Caught in a trap: the male obsession with music

In my last post I mused about the (almost exclusively) male obsession with music, and how those of us of a certain age and disposition spent their formative years preoccupied with the artwork that enveloped album covers back in the day when vinyl was the actual predominant format, as opposed to its more recent revivalist hipster accessory.

Earlier this year, when I interviewed Mark Blake about his excellent Us & Them book about the Hipgnosis design studio, we concluded that another sub-branch of this obsession was the habit of Biro doodling on school bags (and the undersides of many a school desk lid…) the artistically designed logos of bands like Genesis or AC/DC. To the adolescent us, it was A Thing. 

It’s why our middle aged contemporaries still queue outside record shops at five in the morning on Record Store Day to buy the “limited edition” coloured reissue of an album we already own, probably on several formats. Simply because we have to have it.

One of the greatest portrayals of this umbilical relationship with buying, owning and curating music is High Fidelity, Nick Hornby’s readily identifiable 1995 novel about the emotionally stunted 35-year-old owner of an Islington record shop, who processes the trauma of yet another break-up through the weed-depth compilation of a mix tape. 

Hornby’s chief protagonist, Rob Fleming, engages in a seemingly never-ending series of pedantic arguments with his employees, Dick and Barry, on topics such as whether to store albums alphabetically, generically or chronologically.. “The thing that interested me about people like the characters in the book,” Hornby has explained, “is that what they listen to all the time is incredibly emotive and yet they’re very anal about stuff.”

In Stephen Frears’ masterful screen adaptation of the book, Rob is transported to Chicago (and renamed Rob Gordon) with John Cusack in the lead role. In one of many fourth wall-breaking narratives, he establishes the premise of why he owns the record shop, and who it sells to: “I own this store called Championship Vinyl. It’s located in a neighbourhood that attracts the bare minimum of window shoppers. I get by because of the people who make a special effort to shop here - mostly young men - who spend all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original, not re-released - underlined - Frank Zappa albums. Fetish properties are not unlike porn. I’d feel guilty taking their money, if I wasn’t...well…kinda one of them.” 

Conversations between Gordon and the awkwardly shy Dick and the acerbic counterweight Barry (memorably played by Jack Black in his first major screen role), faithfully appropriate the level of fanaticism chaps will sink into (sample argument: after Rob has included Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit in one of his top five lists, Barry sarcastically counters: “Oh, that's not obvious enough Rob. How about The Beatles? Or fucking Beethoven? Side One, Track One of the Fifth Symphony! How can someone with no interest in music own a record store?”.

The undisputed companion to High Fidelity’s exploration of masculine musical neuroses is Giles Smith’s 1987 memoir Lost In Music, which is being republished today. It’s an autobiographical account of Smith’s own journey through music, from growing up in Colchester (the same London satellite town that begat Blur), to having somewhat unrequited musical ambitions of his own. It is riotously funny in recalling that journey, and the mania Smith - and I suspect plenty of others - become consumed by.

“This book is the story of that voyage - one man’s journey into the world of rock and then back to his mum’s,” Smith explained in the book. “And at the same time it’s a book about what gets into people when pop gets hold of them. And boy, can pop get a hold. It’s pushy like that. You’ve really got to watch it. You invite pop into your house on a fairly casual basis and the next thing you know it’s telling you what to wear and picking your friends.”

A case in point: I was 17 on 13 July 1985, the date of one of the greatest events in musical history: Live Aid. It was an impressionable time. I had no ambition (well, relatively little…) of becoming a pop star myself, but I was easily influenced. I obsessively bought a pair of white dance shoes from the Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden because Bryan Ferry wore the exact same pair at Live Aid. Ditto, the 12-pleat blue-grey trousers Bowie wore during his set. Likewise the bright yellow shirt George Michael wore during the Wembley finale.

But for ridiculous fanboy obsession, it was Sting who left the most lasting memory on me of that day - wearing a baggy white grandad-collar shirt, untucked, with one arm of a pair of sunglasses casually adorning the outside of the breast pocket. Sting also played an all-black Stratocaster (with a 1970s headstock) that day. I wanted to be him, and hunted high and low for, at least, the shirt and accompanying loose-fit linen trousers. I even bought a bottle of Sun-in to get my hair like Sting’s. Of course, it turned orange.

I wasn’t alone. “I really fancied Sting’s job. Great pay: the best pay,” Smith wrote. “Superb hours too (because what does Sting actually do in the long months between albums and tours? He mucks about, I reckon). Homes in Hampstead and New York and Miami and Los Angeles (Barbra Streisand’s old place, in fact). Not that I wanted to make records that sounded like his, but I was certainly on for the lifestyle. Concerts, fans. Pop music. Pop stardom.“

Smith did eventually break out of his suburban Essex confines in the pursuit of pop stardom, as a keyboard player, the result of concluding that he couldn’t play guitar and would therefore be denied the preening glory that all axemen indulge. “Keyboard players seemed to be people like Tony Banks of Genesis, perhaps the least expressive man in rock, whose idea of a crowd pleasing freak-out is to nod gently to himself,” Smith concludes. He also acknowledges that playing one of those keyboards that you wear like a guitar - Herbie Hancock comes to mind - is no substitute, either. “…it made you look like a keyboard player with a bad case of career envy.”

Eventually he experienced some fame with Cleaners From Venus. “For every Simple Minds there are dozens, even hundreds, of Cleaners From Venuses,” wrote the late John Peel in his review for The Guardian of Lost In Music, “bands which, according to the accountants and promo hit squads, have failed. I know about these failures and I respect them. Some of the best music I have heard has been made by failures. This book could equally well have been, say, the Skip Bifferty Story, the Stackwaddy Story or the Bogshed Story, but these bands had no Giles Smith to record the handful of games with the reserves they played before their free transfer to oblivion.”

John Cusack and Jack Black in High Fidelity
© Touchstone Pictures

Lost In Music describes in glorious detail the foundations of his relationship with music, from the High Fidelity-esque arguments over which ranked higher out of T.Rex or Slade, to standing in vain on a Colchester street corner hoping that Marc Bolan might happen to drive past en route to a music festival in Clacton. We’ve all probably done it. But it is precisely this lack of logical thinking that underpins the male obsession with music, and is the frankly hilarious - if worryingly resonant - thread coursing throughout Lost In Music. It is balanced perfectly between anecdotes of being that fan, to being that fan who wants to really be on stage. “You really want to be a rock star, but then you discover that you’re really just a fan,” Smith recently told David Hepworth and Mark Ellen on their Word In Your Ear podcast. 

In the years since Lost In Music first came out, much has changed. Smith, who has written for Q and Mojo, went on to become a brilliant sports columnist in The Times. The vinyl record has been, gone, and come back again. The album sleeve has lost its great significance as it has been reduced to a thumbnail on a streaming app. That said, Smith told Hepworth and Ellen:  “It’s a golden age to be a fan and a listener. When the book came out [in 1987] it was possible to get excited by the fact you could listen to music on a Walkman. And then not long after the book came out you had the iPod which could contain 40,000 songs. Suddenly you have streaming, which brings you everything all the time. In terms of the hardware you use to consume this stuff, that’s changed but we haven’t. People of our generation still cling to the physical format, but I look at my kids and they own nothing - it’s all on their phones. the fetishism has gone. I envy them, as they travel light!”

Yours truly, in front of his alphabetically ordered record collection

Me too. I still want records on the day they are first released. I will still buy albums I’ve owned several times before. I’ve transitioned from owning vinyl and cassettes to CDs, before buying them all again on vinyl, probably for the tactile excitement that still comes from unsheathing a record for the first time and placing a needle on the intro groove.

Years ago I went through a purge of my CD collection, mainly to accommodate a girlfriend’s request to make my then-home a little less of a man cave. Of the roughly 1200 discs I had at that moment in time (fuelled largely by visits to Tower Records branches in the US in the good times when a pound bought you two dollars or so), I had half professionally ripped onto a hard drive before selling them to a second hand dealer in Amsterdam. 

In his book Smith describes this as a form of purification, but also part and parcel of the awkward selectivity and margin calls that come with owning and listening to records. “When I went to the shelf and took down, say, [Stevie Wonder’s] Innervisions, I was just as importantly electing not to play Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy or Venus And Mars by Wings, or any of those albums that had seemed like a good idea at the time, but whose appeal had dwindled with age or the dawning of good sense. I was able to prize the wheat, because of its contrast with the enormous, patiently accrued pile of old chaff.”

All music fans, to varying degrees, apply this arch subjectivity. At its extreme, exhaustingly so. “Liking both Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel is like supporting both the Israelis and the Palestinians,” Rob Gordon informs his estranged girlfriend Laura in High Fidelity. “No, it’s really not,“ she replies. “You know why? Because Marvin Gaye and Art Garfunkel make pop records.” “Made,” he retorts. “Made. Marvin Gaye is dead. His father shot him.” Mansplaining, as much as that comes across (Cusack has acknowledged the masculine toxicity that his character exudes), it does also faithfully capture the inanity that Smith also delves into in Lost In Music, the “emotional librarian” that lies in most men, to quote a Guardian review of the book.

“The book did want to be quite proudly wrong about things, which isn’t often really a strength about rock writing,” Smith said on Word In Your Ear. “I think people like to feel they’re championing a right cause and getting behind the stuff that matters.” Actually, he did. 

Lost In Music is an extraordinary, personal and resonant exploration of the transformative power of music, but also what drives the obsession. For some, that obsession shapes their lives. For others it provides context. Some simply can’t function without music, while others will go to extreme lengths to consume it. That’ll be me, then, someone who once drove for 12 hours on a 900-mile round trip just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers album. You had to be there. You had to be me.

Squaring The Circle - the story of two of the most important figures in rock history

Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell and Storm Thorgerson
Picture: Hipgnosis

To men of a certain age – and it is, almost exclusively men – album covers are, or at least were, a big thing. They probably still are, but it’s actually hard to think of the last time you heard of an album cover making headlines in the age of streaming.

There was a time, though, when an album cover was almost as significant as the music contained on the vinyl within. Earlier this year I interviewed journalist Mark Blake about his book Us And Them, which tells the story of arguably the greatest purveyors of album design, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell – collectively the design house Hipgnosis. Their work between 1968 and 1983 produced, most famously, the artwork for Pink Floyd (including their opus The Dark Side Of The Moon), but also more than 250 sleeves for artists as varied as Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel, Humble Pie, 10cc, Leo Sayer, Genesis, ELO, Black Sabbath, Olivia Newton-John and XTC. “The Hipgnosis story kind of follows the arc of the LP, and the LP ‘taking over’ from the single as the primary focus of bands,” Mark told me. “[The Beatles’] Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a game changer in that sense. So, their career follows the art where the LP was king.”

That career is now the subject of a film by Dutch director and photographer Anton Corbijn, himself responsible for iconic album art of his own, having been most closely associated with Depeche Mode and U2, as well as taking iconic images of everyone from Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen to Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood. 

Squaring The Circle, Corbijn’s debut as a documentary maker (having previously made dramas like Control, about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis and The American with George Clooney), pays homage to trailblazing legacy of Thorgerson and Powell and how they took the concept of cover art - which, for most of the pop era had largely been portraits of the bands - to conceptual pieces of art which complimented or even extended the often progressive, lyrical nature of music they enveloped.

With archive clips of interviews with the late Thorgerson, narration throughout by Powell (who brought the idea for the film to Corbijn) as well as new interviews with the likes of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Roger Waters, Sir Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Noel Gallagher and Peter Gabriel, the documentary expands on the studio’s work amid the context of rock counter-culture.

Peter Gabriel’s first three, Hipgnosis-designed albums

“There was an enormous amount of goodwill towards Hipgnosis,” Corbijn told The Guardian recently about the involvement of many of Thorgerson and Powell’s muses. “People just wanted to make [the film] work. They were generous. Everyone was proud of their albums and the work they had done with them.”

“Growing up in the late ’60s and ’70s, I was obsessed with music and everything connected to it – especially the album covers,” Corbijn says as a pretext to the film, adding that “record sleeves were a huge part of my education. I clearly recall the moment I first saw the sleeve for Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd, and the Peter Gabriel sleeves [whose first three solo albums were untitled save for his name and an iconic image]. They just blew me away and this led me on a journey of discovery towards Hipgnosis, who designed these and some of the most memorable sleeves from that time.”

Without doubt, The Dark Side Of The Moon looms large in that pantheon, with Thorgerson and Powell knowing Pink Floyd since their school days together in Cambridge, before moving to London. “Hipgnosis were unique in these early days and they set the bar very high,” says Corbijn.

Thorgerson was very much the ‘ideas’ half of the duo, while Powell, a photographer, had a more instinctive, snappers approach. When combined with the creative freedom they were afforded by bands and their record companies, the gallery of Hipgnosis’ output deserves a chapter of its own in the history of popular music. “They conjured into existence sights that no one had previously thought possible,” says Corbijn. “They produced visuals which popularised music that had previously been considered fringe, and were at the white-hot centre of the maddest, funniest and most creative era in the history of popular music.”

Hipgnosis at work, 6 Denmark Street, London
Picture: Hipgnosis

Album sleeves, he says, during this period became a force in their own right. “In the ’80s, of course, we got CDs, so the album sleeve sort of deteriorated, and the art with it, Corbijn adds, saying that, as a photographer, he was drawn to Hipgnosis’ work by the images they used. He marvels at how they created works of art: “Before we had all the intricate things we can do now on the computer, they did it with a knife and glue, and pieces of paper,” he recently told Collider. “They made really incredible collages and made the impossible possible.”

As the film reveals, Thorgerson and Powell often went to great lengths - and expense - to produce their album art, notably the images for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album and, of course, the ‘flying pig’ cover for that record’s follow-up, Animals. It’s this ambition that inspired the documentary’s title. “‘Squaring the circle’ means doing the impossible, but it also represents the circular record going into a sleeve, Corbijn explained to The Guardian.

“One of the craziest things - it’s also in the film - is a sleeve for 10cc [for the Look Hear? album],” Corbijn recalled to Collider. “They saw the idea of having a sheep on a couch in a beautiful ocean. So they went all the way to Hawaii, not realising [there were] no sheep in Hawaii, and there were no [psychiatrists’s] couches either. So they had a couch made, and they had one sheep, they found one sheep at the university, and they managed to give it a lot of Valium and shot it.”

While Noel Gallagher quips in the film that album covers represents “the poor man’s art collection”, there’s no escaping the fact that Hipgnosis have produced some of the most recognisable images of all time, with The Dark Side Of The Moon’s light-entering-a-prism seared in culture (receiving no more prestigious a nod to the zeitgeist than being parodied in an episode of The Simpsons). “I think both of them have a complicated relationship with  Dark Side,” Mark Blake told me earlier this year. “It’s not their favourite work, but it is their most famous work. I don't think it's a very simple design, and it doesn’t have the narrative quality to it as Wish You Were Here did a couple of years later, which I think was certainly one of Storm’s favourite Floyd covers.  So, I think they're both a little bit conflicted about Dark Side, really.”

For his film, however, Anton Corbijn had to negotiate around the frail relationships that exist between the surviving members of the band, most notably the fractious dynamics between founder member Roger Waters and guitarist David Gilmour, who joined in 1967 as co-founder Syd Barrett’s behaviour became ever-more erratic. Barrett himself makes a brief appearance in Squaring The Circle, in a poignant moment when Powell recalls an overweight and almost unrecognisable Barrett visiting Abbey Road studios in 1975 during the recording of Wish You Were Here, by then succumbing increasingly to poor physical and mental health. It is, apparently, a moment that continues to move the band’s remaining members.

Hipgnosis images used for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album

“I guess everybody knows they have four managers these days – for every member there’s a manager,” Corbijn semi-joked to Collider with typically understated Dutch humour. “But I guess the love for Hipgnosis overrode all that, and they wanted to be part of this. I mean, they were not in the studio at the same, but they all said yes to it in the end.”

Pink Floyd, in particular, gave Thorgerson and Powell a platform. Their abstract, obtuse and often ethereal concepts led them to other exponents of early ’70s progressive music, like Wishbone Ash’s Argus, which in turn led to Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page inviting Hipgnosis to design the House Of The Holy sleeve (which depicted Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway). That, then, attracted Paul McCartney’s attention, bringing the studio in to realise his concept for Wings’ celebrity-themed Band On The Run cover.

“I hope people see it as a fun documentary, as well as an educational one, regarding that period of music and graphic design,” Corbijn says of Squaring The Circle. However, it also addresses how the Thorgerson/Powell partnership came apart. Having moved to London during the 1967 ‘Summer Of Love’, the duo shared a South Kensington flat, first using university facilities to build their reputation for art (including their debut for Pink Floyd, A Saucerful Of Secrets in 1968) before opening the Hipgnosis studio at 6 Denmark Street - London’s musical mecca known as ‘Tin Pan Alley’. 

But by 1983 - a year after the launch of the CD - Hipgnosis as, largely Thorgerson and Powell (along with often forgotten Peter Christopherson) - they decided to call it a day. Powell addresses this in the film, breaking down in the process, much to Corbijn’s surprise. “I didn’t see it coming,” Corbijn says of the scene. “It was a beautiful moment in the film. He clearly misses Storm terribly.”

Po and Anton
Picture: Anton Corbijn

As much as Squaring The Circle celebrates an era of album covers that broadly paralleled the rock era itself, it also marks the decline of an art form, first by the introduction of the Compact Disc in 1982 (Hipgnosis gave up album design in 1983 and switched to making music videos) and more recently, by the advent of streaming. It’s a point Noel Gallagher makes in the film, highlighting the lack of appreciation for album covers shown by today’s younger consumers, which may be the result of both record companies trimming their artwork budgets, and the thumbnail formats of streaming platforms making the impact of album cover art negligible. “The importance of the record sleeve has diminished,” Corbijn agrees. “In the ‘70s, for young kids there wasn’t much else to spend money on. Yet you had to save up to buy something, so it was meaningful. Now nothing is meaningful because you can get it at the touch of a button.”

Squaring The Circle opens today in UK cinemas and via streaming services. It also be released as a collector’s edition Blu-ray Disc on 7 August.

Arc Of A Diver, my post on Mark Blake’s biography Us And Them can be read here.

Did they learn anything from Caroline?

Three and a half years ago I wrote about “a modern tragedy”, one that shouldn’t have happened. I’m talking about the death of Caroline Flack, who was found dead in her Stoke Newington flat just over a month after she had been charged by police with assaulting her tennis player boyfriend. 

She had committed suicide, a horrendous outcome from a truly sorry story, in which heavy-handed processing by the Crown Prosecution Service, coupled with intense media scrutiny and even more intense social media commentary appeared to compel the 40-year-old - who’d been struggling with mental health issues for several years, despite portraying herself as a bubbly, fun public persona had already been suffering from mental health issues - to kill herself. As I wrote, “Fans blame the press. The press blames social media. Social media blames the press. Everyone is blaming everyone else for Caroline Flack’s suicide. It’s an unholy mess.”

Fast-forward to last Friday, and The Sun’s publication of a story about an unnamed BBC presenter allegedly paying a young individual tens of thousands of pounds for explicit photos over the course of three years, starting when they were just 17. And so began a five-day media firestorm, plunging the BBC into crisis, and launching a frenzy of speculation as to who the “well-known” presenter was. Day-after-day The Sun doubled-down on the story, with other media outlets - including the BBC itself - echoing the reporting with their own. Despite other things going on the world the BBC presenter story led TV news bulletins and dominated front pages. Rishi Sunak couldn’t even fly off to the NATO summit in Vilnius without being asked for his six cents’ worth. The story was, according to Alastair Campbell, what happens when “media culture loses any sense of perspective about a story”. “We have to get a grip on our sense of perspective when these things happen,” he told the BBC itself, pointing out that the frenzied saturation coverage had managed (perhaps conveniently) to obliterate other big stories such as the NATO summit and Boris Johnson's apparent lack of producing his WhatsApp messages by Monday’s deadline for the Covid inquiry.

On Saturday The Sun published further allegations, opening up the BBC’s complaints procedure to scrutiny. By Sunday, the still-unnamed male presenter was reported by the corporation as being suspended while it worked “as quickly as possible to establish the facts in order to properly inform appropriate next steps.” In the meantime, high profile male BBC presenters had to fight a rearguard action of their own to dismiss speculation that the presenter was one of them. One presenter went out of his way to post on both Twitter and Threads that he wouldn’t be appearing on air the next day because he was “looking forward to taking annual leave”, a somewhat absurd statement to say “it’s not me”.

Three more days of speculation ensued, with The Sun and its rivals still not naming the presenter on the basis that they didn’t have any legal grounds to do. Even the young person at the centre of the original controversy said, in a letter to the BBC issued through lawyers, that nothing inappropriate or unlawful happened had happened the unnamed presenter, declaring The Sun’s story as “rubbish”, and even highlighting the fact that the paper hadn’t even acknowledged the individual’s denial on Friday night.

That, though, didn’t stem the media pile-on. By yesterday morning, Jeremy Vine - one of a number of people caught up in the speculation about the presenter’s identity - spoke on his Channel 5 programme that it was time  the presenter named himself in order to spare others from being falsely accused. ”I know the individual concerned,” Vine professed, before magnanimously adding: “I am very worried about his state of mind and what this is doing to him. I know his survival instinct has kicked in and I know he saw what happened to Phillip Schofield, but my God look at the damage to the BBC, look at the damage to his friends, to those falsely accused - and the longer he leaves it the worse it will be for him.”

And then, some hours after it was revealed that the police had decided that “no criminality was identified” out of The Sun’s lurid coverage, the pressure that had been building on the presenter and his family came to a head when Vicky Flind (producer of Robert Peston’s weekly political discussion show on ITV) named her husband - Huw Edwards - as the presenter (confirming what had been known amongst journalists as the media gossip network had done its worst, with less-than-disguised posts on social media). 

“As is well documented,” Flind wrote in a statement, “[Huw] has been treated for severe depression in recent years. The events of the last few days have greatly worsened matters, he has suffered another serious episode and is now receiving in-patient hospital care where he’ll stay for the foreseeable future.” Let’s just linger on that last point for a second. Is it any wonder?

Earlier in the day, on The News Agents podcast, former BBC reporter Jon Sopel - a friend and colleague of Edward for over 30 years - told co-presenters and fellow BBC emigrés Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall that he disagreed with Vine’s view that the as-yet anonymous presenter should out himself: “I would say Jeremy is a friend of mine and I disagree with him on this,” Sopel said. “I think that whoever the presenter is needs to work it out himself. I cannot begin to imagine the sort of pressure, the sort of anguish, turmoil that is going on in his life. And just to hear from your colleagues, come on for the sake of me, can you out yourself please? I’m not sure that’s the best look.”

After Flind had released her statement, Sopel appeared on Andrew Marr’s show on LBC, making the very salient point that: “There was no criminality and if there was no criminality - which we have had confirmed by the Metropolitan Police - what are you left with?”. “Huw has talked in the past about his depression. The Sun initially made some very serious allegations on the Saturday morning: that he might have solicited photos from someone who was underage and had therefore committed a criminal offence.” “I did gasp when I saw the headline [on Saturday],” Sopel added. “I didn’t know who the presenter was but I thought ‘bloody hell this is serious’.” But, he said, after the story had been plastered across the next seven pages, “it was nothing”. “I don't know what went on at The Sun. But it just seemed to me that they had a slightly half-cooked story that they decided to go with. They went with the parents of a young man who was in turmoil and from a fractured family relationship. And they didn't even carry the denial from this kid, from this young man. It was nonsense.”

At the heart of this story are humans. Vulnerable humans. And victims, too - Edwards himself, his wife Vicky and their five children, the family caught up in the original story, other people who’ve come forward to make claims about Edwards’ behaviour. Was The Sun wrong to run the story in the first place? Possibly, possibly not. It will use the morally ambiguous argument that running the original story was ‘in the public interest’. But stringing it out for five days while not naming the presenter and therefore putting itself into legal jeopardy merely added the pressure on Edwards himself. If The Sun was so sure of its story, why didn’t it name Edwards when it clearly knew his identity? It begs the question - what was its intention.

This brings us to the BBC. In essence, this story isn’t about the BBC. It was, in Jon Sopel’s words to Andrew Marr,  “Someone who had a probably rather complicated personal life, who was wrestling with certain issues,” and who wouldn’t have been the first to do be in that situation. “Huw has talked in the past about his depression,” Sopel continued. ”The Sun initially made some very serious allegations on the Saturday morning, that he, you know, might have solicited photos from someone who was underage, and therefore had committed a criminal offence. And that seems to have gone away completely, given what the Met has said this evening. And so you're thinking, well what is this all been about?”.

This, inevitably, leads to the conclusion that The Sun - whose proprietor has a known ideological dislike of the BBC - were handed a golden, cynical opportunity to use Edwards’ apparent indiscretions as a means of damaging the corporation’s reputation. There is certainly a suspicion that every headline opportunity the newspaper (and its rivals) had to tag the BBC, it did.

“I don't know what went on at The Sun,” Sopel told Andrew Marr. “But it just seemed to me that they had a slightly half-cooked story that they decided to go with. They went with the parents of a young man who was in turmoil and from a fractured family relationship. And they didn't even carry the denial from this kid, from this young man. It was nonsense.”

In fairness, though, the BBC does appear to have a lot to explain itself of how it handled the original complaint, raised with it in May after the family of the young adult in the initial story had flagged it in April to South Wales Police, who deemed the allegations not worthy of criminal investigation. It took from 18 May, when a family member went to a BBC building to make a complaint about “the behaviour of a BBC presenter” until last Thursday, 6 July, when The Sun raised with the BBC press offer that there were allegations about Edwards. 

Here’s where the BBC itself has ended up doing The Sun’s job for it. Although a specialist BBC investigations team had instigated an enquiry into the claims made in May, new allegations appeared over the weekend that were different to those initially investigated. Under it’s “neither fear nor favour” editorial ethic, the BBC itself started reporting extensively on the story, leading news bulletins with it, and even pumping out breaking news alerts received on mobile phones about one of its own. This has been met with incredulity by Jon Sopel: “I think the BBC is a complicated beast and it would be lovely to think of it as a streamlined organisation where one bit knows what the other is doing. But the BBC is a series of completely uncoordinated limbs”. On the one hand, he said, BBC Director-General Tim Davie was claiming that its internal investigation was put on hold while the police decided whether there was anything to investigate (or not), while at the same time “BBC News is carrying out investigations and produces a report at 4 o'clock in the afternoon saying he had spoke to someone, and aggressive tones, or used swear words. I just thought: ’Hang on, does one know what the other is doing?’. I think the worst thing the BBC could be seen as being is the provisional wing of The Sun newspaper.”

My issue here with this debate is that it becomes something of a self-serving media ‘bubble’ story. In the days and weeks ahead, fingers of blame will continue to be pointed at the various actors in the media coverage. Questions will be rightly asked about many aspects of the BBC’s handling of a human resources issue, but also about The Sun’s motives, and the motives of newspapers with similar interests and their role in the pile-on. What’s not clear is what happens with the figures at the very heart of the story - the victims. Edwards himself is one of the BBC’s highest paid presenters (according to the BBC Annual Report, published on Tuesday as the furore was growing louder), but also one of its most respected, not only as one of the presenter of the 10 O’Clock News but lead anchor on state occasions. 

Should Edwards’ “rather complicated personal life”, to quote Jon Sopel, preclude him resuming his roles? And what about the young adult - now aged 20 - whose alleged receipt of £35,000 for explicit pictures at the request of the person we now know to be Edwards do next? If, as has been reported, this as-yet unidentified person has a crack cocaine addiction, you would hope that they can get the help they need. I don’t doubt, either, that their family - who raised the complaint in the first place - will be going through purgatory over the way the story has evolved (and I’m deliberately avoiding being judgemental about their circumstances or motivation for raising the complaint to begin with, even if their child has dismissed The Sun’s story as “rubbish”).

The bottom line is that, unless we see evidence to the contrary, what has been extensively and intensively reported on over the last five or six days amounts to little more than one adult’s complicated private life being made public. And he is now in hospital being treated for an acute mental health condition. Perhaps the media didn’t learn anything from Caroline Flack. Compassion, for a start.

Anti-social behaviour

I blame Tim Lovejoy. His raving about Twitter, 14 years ago, convinced me to dive in. Such was his endorsement of the social media platform on BBC2’s Something For The Weekend (before it transferred to Channel 4 as Sunday Brunch) that I had to give it a go. 

It was a bit of a laugh back then, with people posting stupid cat videos and making witty remarks about their breakfast. With tweets originally restricted to 140 characters, it started the culture of ‘micro blogging’. Over time, it evolved into an invaluable source of almost immediate information generated by media organisations and businesses, as well as individuals disseminating Things They Know. It created its own luminaries, too - must-read accounts authored by smart, witty people who could write with erudition (and knew the difference between “your” and “you’re”, as well as the role a possessive apostrophe plays in basic grammar). Most of all, it was free. Free! 

But, then – and I’m conveniently truncating history here – Donald Trump came along, and his deranged early morning, stream of consciousness, all-caps tweets (written, we assumed, while he was conducting the day’s first ablutions) started to take Twitter into a very different direction. We had entered the ‘post-truth’ era, and before you knew it, Twitter had become bad for your mental health - especially if you’re susceptible to the grifting of certain politicians and their equally gaslighting acolytes. Views long-banished to the darkened recesses of society were propelled to the surface, or near enough.

Oddly, though, that hasn’t been the worst development. That arguably occurred when Elon Musk paid $44 billion for the platform last October, set about firing half of its employees, and introduced a new subscription model in a clumsy attempt to make it generate more income. Ever since, Twitter has been a raging bin fire of functional and policy changes – believed to be instigated by ‘Space Karen’ himself – that have made the platform a significantly less fun place to be.

For some, this last Saturday may have proven to be the final straw. “Rate limit exceeded – Please wait a few moments then try again” appeared in the place of up-to-the-minute missives about whatever. Twitter appeared to be down. The hashtags #ratelimitexceeded and #twitterdown started trending, except no-one could read the tweets born by them. No-one – with perhaps the exception of Musk – knew what the hell was going on. Twitter wasn’t down - it had been intentionally broken by its owner.

In, oddly, one of the few tweets you could read, Musk later explained what had happened: “To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: - verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day; - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day; - New unverified accounts to 300/day.”

Immediately there was a collective realisation that Musk was having another dummy-spitting episode about something. He was doing it knowingly, too. Twitter (or Musk) would later raise the restrictions to 8,000/800/400 tweets viewed and then 10,000/1,000/500 respectively, with the South African billionaire clearly finding the whole exercise – and the brouhaha it generated - funny. 

“You awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends and family,” he wrote in another tweet. He then trolled users further by posting: “Oh the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits,” after people had exceeded their cap by posting the “Rate limited exceeded” message and asking what it meant. Many concluded that “data scraping” and “system manipulation” claims had something to do with AI harvesting (other social media platforms have expressed similar concerns) and didn’t want anyone or anything else to profit from Twitter. 

However, given that Saturday’s action effectively shut off Twitter’s basic functionality to its users - and therefore eyeballs belonging to the platform’s lucrative advertising audience - the whole exercise seemed like another gallon of petrol thrown in the blazing bin. Industry analysts said the latest chaos would not help maintain advertisers’ interest in the platform, with one saying that the stunt was “remarkably bad” for them. “This certainly isn’t going to make it any easier to convince advertisers to return [to Twitter]. It’s a hard sell already to bring advertisers back,” Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg told Reuters, a point of view backed by media buying agencies openly advising clients against using the platform.

Only last month former NBC-Universal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino started work as Twitter CEO with a brief of improving the company’s commercial activity. In fact, according to the Financial Times, Yaccarino had been specifically tasked with restoring relationships with the advertising community, relationships that had been strained since Musk’s takeover and his subsequent tinkering. One industry figure told Reuters that Yaccarino represented the “last best hope” of saving Twitter, which has seen its market value drop to just a quarter of what Musk paid for it.

Key to advertisers staying with Twitter is it continuing to deliver those eyeballs, but in that, no knows for certain how many accounts the platform has, or how many have been closed down since Musk’s takeover (the company no longer discloses how many accounts it has - the last time it did it reported 330 million active monthly users). Several high profile figures, like Sir Elton John have, though, stopped using it since October. 

But for some end users, however, Saturday may well have been the final straw following months of constant, clumsy tinkering: the provocative adoption of Musk’s “free speech absolutism”; introducing the ‘curated’ For You channel no one had asked for (but is oddly addictive); bringing in ‘verified’, subscription-based accounts, replacing previous Blue Tick arrangement for prominent account holders; the arrival of a Wild West of spam and even illegal advertising. 

On Saturday evening, many people - including me - went scurrying off to look for alternative social media outlets that could do the job Twitter had, until relatively recently, done pretty well. The truth is, there aren’t any or, at least, weren’t. There are venerable discussion platforms like Reddit, Tumblr and Mastodon, which has a similar interface to Twitter. There are rivals in development, too, like Bluesky, the semi-available app being developed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. 

None, however, appear to offer the immediacy and – when it was good – reliability of Twitter to keep abreast of world events in real time. Which is why, despite Saturday’s nonsense, many users I know, as well as most of the accounts I follow, were operating as usual yesterday. But with the threat of Musk continuing to tamper with what had once been perfectly good (it just struggled to make any money), there is still an open opportunity for someone to offer a direct rival.

Step forward, then, the direct rival – Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder and, now, CEO of the Meta empire that owns that original social network, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, will this week launch Threads. 

Available to download from the Apple App Store on Thursday, it will be functionally very similar to Twitter by being -  according to App Store blurb - a “text-based conversation app,” and a place “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today, to what’ll be trending tomorrow.” 

Threads will enable users to post short messages, with images and links to web pages, as well as engage with them through likes reshares. Given that many people on Twitter also have Instagram accounts, Threads users will be able to easily connect to the accounts they follow on that platform.

Given that Musk is said to have challenged Zuckerberg to an actual cage fight, Threads could be the Meta boss’s ultimate counter-strike. According to The Verge, Meta’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Cox, said at a recent company meeting that Threads will be “our response to Twitter”, adding that it was being developed in response to “creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run,” a barb clearly aimed at Musk.

Not that a Meta-run version of Twitter will be perfect. In its pursuit of profits, Facebook has become, at times, an impenetrable forest of sponsored accounts no one asked for, with functional tinkering of its own making it less of a chronological timeline of posts as a miasma of random items and spam ads. And, to cap it all, ads clearly generated by deep mining of browser activities on devices using Facebook and Instagram. 

It’s safe to assume that Threads will make use of the same algorithms. Nor would you bet against Meta applying a tier-based subscription model to it as Musk has done with Twitter. The problem with free stuff is that sooner or later someone decides that it needs paying for.

However, what might determine Threads’ success is the loyalty with which Twitter users remain attached to it. Even after Saturday’s events, and my own search for an alternative (largely to ensure I have something to look at when Musk breaks Twitter for good), it’s a difficult opiate to be weaned off. 

Anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom will have access to newswires constantly churning out headlines – click bait before the phrase was even coined – and the Twitter death scroll has fulfilled much the same service. Even in Musk’s batshit-mad world of peppering your feed with ads for things you have no interest in at all (yes, you, Omaze and your bloody million pound house!), it is still, mostly, populated by tweets from organisations we can be individually interested in or, if you choose the ‘For You’ channel, tweets you have an uncannily unexpected appreciation of.

However, with each new belligerent act by Musk, regardless of whether he is genuinely trying to introduce some commercial reality to the platform (or just being disruptive for larks), the Twitter experience gets ever more wearisome. Zuckerberg knows this. He has considerable muscle (Instagram has around two billion monthly active users, according to Meta), but has also shown himself to be very adept at assimilating concepts from elsewhere (Facebook’s feature for ‘disappearing’ stories seemed to have been lifted from Snapchat, just as short-form video ‘reels’ looked a lot like TikTok). So, if anyone can break the Twitter habit, surely it will be him.

Here’s one I made earlier: the darker side of Blue Peter

They say you should never meet your heroes, and I have to say, there have been occasions when that warning has proven valid. I once encountered Spike Milligan while working as a television publicist but, unfortunately, came up against the darker side of the notoriously bipolar comic, whose genius I’d grown up in awe of, thanks to my dad entertaining us with recordings of The Goon Show.

As a journalist, I often found that private personas were very different to the public versions that I’d seen as a child. My dad worked for the BBC, which meant that I was often taken to Television Centre to see shows he was involved in being made, in the process getting to meet many of their stars. In that context, I was treated as a junior VIP, with presenters and actors in full-on PR mode - gracious and engaging. But, when I later met some of the same people as, now, an adult writer, impenetrable walls of guarded defensiveness would inevitably get thrown up. Fair play: it was easy to see why, the way the tabloids did - and still do - stitch up celebrities, despite them engaging with the press in full understanding of the Faustian pact they had made in exchange for publicity.

Early in my nascent career - in fact, just six months after taking my A-levels - I was dispatched to North London to interview another childhood hero: John Noakes, the slightly scruffy Yorkshire-born actor who inadvertently became children’s television’s resident daredevil during his twelve-and-a-half years as a presenter of Blue Peter.

As my resultant piece for LM magazine detailed in its intro: “He fell from chimneys, dived to the bottom of the sea, raced cars. bikes and steamrollers, climbed Nelson’s Column, stepped out of an aeroplane at 25,000 feet, drove steam engines and cars of the future, broke a world record with 102 people aboard a Volkswagen Beetle, built an igloo on the side of the Cairngorms, went on safari all over the world, spent months training guide dogs, hashed up some amazing delicacies in the kitchen, and diced with death on a two-man bobsleigh at St. Moritz. And then he fell from grace - or rather, John Noakes fell out with most of the Blue Peter team”. Well, specifically, Blue Peter’s producers.

John Noakes, interviewed by me for LM magazine, March 1987

“Why should I risk my life for those idiots, only for them to kick you in the balls in the end?,” he vented at me in the pokey dressing room of the Intimate Theatre in Palmers Green, where he was playing Buttons in Cinderella. “I’ll leave TV to other idiots,” he reflected, some years after leaving the business. That, though, wasn’t the end of his ire towards the show that made his name. “Blue Peter was all one big lie and people believed it,” he revealed, my childhood illusions evaporating into the North London air. For example, the cookery segments, in which he’d confuse “decimated” with “desiccated” coconut was all part of an act. “I couldn’t cook a bloody egg,” he recalled. “The cooking [items] was a load of rubbish. I used to make up those cockups on purpose. It was all one big lie and people believed it. It was fantasy, and you’re all brought up on it.”

Much of Noakes’ anger was directed towards Biddy Baxter, the legendary, matriarchal editor of Blue Peter since 1962, who turned it into a pillar of the BBC’s children’s output. “Don’t talk to me about that bloody woman,” Noakes’ exclaimed that December morning in 1986 when I brought up the subject of his acrimonious departure from Blue Peter in June 1978, having been the show’s longest serving presenter. “The only way they’ll ever change Blue Peter is if they get rid of Baxter. You can take the programme from 15 years ago, stick it on tomorrow and you won’t notice any difference. But don’t ruin my day. I haven’t thought about all that for ages - I think of nice things…”.

Quite what he’d think about things now, with the publication tomorrow of a biography of Baxter herself, we will never know. Noakes died in 2017 at the age of 83, having settled in Majorca after he and his wife Vicky’s sailing yacht was - in perhaps the most Noakes way possible - shipwrecked in 1982, and they decided to stay there.

Picture: Ten Acre Films

45 years after his departure from Blue Peter - ending the ‘classic’ presenting line-up of Noakes, Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves and Lesley Judd - urban myths still linger. One is that Noakes and his beloved on-screen border collie Shep were forced apart by the BBC when the presenter left the show. Noakes had maintained that he’d been told that he’d be able to keep his canine partner, accusing the corporation of breaking its promise. Not so, according to Richard Marson, author of the new book, Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter. In fact, according to Noakes’ wife, he kept Shep until the couple decided to embark on their fateful voyage, concluding that the dog just wouldn’t be happy at sea. And so, Shep went to live with a lady called Edith Menezes, who’d taken on many of the Blue Peter pets after they’d retired from the show.

When I met Noakes in 1986 there were clearly many points of animosity between him and Baxter. There were industry rumours that he’d been sent on the most dangerous of stunts - like free-falling with the RAF Falcons parachute display team or scaling Nelson’s Column - without any form of insurance, allegedly the result of BBC stinginess. In Marson’s book, however, Vicky Noakes reveals that Shep was the biggest source of acrimony, given that the dog was ‘owned’ by the BBC, with the Noakes family paid an allowance for his expenses. “John used to say, ‘Oh, Shep’s just a prop’. He hated the fact that he should be given a contract to look after the dog. He said, ‘This is absolutely ridiculous’.” Noakes also took exception to the BBC preventing him from doing an advert for Spillers dog food featuring the pet.

In reality, Noakes and Shep remained a double act for a long time after Blue Peter, appearing in the children’s factual series Go With Noakes, with the collie continuing to live with the family. But, still, in that Palmers Green dressing room, his anger over many things relating to Baxter - with his love for that dog at its root - was clear. What is also clear is that Baxter, throughout her time as Blue Peter editor (she left the show in 1988 as the result of a reorganisation of the BBC Children’s Television department) was simply protective - perhaps too much - of the Blue Peter ‘brand’. The Spillers ad ban was to prevent the brand being exploited. 

During her 33 years in charge, Baxter became a powerful figure within the BBC. “She absolutely ruled [Blue Peter],” Peter Purves once said, adding: “I didn’t always agree with her views, but she was right.” Writing this week in the Daily Telegraph, Marson recounted a story of Baxter needing to make use of the Television Centre inner ring road to demonstrate a new high-tech vehicle. “BBC jobsworths tried to stop her, [so] she simply put in a call to the Controller of BBC One and steamrollered all objections. No matter that as a result there was gridlock around West London. The police were incensed but when they learnt Blue Peter was to blame, took no action.”

Presenter Lesley Judd’s future on the show came into doubt when she divorced her husband Derek Fowlds (then ‘Mr. Derek’ on the BBC’s Basil Brush Show), who in turn threatened to go to the press about their marriage. Baxter was reportedly fearful of the story’s impact on Blue Peter’s wholesome reputation. Judd’s working relationship with the show would never be the same again. “The programme was so precious, especially to Biddy,” Judd has said, graciously. “She ate, slept and lived it.”

Richard Marson is effusive of Baxter’s tenure as the show’s editor, and its lasting effect on a generation or more of children exposed to the show’s sticky-backed plastic ‘makes’. In the Telegraph he wrote: “It was Biddy’s single-minded drive and devotion to the audience that transformed Blue Peter from an inconsequential studio-bound magazine show begun in 1958 and aimed primarily at five to eight-year-olds, to a major national brand, enjoyed, imitated, talked about, mocked, criticised, revered, an essential part of the DNA of generations of children, who watched and engaged in their millions.”

Engagement was, Marson argues, key to the show’s strength: “[Children] could write in with a story, a picture, a poem or an idea for the programme. The reward might be one of the famous Blue Peter badges, which Biddy launched in ’63 and which bestowed the privilege of free entry to all kinds of top attractions the length and breadth of the UK. The scheme was wildly popular and, for a one-way medium, kept the show uniquely in touch with the tastes and interests of its audience. In a pre-Internet era, it gave children a powerful sense of ownership and belonging.”

Baxter’s legacy was established by a near-fanatical obsession with what Blue Peter was there to deliver, and by the power that stemmed from her ownership of it. “Presenters came and went but the programme spoke with one voice - Biddy’s,” Marson wrote. “She had the ultimate say over every aspect of the content, wrote or rewrote all the scripts, and was a forensic presence in the studio to ensure that her perspective and emphasis prevailed. Even in an era with far less scrutiny and compliance, she wielded extraordinary power and control. All at a time when it was exceptionally rare for women to reach such positions in television - which Biddy had managed at 29, after stints in schools radio and TV and Listen With Mother.”

To watch Blue Peter now is to see a show largely unrecognisable to that which I watched every Monday and Thursday afternoon as a child, but then so has children’s television. Plus, at 55, I’m not the audience. Today’s Blue Peter has had to adapt to, for a start, children’s television shows being somewhat marginalised in the daytime schedules and shunted into their own channels while BBC One’s afternoons are a dirge of reality shows and quizzes. When I was a child I didn’t have all the digital distractions that kids today have at their finger tips. Frankly, it’s to the BBC’s credit that shows like Blue Peter and Newsround (which my wife screens every day for her primary school class) are still on the air.

Thinking about it though, the era of Noakes, Purves, Singleton and Judd was somewhat unreal. Even for the 1970s, they hardly conformed to what we now think of as youth TV presenters, with Noakes’ ‘slacks’, rolled up shirtsleeves and Boris-esque mop of hair. Youth culture was different, but not necessarily simpler: I’m not, for a minute, suggesting that we had to make do with spinning tops and marbles for our amusement. 

Blue Peter was - and probably still is - educational and informative. Under Baxter, we experienced vicariously the presenters’ summer expeditions, to parts of the world television cameras rarely took children. We came to appreciate tortoises’ hibernation rituals, and found that a cheap Christmas decoration could be easily constructed from lashing a couple of wire coat hangers together with some tinsel. Innocent pleasures, that, I must admit, were only slightly bruised by John Noakes’ take on what life really was like behind the scenes.

Biddy Baxter: The Woman Who Made Blue Peter is published by TenAcre films on 3 July

A midsummer night’s dream - Peter Gabriel at the O2 Arena

Picture: York Tillyer

It’s been 21 years since Peter Gabriel last delivered a full album of net-new material. Children have been born and graduated in that time. I’m now three years older than Gabriel was when he last put out an entire collection of properly original songs. Not that he’s been a recluse: there have been contributions to soundtracks here, collaborations with other artists there, and a couple of cover version projects. But that aside, nothing box-fresh. We have, though, had six tours, of which I’ve seen five, only missing out on his ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ double-header with Sting.

However, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. In principle, the 73-year-old has been working on a new album for most of those 21 years, but it was only photographs this time last year of Gabriel and long-term cohorts Tony Levin, David Rhodes and Manu Katché at work at his Real World Studios near Bath that confirmed a tenth solo studio album was “on”. But, being Gabriel, and with the middle of 2023 now reached, the semi-mythical new record is still months away. 

This might be, simply, Gabriel’s customary glacial rate of progress: interests and causes constantly throw him off schedule. Or equally, he’s simply teasing. Maybe it’s the latter. There have, in fact, been new releases since the beginning of the year. Six songs, to be precise, each introduced in typically Gabrielesque manner to coincide with the lunar cycle. “I’m an awkward sod,” he told Uncut’s Michael Bonner in March. “I like doing things differently, if I can. I’m 73. At this point, it doesn’t matter what other people say. I listen, still, to people who I think are wise and smart and have good taste. Generally, though, I’ll end up doing what I think will be either fun or interesting.”

He has earned that right, and not always with the recognition his notoriously sporadic output has deserved. While never regarded with the same chameleonic awe as David Bowie, across nine solo studio albums so far, four soundtrack projects and myriad one-offs, produced a body of work as intriguing, compelling and as invariably confounding as anyone I can think of. I’m somewhat biased, of course. Having been first introduced to Gabriel via his seven-year tenure as lead singer and figurehead of proto-prog era Genesis, his solo albums (the first four simply titled Peter Gabriel to encourage the cover art to make each record stand out...although I suspect some wry record label trolling was also at play) have been nothing short of eclectic. Classic rock, soul, funk, gospel, Afro-beat, Indian themes, Aboriginal influences, electronica, barbershop jazz - you name it, they’ve all featured.

Surprisingly, there’s been more commercialism in that array than some might recognise, what with hits like Solsbury Hill, Games Without Frontiers, Shock The Monkey, and then the pop phenomenon that was the So album, with Sledgehammer, Don’t Give Up and In Your Eyes. But as the period between albums has stretched out - the first four made over five years, then gaps of four, six and ten respectively, before the two-decade elapse since 2002’s Up - Gabriel has also found plenty to with which to dilly and dally.

Peter Gabriel plays live - by yours truly in Smash Hits, 14 July 1987

At the O2 Arena last night - the seventh time I’ve seen Gabriel play live since 1987 - the 46-year expanse of Gabriel’s solo career was condensed into almost three hours, separated by an interval, and given fresh impetus. As with any well-established act, there are the expected staples: the now-customary finale of In Your Eyes followed by Biko (in 1980, one of the first mainstream rock songs to address apartheid), the feelgood Stax energy of So’s Sledgehammer (oddly sequenced at the end of the first set before the interval) and Big Time, the intimate optimism of Don’t Give Up (backing vocalist Ayanna Witter-Johnson stamping her own signature to mesmerising effect on Kate Bush’s duet role in the original). These are what many, if not most, of the punters have come to hear. 

This, though, raises questions about the back-to-front commercial wisdom of the 22-song set including a whopping 11 new pieces drawn from the forthcoming album i/o. It’s easy to assume that this is peak contrarian Gabriel - especially as the i/o Tour is not actually in support of the near-mythical new release, the date for which is still not confirmed. In the end, it was a masterstroke. This was, essentially, a preview of the new album on a grand, arena-sized scale. Gabriel has used tours in the past to preview works in progress, but here in North Greenwich, the new material was brought spectacularly to life. 

Even the six new songs released so far, were given bigger and bolder expression in the O2’s expanse. Lead-off single Panopticom, Four Kinds Of Horses and the i/o title track (named after the computing acronym for “input/output”) bounce expressively, their instantly singalongable choruses underpinned by stalwarts Levin, Rhodes and Katché’s combined rhythms. Along with The Court, Playing For Time and Road To Joy, the new songs bloomed into dimensions that seemed familiar and new in equal measure. Those we hadn’t heard before also seemed to fit effortlessly into the programme: Olive Tree, for example, seemed like it had come from a 1980s soundtrack album without sounding out of place in a trio of new songs that included the aforementioned Playing For Time (featuring the studio recording’s Tom Cawley on piano) and the warm reflection on domesticity, This Is Home. 

The one misfire of the entire evening was another new piece, And Still, inspired by the loss of  Gabriel’s mother. Not that it won’t have its place on the new album, but coming after the searing brilliance of Red Rain, it seemed downbeat and out of kilter with the general upbeat mood of the evening (much the result of the ensemble Gabriel has placed around him on this tour - which also includes guitarist Richard Evans, Witter-Johnson on vocals and cello, Marina Moore on vocals and violin, Josh Shpak on brass, along with the very funky keyboardist Don E).

“There’s always a trade-off,” Gabriel explained in one of his monthly Full Moon Club newsletters. “People generally want to hear what they know and the artist generally wants to play the new stuff. So, I think there’s a sort of barter thing where you have to suffer enough new numbers to get to hear the old ones. It’s always been a bit like that with me, but I think this is a strong batch of songs. They’re not all up-tempo, but I feel they’re certainly being played with a lot of heart.” 

Levin, Gabriel and Rhodes - not a comb between them
Picture: York Tillyer

In the early days of Genesis, Gabriel wore masks and costumes to ‘act out’ the invariably complex narratives of their lengthy fantastical songs. He would also tell ponderous, meandering stories between songs, largely to allow Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett time to retune their twelve-string guitars. Some of this was a front, mere armour to shield his shyness, but also - in his own words - to “command an audience”. Five decades on, he’s still giving ponderous introductions, largely to explain what his songs are about. While mostly worthy, they are also sincere, and delivered with a wry sense of self-depreciation. And while the costumes and greasepaint have long been abandoned for stage clothing redolent of his world music interests, the singer who once bunked out of Charterhouse to see Otis Redding play the RamJam Club in Brixton is still prone to dad-dancing routines to accompany his livelier songs, like Solsbury Hill and In Your Eyes. Rather than being embarrassing, it’s endearing. By the evening’s end, and a somnolent, cavernous drum beat heralds the traditional ending of Biko, the crowd knows the score, clenched fists punching the air in solidarity to the “Heh! Heh! Heh! The man is dead, the man is dead” township refrain.

When the new album i/o eventually arrives, and lyric sheets and press releases can be pored over, the disparate, encyclopedic themes that Gabriel has always pursued will be explored in more depth than via, for most people, their first listen live. It’s part of my fascination with the multiple dimensions he brings to bear with his work, especially with a penchant for eccentric wordplay. When he officially left Genesis in 1975, he released a statement to Sounds newspaper which concluded:

“The following guesswork has little in common with truth: Gabriel left Genesis.
1) To work in theatre.
2) To make more money as solo artist.
3) To do a ‘Bowie’.

4) To do a ‘Ferry’.

5) To do a ‘Furry Boa round my neck and hang myself with it’.
6) To go see an institution.
7) To go senile in the sticks.
I do not express myself adequately in interviews and I felt I owed it to the people who have put a lot of love and energy supporting the band to give an accurate picture of my reasons.”

Such witticism (which found its way into songs like Games Without Frontiers and Sledgehammer) is there on the new songs, but used to cover pet topics such as utopianism (Panopticom), dystopia (The Court) and environmentalism. But, if their unfamiliarity to new ears might be unsettling, audience engagement is undimmed. “Now we’re going to do something new” is usually the cue for a bar stampede, which suggests that devoting half the set list to songs from i/o  would seem instinctively risky at best. But it’s here that you realise that Gabriel - even if never the first name on people’s lips when you invite them to name a rock legend - has earned that respect over 56 years as both a frontman and originator of, in his words “awkward”, yet utterly inventive pop music.

Absence does make the heart grow fonder, but there have been times when it has felt like Gabriel’s almost fan-trolling ponderousness in the studio might have tested that allegiance. “It’s been a while since I’ve been touring, but I am thoroughly enjoying it. We’ve had lovely audiences and I think it is a really extraordinary band, so I am delighted with that,” he wrote in his latest Full Moon Club update. 

For all the human rights causes, obscure artistic rabbit holes and other tangents that will have understandably drawn irate cries of “Just get on and make a new record, will you?!” from his fanbase, his emergence, on this tour and with the prospect to come of i/o, reawakened my belief that Gabriel is one of the most compelling artists in the business.

Noel Gallagher - with strings attached

If I was Noel Gallagher, I’d probably be happy to get through any media interaction without the subject of Oasis being brought up. It probably doesn’t help that his own brother doesn’t let the issue of the band reforming lie. Barely a week goes by without Liam firing off some salvo about his sibling via Twitter. Last week the elder Gallagher branded his junior a “coward” for not picking up the phone (rumours have been circling that the brothers are warming to the idea of getting together for, possibly, a one-off gig, perhaps symbolically at Knebworth to mark the 30th anniversary of Definitely Maybe next year).

This week, The Sun reported a further exchange of salvos in the spat, with Noel insisting that he’s too busy, and that “anyway, Liam is full of shit”, adding “He knows as well as I do that he doesn’t want it either - what he does like doing is making me look a cunt.” The bottom line, he insists, is that his phone has remained silent and nobody has been in contact about a reunion. So that is that.

For those desperate to recreate their ’90s youth, Blur’s reformation may provide an acute stimulation to the brothers. The key here is nostalgia, with such exercises serving the mutual needs of artist and audience alike: one party gets to exploit a lucrative trip down memory lane (viz reformations of the likes of Cream and The Police), while the other revisits their own a time gone by they might cherish. 

For the Gallaghers, however, to a greater or lesser degree, there really isn’t any need for either to recreate a past that was of its moment, either in musical terms or the publicity it generated. At least that has seemed to be the position of the elder sibling, whose new album with his High Flying Birds, Council Skies, is out today. It’s Noel’s fourth record in the 12 years since he acrimoniously left ‘his brother’s band’, and while Liam has largely stuck with the Oasis formula with his subsequent releases (the Lennonish vocals, choppy Indie-light guitars, slavish adhesion to Scally casualwear) Gallagher Snr. has always appeared more progressive.

Quite how Council Skies is more progressive than its predecessors, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Chasing Yesterday and Who Built The Moon?, plus the bumper Record Store Day compilation Back The Way We Came, which included new material, is not easy to ascertain. That is not a criticism, by the way. Gallagher has a gift for edgy melodicism that makes his newest material seem familiar at the same time as requiring a keen listening ear to distinguish what’s different.

It’s that subtlety that makes Council Skies so utterly enjoyable, from start to finish. While it’s title (and title track) - inspired by a book by illustrator Pete McKee - might suggest a sombre sketch of northern despondency, like Richard Hawley’s Sheffield-inspired Standing At The Sky’s Edge, there is a reflective wistfulness to the 11 songs. Perhaps that’s due to the fact that string arrangements appear on at least half the tracks, giving them the inevitable cinematic expanse that orchestration does, accompanied more by acoustic guitars than Gallagher’s trademark electric chug of yore. That said, there are occasional bursts of amplification, such as the sumptuous radio hit Easy Now - a classic arm-waving, festival-friendly piece of singalong-a-Noel, which includes a brief “soaring” guitar solo that conjures up an image of Slash or Richie Sambora on a mountain top.

The title track - which has also benefited from decent radio airplay this year - is another string-soaked classic - and one whose arrangements underline the quality of co-producer Paul Stacey’s brilliance. Stacey has worked with Gallagher since Oasis’s Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants album, and has regularly given his client the room to expand his sound beyond the T-Rex-lite that established his former band.

Council Skies has an understated swagger about it, a confidence ultimately reflective of its creator’s own notable self-confidence (Noel remains one of the industry’s most entertaining interviewees). Open The Door, See What You Find is a good example of this, mixing tempos with chorused vocals that hook themselves into the brain. More follows on There She Blows!, with its Beatley chug and vocal harmonies that transport the listener back to the ’60s (with, dare I say it, a slight nod towards the Wall Of Sound).

Picture: Sharon Latham/noelgallagher.com

For many, Champagne Supernova will always be the gold standard of Gallagher’s sense of the epic. It’s something he seems capable of producing without even thinking about it. Trying To Find, here, goes down a similar path, but of all the tracks on the album most redolent of northern gloom, it is this one. My one complaint is that, at just over three minutes, it’s too short. There is more in this string-infused vein with We’re Gonna Get There In The End and Trying To Find A World That's Been And Gone, both tracks that appeared last year in what felt like demo form as direction of travel to this new collection. Other gems include Think Of A Number (not, to my knowledge, a hat-tip to Johnny Ball), and the soulful I’m Not Giving Up Tonight.

Arguably, though, the drop-dead highlight of this album is Dead To The World. Appearing early on in the running list, it builds from a slowburn opening on a bed of - yes - more strings - to give a woozy, Bacharach-like feel. It even prompted brother Liam to tweet: “How can such a mean spirited little man write such a beautiful song?”. Hardly a sign of a thaw in their relationship, but equally, a glimmer of light that the love between two brothers may not have been lost completely.