sing it, just for laughs. And he would oblige. 

Williams seemingly can get away with it. Covers of Wilson Pickett's Land Of 1000 Dances, Queen's We Will Rock You and the intro riffs of AC/DC's Back In Black on the front end of Kids simply add to the vaudeville. By the time we get to the inevitable ending, Angels (introduced by "I wouldn't go without doing 'the hit'"), Williams has the 65,000 eating out of his hands. It is also this point of the evening, I'd been warned, that he takes something of a liberty with the paying audience by letting them do some of the heavy lifting. No one complains though. Angels is that beautiful piece of anthemic communion that even the hardest-hearted would find difficult to resist a pub-style "...and throo it ALL...!!!!". 

We are now, at this point, near the end. For some, a long journey home without access to public amenities is going to be a very clear challenge. Others are stopped in their tracks heading for the exits when they realise Angels, and the group stage bow thereafter, isn't the end of it. There's just one more, Williams with Chambers on keyboards doing Sinatra's My Way. Somehow, it was the song Robbie Williams was born to sing, not just to lovingly recreate his dad's pub singing act, but to bathe in the many ironies of Paul Anka's original lyrics. Worth it, down to the very last drop. 

Rolling in the deep: Stones still going, 57 years after their live debut

I have, on many occasion, used this platform to write about my fascination with the suburban British roots of some of rock's biggest global superstars, especially Eric Clapton and others who (like me) emanate from the Surrey/south-west London borders. These suburbs also play a part in, arguably, the most enduring success story of London's musical product, The Rolling Stones, who are - as I write - in the midst of their delayed US 'No Filter' tour, heading for New Orleans (along with Hurricane Barry, which is about to batter the Louisiana coastline).

That the Stones are, in 2019, still rolling is all the more remarkable when you consider that they played their first official gig under the name 'Mick Jagger & The Rollin' Stones' on this very day, 57 years ago, at London's Marquee Club, as it once was at 165 Oxford Street.

"It is quite amazing when you think about it," Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine on the gig's 50th anniversary. "But it was so long ago. Some of us are still here, but it's a very different group than the one that played 50 years ago." The line-up that night included Jagger, Brian Jones and Keith Richards, but not Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, who would join the Stones later.

The significance of that first gig is even more remarkable when you consider its chronological place: Jagger and Richards had only rekindled their childhood friendship the previous October, when they famously met on Platform 2 of Dartford railway station, the latter enamoured by the Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry records under crook of the future Stones frontman's arm. By the following spring they were members of the Blues Boys quintet, which later led to their involvement in Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated on the other side of London at the Ealing Jazz club, prompting Jagger and Richards to start jamming with the outfit (which also included Jones, Watts and eventual Stones keyboard player Ian Stewart). The jams led to the formation of a group playing cod covers of Berry and Waters numbers. Given the confected rivalry between the Stones and The Beatles, it should be remembered that the Liverpudlian band had, at this point, yet to sign with George Martin and Parlophone, or even release a single. The 'British invasion' was yet to commence.

By the time the new combo - which featured future Kinks drummer Mick Avory (according to Richards' autobiography Life) - managed to get booked for the Marquee, Jagger was still studying at the London School of Economics and just a couple of weeks shy of his 19th birthday. Like Richards, he was still living at home. The older Jones had migrated to London from Cheltenham and was already living the dream. The gig itself came about by a happy accident: Blues Incorporated were the Marquee's regular Thursday night band, but they'd been invited to do a live BBC radio broadcast elsewhere. Jones used his considerable charm to persuade the Marquee's owner, Harold Pendleton, to let their new group fill in. It was then, with Jones the band's de facto figurehead, that he got in touch with the local listings magazine Jazz News to plug the gig. When asked for the band's name, he caught a copy of Muddy Waters' Best Of album out of the corner of his eye, and saw the track listing for the song Rollin' Stone. A legend - one which remains to this day arguably the most enduring of the rock era - was born.

As for the gig itself, the Stones performed a sweaty 18 songs, all blues covers including Bright Lights, Big City, Kind of Lonesome and Blues Before Sunrise, ending with Elmore James' Happy Home. Jones pocketed six pounds in old money, while the rest took home five each. Even so, for those days and for their age, not a bad wage for a night's work, and the foundation of the money-making machine to which the Rolling Stones would become adept.

When celebrating the gig's 50th anniversary in 2012, Jagger was somewhat uneasy about the landmark: "Part of me goes, 'We’re slightly cheating,' because it’s not the same band, you know," he told Rolling Stone. "Still the same name. It's only Keith and myself that are the same people, I think. I've tried to find out when Charlie's first gig was, and none of us can really remember and no one really knows. But it's an amazing achievement, and I think it's fantastic and you know I'm very proud of it." Richards, ever the contrarian, was less fussed about the anniversary: "...[we] always really consider '63 to be 50 years, because Charlie didn’t actually join until January. So we look upon 1962 as sort of the 'year of conception'. But the birth is next year."

Even so, the now-near 60-year-old band, continuing to bowl over audiences over with their exuberant brand of blues, their showmanship, their sheer corporate might (The Rolling Stones BV is actually incorporated in Amsterdam for reasons, I'm told, of tax efficiency rather than Keith's proximity to the city's delights...). Even so, as they finally kicked off their No Filter tour earlier this week in Chicago - delayed due to Mick Jagger's heart surgery - the band, with a combined age of its core membership of 300, were every bit as dazzling as they've ever been, playing songs like Street Fighting Man, Tumbling Dice, Sympathy For The Devil, Paint It Black and a ten-minute version of Satisfaction with as much vibrancy as a band a quarter their age.

Picture: Facebook/The Rolling Stones

After all these years of mega tours like this one, not to mention the some 24 studio albums they've recorded (with another on the way), plus all the Glimmer Twins aggro and regular splits and spats, it would be easy to look upon the Rolling Stones as some vaudeville act still pounding the boards, six decades on from their first outing. Having seen them four times in my life (with the last one, in Amsterdam 13 years ago one of the best ever), I'd still like to see them one more time. For all their success, their wealth and all that comes with it, the Stones today are still, largely, the blues purists they were on this day in 1962. The Beatles and other contemporaries may have given way to psychedelia and progressiveness - and that's absolutely fine - but the Stones have never wavered from their core interest in 57 years (with the exception of the faux disco of Miss You), With that, they have retained and even reinvigorated their zest for what they do and have always done best. And, even if they have lost original members, inevitably like most of their contemporaries from the 1960s, the Stones today are still a force. A nature-defying one at that.

Modz rool: Paul Weller at Greenwich Music Time

Picture: Simon Poulter © 2019

When your career has produced a current total of 26 original albums (14 as a solo artist, six each with The Jam and The Style Council), and you are Paul Weller, you’ve got a certain licence to do whatever the hell you want to. You could, for example, turn your gigs into a two-hour jukebox of hits and send your exclusively middle-aged punters home satisfied, blissfully karaoked-out with sore throats from reliving their youth club days singing along to The Eton Rifles, Going Underground or Beat Surrender. Or you could play to the political climate and revive the prescient Walls Come Tumbling Down, a song as relevant and needed today as it was during the era in which it was conceived.

But, if you are Paul Weller, you’re 61, you’ve been in bands since you were 14, recording since you were 19, and you have produced 26 studio albums, there’s nothing stopping you opening your set at an outdoor summer's evening show with I’m Where I Should Be, a low-key, somewhat obscure track off 2015’s Saturn’s Pattern. Because you can. And he did.

It's hard to truly tell whether the choice of opening song was Weller's little joke, simply as it's hard to tell if Weller ever does joke. I think he does, and the stony face cracked a number of times during Sunday night's closing show of the six-night Greenwich Music Time festival, delightfully staged in the stunning grounds of the Old Naval College next to the Thames (one of London's busiest filming locations, with episodes of The Queen shot there amid the pristine period surroundings). If the opening number caught the audience off guard, My Ever Changing Moods up next restored the crowd to the familiar.

Now, about the crowd. Unsurprisingly, for an act in the public eye for over 40 years, the crowd is default middle-aged. Dadwear is in copious evidence, along with a high propensity of close-cropped balding pates which, when queuing behind, makes you wonder whether you're standing behind a London cab driver you've ridden in and had to put up with his views on, well, everything. Then there are the Weller uberfans, replete in Ben Sherman and Fred Perry shirts, some sporting feather cuts (one even going the full distance with a magnificent mane of grey hair and a camelhair jacket that the Modfather himself would surely approve of. Or laugh at. Again, I'm not really sure).

Over the course of 27 songs, Weller and his band - which included trusted lieutenants Steve Craddock on guitar and Andy Crofts on bass, augmented on occasion by the brass section of Weller protégés The Stone Foundation (who'd opened for their mentor) - covered a wider gamut of the canon that perhaps many in the audience, especially those who'd come in costume, were expecting. There were the brusque, R'n'B rockers like Woo Sé Mama from 2017's A Kind Revolution and Peacock Suit from Heavy Soul, the fourth in Weller's extraordinary - and continuing - purple patch of solo outings, as well as the reminders of his soulfulness: the sublime Broken Stones appearing in the encore, along with an old live favourite, Curtis Mayfield's Move On Up. Earlier in the set, Weller brought out Leah, his daughter with Dee C Lee, to duet on You Do Something To Me, another perennial of the tender side to his songwriting (which also includes A Kind Revolution's standout, The Cranes Are Back - which I would have loved to have heard reproduced live). There was another surprise appearance with former Style Council compadre Mick Talbot coming out to tickle the ivories on Shout To The Top! A pity Merton's finest couldn't have stayed for more.

When The Style Council split, somewhat ignominiously, in 1989 when their record company blocked the release of their fifth and final album, Weller found himself at a crossroads. It was to be the making of him as a national music treasure. Despite having fronted two of the most successful and intrinsically British bands of the 1980s, his first solo album, Paul Weller set him on a path that would result in the 13 albums of rich variety that have followed, and which were heavily drawn from in Greenwich. Above The Clouds drifted dreamily under the partially leaden sky next to the Thames, while Into Tomorrow reminded of the Britpop template that Weller laid the foundation of. Wild Wood provided an early would-be cigarette-lighters-aloft moment, casting grey-haired memories back to the second solo album that really underlined the creativity that had pent up during Weller's brief sabbatical. Later in the set, that album's Can You Heal Us (Holy Man) provided an energetic example  of an album that contained such stompers as Sunflower, Foot Of The Mountain and Shadow Of The Sun, all of which would have been welcome in Greenwich.

Picture: Simon Poulter © 2019

Weller is nothing if not a prolific songwriter, and the number of albums recorded masks the shere scale of songs he's committed to tape: Mermaids and Brushed from Heavy Soul are performed as a brace, and even Strange Museum - co-written with Talbot - is resurrected from the debut solo album. There was even the rare moment of Weller fluffery, with Have You Ever Had It Blue throwing back to the Bass Weejun-wearing, carefree side of The Style Council and that period of mod revivalism that coincided with all things Soho and The Face magazine that occurred when Julien Temple decided to make a film out of Colin MacInnes' nod to 1950s teenage life in London, Absolute Beginners. Looking back, it was all rather naff, but I loved it at the time.

Weller is, and always has been intrinsically cool, and that's why the association with an era of supposed jazz-cool, revived in the mid-80s with the The Style Council's Cafe Bleu album (with sleevenotes from the legendary 'Cappuccino Kid', itself a nod to Bar Italia and that Soho scene), along with Sade and even Everything But The Girl's Eden album, was something of an affectation. After all, that's what mod culture has always been about, as opposed to rock's somewhat obsessive adherence to its earnest blues roots. Whatever culture Weller was hoping to channel in his younger self, manifests itself now, in his early 60s, as simply extraordinarily good songs. Earnestly performed, perhaps, but an encore that includes the soul classic Broken Stones, The Jam's Start!, the Mayfield cover and Town Called Malice, there is an unlikely communion with the 5,000-strong congregation, sitting in this quintessentially British environment. Apart from the more nailed-on devotees, who'd been able to recall the words to Jam songs like Precious and Man In The Corner Shop, the crowd on this Sunday evening in South-East London had been somewhat subdued, perhaps by a somewhat chillier climate than expected, forcing Weller at one point to enquire of his crowd if it was enjoying itself. Of course it was. This was a master at work. Why wouldn't they?

Frankie's back in town...

Picture: Chelsea FC

Finally. Frank Lampard is back. Chelsea Football Club’s all-time record goal scorer and now its 12th manager in 16 years. "One of the greatest players in our history during his long and illustrious career returns to Stamford Bridge having signed a three-year contract," trilled the club website. Whether he sees out those three years remains to be seen. But certainly at the signing of the managerial nuptials, ex-player and club renewed their vows: "Frank possesses fantastic knowledge and understanding of the club and last season, he demonstrated he is one of the most talented young coaches in the game," gushed Chelsea director Marina Granovskaia in a statement. "After 13 years with us as a player, where he became a club legend and our record goalscorer, we believe this is the perfect time for him to return and are delighted he has done so. We will do everything we can to ensure he has all the support required to be a huge success." No pressure, then.

Never has Chelsea appointed a manager (sorry, "head coach") with so much expectation on his shoulders. Or as much doubt. Twitter, that great touchstone of our time, was predictably binary on the news this morning. Comments from both Chelsea fans and the indifferent were split between the "It's too soon, I hope it doesn't end in tears" view and the "Welcome back Frank - you’re going to be a blinder" (though this being Twitter "your" was often the frequent spelling). Lampard is, at the end of the day, a big boy, and an intelligent one at that. Having seen ten managers come and go during his playing career at Chelsea, he will have seen for himself just how fast the revolving door ejects the dismissed and the failed. He will know what managing Roman Abramovich’s football team is all about, risks and all. But don’t forget, though, it’s a huge gamble for both parties.

Lampard’s appointment, delayed by yesterday's Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp outages (oh, how modern) comes after a month of speculation, rumour and conjecture. Will he? Would he? Would they? Why would they? The former midfielder is stepping into a lion's den only the bravest would enter, taking on only his second job in club management in only his second season in management itself. That first season, at Derby County, left the neutral (or, perhaps, the unromantic) unsure of whether Lampard has the chops...yet. But did Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli have the chops when cuddly Ken Bates promoted them from the playing staff to become managers, winning the FA and League cups respectively? Now, granted, they didn’t last long, either, but longevity in post hasn’t  been a tradition at Chelsea for generations. In fact, in the Abramovich era, longevity probably hasn’t even entered the lexicon, just as long as the manager of the moment delivers Champions League football and maintains a strong challenge on the Premier League title. Even then, that’s not necessarily a guarantee of survival. Just ask Carlo Ancellotti, hired as the model of European managerial excellence, who won the league and cup double in his first season at Chelsea, but only achieved a second place domestically in his second and was fired in a corridor at Goodison Park after the final game of the season.

It is believed that Lampard has received assurances from Abramovich that he will be given time. That might sound empty, but with the club having to accept the two-window FIFA transfer ban, as well as the inevitable loss of Eden Hazard, such assurance represents tacit acceptance that it's time to live within means and make do. Not that with a squad largely unchanged from that which won the Premier League title under Antonio Conte just two seasons ago, plus the wealth of youth talent at its disposal, 'making do' will be a particular hardship. But it won't be plain sailing, either. For a start, Lampard will need to win over the core of the senior players. Coming in as a club legend might help, but Chelsea does have some dead wood in its midst. And the ban means that players like David Luiz and Willian, who'd otherwise offered a choice between a one-year contract (being over 30) and the door, need to be harnessed for what they can still bring. If they can.

Clearly, though, the big opportunity for Lampard is to score a few PR points with the home fans by playing Chelsea's youth prospects. Few, beyond Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Callum Hudson-Odoi, before they were injured towards the end of last season, have had a chance at the club. Chelsea's loan system has looked more like an exercise in husbandry, as the likes of Mason Mount, Fikayo Tomori and Tammy Abraham have been farmed out. Clearly, though, in the case of Mount and Tomori, their time under Lampard at Derby will serve them well. As will the arrival of Jody Morris, Lampard's assistant at Derby, who was drawn from the Chelsea academy with an impressive record. That record, by the way, should also be shared by Joe Edwards,  the 32-year-old youth coach at Chelsea who has played an unsung role in the incredible haul of trophies the club's academy teams have netted in recent years. Lampard's apparent appointment of Edwards to his coaching team is the clearest indication yet that the youth will get their turn. We shouldn't forget, either, that Lampard will also have at his disposal Christian Pulisic, the 20-year-old American "soccer sensation" bought from Borussia Dortmund in January for £58 million, who might well go some way to plug the considerable gap vacated by Hazard.

In his first comments as the new Chelsea manager, Lampard has at least given his younger charges the hope that, finally, they will get their chance at the club. "The path from the academy to the first team is important," the Evening Standard reports him as saying. "I will always have an eye on the academy. I was that young player a very long time ago and the one thing you want is the feeling that the road which divides the academy to the main building is a road you can cross. It has to be there for you. And I think that does come from the top. If young players are performing and they deserve it on merit, then they will be coming to train with us." Here is an oblique reference to rumours that Lampard is planning to integrate the first team with the club's Under-23 set-up, or at least remove some of the clear barriers that separated them (Maurizio Sarri is alleged to have not seen a single youth match during his sole season as club head coach).

"There is a lot of hard work for [the youth players] to do," Lampard added. "I don’t want it to look like an easy road. It is very tough, but I want to try and help them. I'm excited because playing here for so many years, seeing the work put into the academy and on all fronts, from the top, the investment into it and the desire to see it succeed, on the ground, the coaching staff, the people working in the academy trying to bring players through to the first team.

Speaking about Mount and Tomori in particular, Lampard cites their attitude. "You could see they had come through the academy here in how they held themselves, how they trained, their manners off the pitch. That’s what I want to see. I want to dangle the carrot. Can you work hard? Can you compete? Can you get in the team?".

There was a time, several years ago, when a young Frank Lampard had doubts cast over his prospects as a player. Famously, his father, Frank Sr., would drill him at West Ham's training ground, keeping him out after everyone else had gone back to the changing rooms. As a player, he had to put up with a lot, including the ludicrous "Fat Frank" jibes from opposition fans. One thing, though that made him stand out as a player and contributed to his record 221 goals for the club, was his attitude. Lampard has always come across as being somewhat driven, and it's what made him become such an integral part of that title-winning spine of players - along with Petr Čech (also now back at the club), John Terry and Didier Drogba - that made Chelsea an exciting delight to watch. That excitement disappeared in the denouements of Mourinho and Conte's tenures, and failed to even register under Sarri, even if the Italian managed to win both the Europa League and third place in the Premier League.

I know plenty of rival fans still regard Chelsea as arriviste. That's their prerogative. The unwritten rule is that you cheer on your side and boo everyone else. I'm always amused by the "where were you when you were shit?" taunts that come from the away end at most games at Stamford Bridge. Because I always reply, "right here!" (though technically I was right where they are, given that I stood in the Shed End when I first started going to games at the Bridge). Chelsea has come a long way since then, but Lampard today is benefitting from a revolution that began when Glenn Hoddle was poached from the newly promoted Swindon Town. In turn, he attracted bigger international names like Gullit, who in turn attracted Vialli (fresh from lifting the European Cup as Juventus skipper) and Gianfranco Zola. Admittedly, these players were reaching the end of their playing careers, but fans glossed over their ages and bought into the new glamour, finally abandoning the era of Mickey Droy and Ron Harris, and a perpetual lurching between divisions in front of pitiful crowds at home.

While the peak of Hoddle's achievement may have been a Cup Winner's Cup run in 1995 (earned on the back of that 4-0 tonking by Manchester United in the '94 FA Cup Final...), Gullit, his successor, took Chelsea back to Wembley in 1997 and the club's first major honours since a single league title in 1951. 22 years on, and with the not insignificant acquisition of the club by Abramovich, Chelsea can claim one Champions League, two Europa League, five Premier League, seven FA Cup and four League Cup titles in the modern era. Given that haul, Chelsea could, in a way, afford a fallow season or two if it gives a young, inexperienced but locally adored manager like Lampard the space to build a squad based on youthful talent. Yes, we crave success, and even under Mourinho were prepared to sacrifice style for moribund substance, but we also want entertainment. It’s what, ultimately, gets us out in all weathers on a Saturday afternoon rather than traipsing around shopping centres.

Both Gullit and Roberto Di Matteo - scorer of that 47th-second goal at Wembley in '97 - both believe that Lampard can thrive as Chelsea manager, with the Dutchman saying that his lack of experience should not be the disadvantage it might at first appear: "Look, he has done nothing yet as a coach," Gullit told Sky Sports. "[But] they gave me this opportunity as well and we won, so that [inexperience] has nothing to do with it." Di Matteo, Lampard's manager at Chelsea when they won the Champions League and FA Cup in 2012, says no one can predict outright whether the new head coach will succeed, but he'll never know unless he tries. "It's a great fit, but whether it's right now or not, only time can tell," the Italian told Sky. "You can't say it's too early, you have to give people a chance. He's got all the tools and it will make a lot of people happy if he is the next manager." And there's the key: "It will make a lot of people happy". Modern football, and certainly Chelsea, doesn’t do a great deal in this department. Chelsea has elicited plenty of WTF moments in recent years, with ill-advised appointments such as André Villas-Boas, Luis Filipe Scolari and Rafa Benitez (even if he landed the Europa League, his stock at Stamford Bridge was ocean-deep to begin with).

Not every ex-Chelsea name, however, is comfortable with Lampard becoming the boss so soon in his career. Former captain Dennis Wise told Sky Sports that the risks are significant: "From a playing point of view, from a personal point of view, everyone loves [Frank] at Chelsea. But he hasn’t been long in coaching and neither has Jody [Morris] so it slightly worries me a little bit, but if they get it I wish them all the luck, both of them. It’s going to be tough for him but fingers crossed they do the right thing for Chelsea and do well." This from Wise might be the glowing endorsement it looks. But he has a point: "At the end of the day, Chelsea are a Champions League team, they want to finish in the top four," he told Sky. "I think as Chelsea fans you want to be competing at the highest level and winning trophies."

Time will, of course, tell. Lampard certainly has his work cut out, whether it is repositioning N'Golo Kanté back into the seat of midfield, where he should have been last season, getting the best out of the ageing likes of Giroud, Pedro and Willian, integrating Pusilic and the academy stars while, hopefully, aiding the recoveries of Hudson-Odoi and Loftus-Cheek, while at the same time addressing the deficiencies that gave Sarri so much doubt about their viability. Taking the helicopter view, and with a pinch of optimism, these are, actually, quite exciting times at Chelsea. A little different, I grant you, but exciting none the less.

Home on the range - Bruce Springsteen's Western Stars

The Boss has been in a reflective mood of late. Since his last studio album, five years ago, he’s released his excellent autobiography, Born To Run, and ran his one-man stage show Springsteen On Broadway for the better part of 14 months (despite it being only meant to last for a single month), in both, drawing on his blue collar childhood in Freehold, New Jersey, the thunderclap moments of seeing Elvis and, later, The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and his becoming America's most earnest rock star, journeying from Asbury Park pubs to the world's biggest stadia.

Looked at from some angles, Springsteen has always been something of a caricature: the denim, the absence of some of the personality accoutrements of other rock stars, the relentless earnestness and singular attachment to his working class roots but also the musical roots of America, be it folk, country, blues, rockabilly, rock and roll, even straight up pop. It's a guise as distinct as any of the costumes that Bowie adopted, but with The Dame they were always theatrical masks. With The Boss, the blue collar look, the worker boots and workshirts have been a uniform. He has, himself, confessed to some fraudulence, that when he was writing about cars, of riding through "mansions of glory in suicide machines" and being "sprung from cages out on Highway 9" he didn't even own a driving licence. Others have circled his stylistic orbit, be it the late Tom Petty or Gary US Bonds, as well as his associates and band members, like Stevie van Zandt or Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes. Only Bruce has been and remains as distinct a brand, an American brand, if you will, as Levi Strauss, Budweiser or Cadillac.

As he approaches his 70th birthday this September, the nostalgic glances over the shoulder have become more profound, but it’s hard to tell whether Western Stars, his 19th studio album and the first collection of new material since 2014’s High Hopes, casts a winsome gaze over the cowboy culture of Roy Rogers and the early 1950s television the young Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen may have been exposed to in that South Street, Freehold, house, or something else. Because, obviously, over the last five years, the America Springsteen has, in one way, shape or another, eulogised throughout his career, has undergone it’s most dramatic, some might even say disturbing schism in several generations.

Not that Western Stars wavers far from the classic Springsteen narrative. Laid over a painted backdrop of gentle, Bachach strings with infusions of brass and melodies redolent of Glen Campbell, it is a glorious continuation of his American romanticisation, choosing the nation’s western reaches as, perhaps, a symbol of the hope and ambition it once presented when the early pioneers and their wagon trains headed out that way. The irony of this, of course, is that one never got the impression from his book that Springsteen enjoyed his time living in Los Angeles, moving himself and his family there at the start of the 1990s, only to move back to New Jersey at the end of that decade. “I didn’t do a lot of work,” he once told Rolling Stone of his time living in California. “Some people would say I didn’t do my best work.” Poignantly, significantly, he was back living in eastern New Jersey when 9/11 happened, giving Springsteen a sickening view of his America being attacked in Lower Manhattan that Tuesday morning from beyond the Jersey Shore and Sandy Hook Bay. It resulted in The Rising, arguably his best work for a long time.

Picture: Bruce Springsteen

Western Stars can, rightfully, fit into that same bracket. It’s as satisfying a Bruce Springsteen record as he’s committed to tape, a lavish comfort meal, if you will, at a time when there’s so much about the United States that we need comforting about. It contextualises life in the deserts and vast scrublands west of the Mississippi for the challenges they present now, and would have done so for those wagon trains on their quest for the promised land. Some of this is probably more than metaphorical: Springsteen has written and spoken of his struggles with depression, and how family life has provided the perfect counter balance. Chasin’ Wild Horses, for example, may well be one such song that evokes the Wild West’s expanse while bringing it home to Colts Neck, the ranch barely six miles from Freehold where the Springsteen family is now based, and which provided the platform for his daughter Jessica to become an internationally competitive show jumping champion.

Despite this return to almost where it all began ("Born to come back," he joked in the On Broadway show. "Who'd have bought that? Nobody."), throughout Western Stars there’s a longing for freedom, still the core of most culture about the American West. Hitch Hikin’ is the folkiest of the album’s material, a song that builds from acoustic simplicity to one as sweeping as the scenic landscape the itinerant traveller heading west will encounter, telling the story through the eyes of three individuals, each with their own ambitions and dreams. Similarly, The Wayfarer recounts a wanderlust spirit that is, perhaps, as representative of Springsteen’s own displacement in his own land as that of a good yarn about the freedom of the road. There’s a similar sense of adventure in Ulysees, potentially the most personal of all the songs on this album, as it tells of an ageing traveller confronted by his dotage, reflecting on a life lived on the road and concluding that he’s not done yet. I think you can see where the author is going.

Get me to the church on time!

© Simon Poulter 2019

As I was compelled to mention in my recent post about Sarah-Jane Morris's John Martyn project, I hold a fascination - some might say obsession - for the meagre musical connections of the south-west London suburbs in which I grew up. This partly stems from the discovery that Martyn himself was born only a thirty minute walk from the New Malden house where I later sprang to life, a revelation akin to discovering royal blood in my veins.

That discovery gave no indication that there would be more intersections to come. The first - and clearly foremost - came when I met my other half and learned that she not only lived in New Malden (in a house more or less backing on to that in which my grandfather and his siblings were born), but also worked at my first junior school. Bizarrely, too, she grew up in south-east London, where I currently base myself. Then came the revelation that my local Greenwich MP, Matthew Pennycook, also hails from the area and even went to my secondary school, some years behind me, before going up to Oxford (a rare event for Beverley Boys, I can assure you). The next connection in this uncanny sequence, however, was another musical one: via an intimate basement gig one Saturday night in Tufnell Park, over there in that North London, my mate Sean introduced me to the music of singer-songwriter Peter Bruntnell. And, guess what? I discovered that Bruntnell was at Beverley too, albeit a few years ahead of me.

Readers, I will not bore you further (and again) with the other remarkable collection of rock connections to my home area (Clapton, Page, Beck, et al), because Bruntnell is one of two pressing local musical matters to address here. Once described by Rolling Stone, no less, as "one of England's best kept musical secrets", demonstrating customary American understanding of the United Kingdom construct, Bruntnell has, since 1995, delivered a stunning canon of Americana-tinged, bittersweet brilliance. And he's now added to it with a sumptuous new album, King Of Madrid. Incredibly, it's his 13th, which means that the previous 12 have probably passed under your radar over the last 25 years since he released his debut. But if that is so, then you will have missed out on a body of work redolent of one of my favourite periods of musical history, when the canyons of Los Angeles were a vital source of earnest musicianship and hippy ideals, and produced the likes of Jackson Brown, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons and more.

King Of Madrid continues in that rich Americana vein and should, with the right visibility elevate Bruntnell to an entirely different altitude, possessing the kind of hooks, lyrical richness, lusciously strummable guitar work and Bruntnell's gently urgent vocals that wouldn’t be out of place on anything emanating from Laurel Canyon in the late '60s. I’d even go as far as comparing Bruntnell with Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, perhaps not for their denim earnestness, but more for the subtlety of lyrical observation attached to his rooted music. On this release, Bruntnell targets the utter mess Britain is right now, peaking with National Library taking shots at the legacy left behind by David Cameron (including soundbites from the former prime minister), while Memory Hood, London Hood and the album's title track, take clever potshots at the febrile state of the nation.

We stay in the KT postcodes, sort of, and add a very strong touch of Sheffield for the next musical revelation, also brought to me by the aforementioned Sean, whose appreciation of Americana goes unmatched. One spring Sunday morning, seven years ago, Sean sent me a link to a free stream of Richard Hawley's then new album, Standing At The Sky's Edge. Hawley had, like Bruntnell, hitherto passed me by, despite his early Britpop work in the Longpigs and later collaborations with fellow Sheffielder Jarvis Cocker. And yet here, on this particular lazy Sunday morning, lying in bed in my apartment in Paris, I became engulfed completely by Hawley's collection of songs about three families living in Skye Edge, a housing estate in Sheffield's Park Hill district, one of many Hawley has embraced in song. Sky's Edge subsequently turned out to be a new direction, leaving behind the gentle country croons of its predecessors and instead embracing a reverb and distortion-drenched set of psychedelic epics. I listened to nothing else for what seemed like weeks after hearing it. Two weeks after the awful Bataclan attack in Paris, Hawley was the first gig I went to, itself an emotional rollercoaster for everyone inside the Alhambra theatre, barely a fifteen-minute walk away from the terrorist atrocity in November 2015. Hawley's gentle humour and mellifluous songs were, that night, just what Paris needed. A musical arm around the shoulder. Soothing reassurance.

And so it is with a gentler context that the bequiffed and typically double denim-clad Hawley comes to a church in Kingston-upon-Thames, New Malden's 'parent' town, to launch his delicious new record, Further. Noting the "Holy! Holy! Holy!" banner behind him on the apse wall of St. John The Baptist Church (a change of venue from the All Saints Church, which was recently - and surreally - the location of a gig by Jack Bauer himself, Keifer Sutherland), Hawley is soon riffing in his dry South Yorkshire humour, suggesting "Hawley! Hawley! Hawley" as a more suitable slogan.

Even with one semi-accidental F-bomb, he is never disrespectful of the environment, making ample use of the ecclesiastic ambience to enhance the acoustic guitar work of Hawley and his ever-present sidekick Shez Sheridan, as they make their way through an eight-song set that includes new music such as the Beatle-esque Doors, the dreamily shimmering Emilina Says, Galley Girl and its tale of highwayman derring-do, and the utterly winsome My Little Treasures, a song which took Hawley 12 years to write, about two of his late father's drinking buddies. From previous albums Hawley and Sheridan combine wonderfully to produce all-acoustic versions of Sky's Edge and even the glitterball romance of Tonight The Streets Are Ours, returning after the briefest of discreet beer breaks to end with the absolutely mellifluent For Your Lover Give Some Time from the Truelove's Gutter album, a song that, via its bittersweet lyrics, shines the spotlight on Hawley's delicious barrtione.

The set is short and sweet, a promotional opportunity for Kingston's fine emporium Banquet Records as much as a Richard Hawley Gig, but in the church setting, before a largely white middle aged and middle class congregation - Kingston captured in its essence - Hawley wraps yet another soothing arm around the shoulder. The last time was in the tragic aftermath of Paris, almost four years ago. This time, we're in the innocent, perennially untroubling London suburbs, in a residential parish church. The circumstances and location couldn't be more contrasting.

Glad it's all over?

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

So that's it. Barring the Women's World Cup and the UEFA Nations League (no, me neither...), the European Under-21 Championship and the Africa Cup Of Nations, that's football over for another season. Two months off, for those of us who worship at the altar of The Beautiful Game™. For the players not involved in such meagre summer nibbles, it's a few weeks on the beach before pre-season and the whole circus gets going again.

However, before Season 2018-19 turns to dust, some reflection. The general assessment of the Premier League is that the right team - Manchester City - won it. Wherever you stand on clubs funded by bottomless riches, Pep Guardiola's side presented a brand of football that came as close to perfection as you could hope to see. I take some pride in that Chelsea were one of the few teams to beat City in the league (2-0 at Stamford Bridge in December), and that they took the Mancunians to a penalty shootout in the League Cup final. We'll gloss over the 6-0 spanking City gave us in February at the Etihad.

City's awesomeness notwithstanding, this has not been a vintage domestic season. Liverpool, bless them, did a decent job keeping up with their north-western rivals, but the chasing pack - in final order,  Chelsea, Tottenham, Arsenal and Manchester United - appeared at times to be competing with all the dedication of two bald men fighting over a comb. Just imagine if all six teams had really made a go of it? Perhaps there was mitigation: Spurs yet to establish a winning rhythm with their impressive new stadium (or, alternatively, it all went Spursy again); Arsenal still adjusting to life after Arsène Wenger; Manchester United readjusting to life after their frustrating flirtation with José Mourinho, and then finding that turning to a favoured son may not be the answer, either.

Which brings me to Chelsea. Towards the end of the previous season, as it was clear things were turning sour between the club and Antonio Conte, and that yet another managerial departure was inevitable, few knew what lay in store with Napoli's Maurizio Sarri touted as the next Italian in the hotseat at the Bridge. Those plugged into the Italian football jungle drums were hearing exciting things about the unprepossessing Neopolitan, who'd gone from commercial banker to football manager in the lower leagues of Tuscan football, to all of a sudden bringing a brand of football to Napoli that, while not successfully tipping Juventus off the top of Serie A, ran the Turinese giants close. So, building on a tradition of managerial gambles (Villas-Boas, Scolari and even the premature appointments of Vialli and di Matteo come to mind) Chelsea, with their owner somewhat preoccupied with visa wrangles in the UK, punted for the 60-year-old Sarri. If I skip forward a year, on paper you can't argue with third place behind City and Liverpool in the league, a Wembley final and, now, winners of the Europa League. By any token of success, Chelsea have done well this season. It's just that there's not a lot of celebration going on.

Something about Sarri just hasn't connected with the fanbase. Even Conte, when he was starting to sulk, was still routinely serenaded by the faithful singing "Antonio! Antonio! Antonio!". Notably, no such thing with "Maurizio!", a name with an identical syllabic scan. I've never been a fan of fan power: just because we have an elevated view from our seat doesn't give us any authority over a coach who works with his players every single day. What arrogance do we have to suggest that a professional manager knows less than us? On Callum Hudson-Odoi, Sarri was, in principle, quite correct in his assessment that, pre-injury, the teenager had a lot to learn about his game, especially in the defensive phase. Similarly, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, whose muscularly elegant attacking play is the kind that every football fan wants to see, especially from homegrown player, but whose physical rigour over the course of 90 minutes has been guilty of fading too soon. Surely, though, these are things you work on? Surely, there is more upside than down that these players can offer you? By the time they did start to play regularly, it was clear that Sarri was playing them reluctantly and in response to fan power. Sadly, their seasons ended too soon to injury. I hope Sarri didn't feel vindicated.

And then there were the infuriating, zero-sum substitutions: Berkley on for Kovaacic, Kovacic on for Berkley; Jorginho played regardless, the world's best holding midfielder, N'Golo Kante, pushed out to the right of the diamond; Gonzalo Higuain played up front on a Sunday in spite of Olivier Giroud's Thursday night prowess; worse, still, Eden Hazard pushed into the False 9 position in spite of both Higuain and Giroud being available recognised centre forwards. Again, Sarri knew best, or at least professed to knowing best. At risk of sounding a tad mercenary, however, that's not what we fork out hundreds of pounds a season to watch. We want to see the best being the best at what they do. Perhaps if we'd seen fewer of the results like the 6-0 defeat by City or 4-0 away drubbing by Bournemouth, not to mention the niggly two-goal defeats at Liverpool and Everton respectively, attitudes may have been better. Actually, when you look at Chelsea's Premier League performance in totality this season, the results aren't all that bad: Won 21, Drawn 9, Lost 8, Goals for 63, Goals against 39, and 72 points in total. But then compare that with the gulf between Chelsea and Liverpool and City above them - goal differences of +67 for Liverpool and a final points total of 97, and +78 and 98 points for City.

All of which means next season is going to be a tough fight for Chelsea to get back on level terms with their more successful rivals this term. Which begs two questions: how will they fare without Sarri, to be confirmed any day now as the new boss at Juventus (following an "amicable" agreement with the Chelsea hierarchy to move on)? And how will they fare without Eden Hazard, surely to finally get his move to Real Madrid this month, one that most Chelsea fans, I would contest, are respectfully at peace with after seven seasons at the club.

To the first question, I'm sure Chelsea will do fine after Sarri, just as they've been fine following each of the last fifteen managers who've gone after relatively short tenures during the Roman Abramovich era. Of course, there is the almost certain likelihood that whomever takes over will have to contend with the FIFA transfer ban, but then if that means that the club relies on its own resources for a bit, and bloods in some of the myriad youth players scattered throughout the lands as loanees, then maybe the club will get to see what fan loyalty really is about. Sometimes crowd pleasing starts at home. The big question, however, is who gets to manage them, and here's where stomachs begin to cramp up. The appointment of Frank Lampard to run a squad containing homegrown youth would be very attractive to the romantic at heart. But just as no Chelsea fan - and I mean, no Chelsea fan - would ever want to see Gianfranco Zola take the top job, in case he screws up and sullies his legend status at the club, there's a similar squeamishness about Lamps taking on a historically risky job just a single season into his managerial career. No one will deny that Frank is one of the brightest players ever to have graced the game, and will have been applying himself as Derby County manager with customary maturity, but do we want to see one of the greatest players in the blue shirt chewed up and spat out by Chelsea so soon in his managerial career?

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

And, then, Hazard. Resistance to hype might prevent the diminutive Belgian from being favourably compared to Lionel Messi and that ageing showboater Cristiano Ronaldo, but Hazard sometimes does defy the eyes. Sure, there have been plenty of games when he has been demonstrably below par, as if he gets to pick and choose when he turns it up to 11 and when he just ticks over, but just as it has been a privilege to have seen the aforementioned Zola play football, the same applies to Hazard. If he does move on - and who would begrudge him if he did at the age of 28 - we will have seen the sort of mercurial talent that, normally, only gets to play for European club royalty. So the next Chelsea manager will have the inconsiderable challenge of filling an unfillable void. 20-year-old American, Christian Pulisic, might well be that stopgap, though little, really, is known of him, apart from what can be gleaned from his unveiling at Chelsea, in which few believed that he was, actually, 20. Remarkable maturity off the pitch, so let's see what he offers on it.

Every new season brings hope, adventure and expectation, and even with Chelsea's challenges due to the two-window transfer ban (which, despite ongoing appeals, seems unlikely to be revoked) and yet another change of manager, the prospect of young players coming into the squad, and a few dead weeds disappearing, means that when that first August weekend of the new season comes around, there will be a wholesale sense of change at Stamford Bridge that hasn't been there for many an opening weekend. The coming days will, I suspect, be key to that. But perhaps, though, a little holiday from football might do us all some good.

It’s very nice to go travellin’…sometimes

Picture: British Airways

There are plenty of pithy quotes about travel, and I could be somewhat pretentious here by referencing the Taoist saying that "the journey is the reward”, but I’d prefer the kernel of Robert Louis Stephenson's oft-truncated "for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive", which says much the same thing. Because it just isn’t. Fact.

In the last three months I’ve spent a lot of time in the air. In fact, I’m writing this on my way back from Dubai on a trip that comes only a week after returning from a visit to Los Angeles. Ooh, get him! And, yes, I am aware of my extending carbon footprint... And there's even more to come. Over the course of March and the beginning of April I traversed some 7,000 miles of continental Europe on a tour of cities where my company was staging a series of customer events. All but 300 of those miles were conducted by plane, which meant that many - if not most - journeys required dealing with those [mostly] alpha male road warriors who spend much of their working lives plying these routes, hogging the overhead luggage bins and generally acting like utter cocks. Many are quite senior in their companies, spending their days in dull business review meetings, looking at pie charts and spreadsheets and barking out instructions and percentages. In other words, they are used to getting their own way in general, which leads to a sense of entitlement when they board a plane while flashing their high-tier frequent flier status (the coveted ‘gold’ level that opens up the perfumed gardens of first class lounges and the ‘priority’ boarding group - the one that gets them to their seat before the rest of us plebs, taking a provocative age to fold their raincoat neatly into the overhead bin while belligerently blocking the aisle to prevent the remaining 30 rows to fill up). At this point I have to confess that I, too, have tasted this nirvana. I’ll confess to the occasional upgrade that has propelled me to the front of the boarding queue. However, this is a double-edged sword: on the one hand you’re seated smugly with your carry-on wheelie case stowed and a hot towel with which to freshen up, but on the other hand, your remaining passengers troop past with barely concealed contempt, casting you the skunk-eye as they go.

If your only experience of air travel is an annual excursion to a beach somewhere then you’ve actually been spared the worst of it. I don’t mean that to sound elitist, but even enduring passengers who’ve been downing pints of Stella since 4.30 in the morning at the Gatwick bar are a mild irritation compared with the passive-aggression of some regular business travellers. That’s right, the armrest-hogging, stow-my-bag-sideways-in-the-locker, hover in front of the boarding aisle as if that makes actual boarding happen sooner, types who demonstrate my long-held belief that travel really does bring out the worst in people. As I am often reminded, it doesn’t really matter which class you fly in (“we’ll all get there at the same time”). Well, in principle, yes, though that doesn’t stop the pushy types who rush from the back on landing and bundle past those trying to exit their rows like cars filtering into traffic. I know that some of these serial bargers might be desperate to make a connecting flight, but the experience of many of my recent journeys has been somewhat different. “Gits,” we shall call them.

© Simon Poulter 2019

Two of the journeys in my burst of travel in March were by train, and I have to say, they restored my faith in the old locomotive. In the early days of living in Paris I used the Eurostar to get back to London for the weekend. But the prevalence of delays caused by everything from trackside fires outside Gare du Nord to illegal immigrants in the Channel Tunnel rendered the Eurostar anything less than the romantic notion of Jason Bourne-style city-to-city travel. However, recent trips from Zurich to Milan, and Milan to Lausanne reminded me that it's not at all a bad way to travel. Being the Swiss railway, the trains were punctual and comfortable, even in second class. And what better way to travel than watching lakes, snow-capped mountains and quaint chalets passing by the window? And not a single scrap for overhead locker space. Notable, too, was the absence of turbulence, or Storm Gareth which contrived to bugger up my journey into and out of Amsterdam.

So, if you haven’t taken this on board so far, travel isn’t all it's cracked up to be. It’s a refrain I’ve found myself repeating a lot in recent months, as friends have commented on what seems like near-daily Facebook posts of “Simon Poulter is travelling from Airport X to Airport Y”. And there is now some scientific evidence to prove this point. Researchers at the University of Surrey and at Sweden’s Linnaeus University recently published a report into the “darker side of hypermobility”, that group of people - which I suppose must, now, include me - who travel a lot, mainly for work and end up inducing both envy and disdain from their social circles for the never-ending updates which, perhaps, suggest a veneer of ‘jet set’ (in old money) glamour. Underlying this, however, is anything but glamour.

The study found that frequent travel bears three types of risk: physiological, psychological and emotional, and social. The physiological is, essentially, jet lag but unbeknownst to most who succumb to it with their travels is the fact that spending extended hours crossing oceans, continents and timezones speeds up the ageing process and raises the risk of a heart attack or stroke. And that’s on top of deep-vein thrombosis, absorbing strangers’ germs (and not necessarily from airplane toilet seats - your tray table is a proper little germ farm), and exposure to levels of radiation for some frequent flyers that goes well beyond regulatory limits on the ground. Add to that, a lack of exercise and poor diet, and you’ve got a cocktail of lethality.

The view from seat 68K
© Simon Poulter 2019

The Surrey/Linnsaeus study then found that business travel takes its toll psychologically and emotionally, especially when you combine the isolation of often travelling alone and separated from loved ones with work stress (especially managing e-mail and incoming demands while on the move). A study of World Bank employees found that there was a three times-higher likelihood of frequent business travellers making insurance claims about psychological mistreatment. Finally, the study also identified a social impact, in particular, the creation of ‘war brides’. Most business travellers are male (the French hotel group Accor found in a 2011 survey that 74% of Asian business travellers were men), adding pressure on partners who remain at home, especially with children. There was even evidence that friendships suffer, as frequent business travellers prioritise immediate family when they are back on home soil.

Even factoring in that those who travel abroad for work the most tend to be in the upper echelons of the corporate ladder, and are therefore more likely to be compensated for it, being part of the “mobile elite” is not all champagne flutes at 39,000ft. Well, it might be for some, but for the vast majority of us, compressed into an economy class seat by corporate travel policies, and racing to catch connecting flights because the company travel agency found the only routing that was ‘in policy’, spare a thought for the mounting expenses backlog and the utter dirge of truly awful airline food. And take pity on us - well, me in particular - who’ve succumbed to the reality of air travel, which, perhaps more than any other form of organised movement, seems to generate a sense of entitlement, regarding professional and social achievement as that nirvana of over-inflated privilege, the airline lounge, and who regularly put up with the vagaries, the ageing plane fleets and the penny-pinching contempt of pledging unstinting loyalty to one airline over another to get in there. Have pity.