Letter From America: The Boss is back

What did you do during lockdown (and by that I mean the first lockdown…)? Did you discover the joys of Zoom? Were you sucked into a weekly online quiz with your extended family? Did you acquire a new hobby? Eat yourself into a Jabba The Hut-sized mound? Finally make use of that yoga mat you’d bought but never used? Or, perhaps you did a Captain Tom, and walked yourself into the record books and the nation’s hearts. 

If you’re a musician, lockdown has possibly been a boon to creativity, if only to compensate for tours not going ahead. Look at Paul McCartney - he recorded McCartney III, out in December, on his own at his studio in Sussex, handling all the instruments himself. And I bet it’ll be a corker.

Though this took place last November (a sweeter, disease-free time, right?), Bruce Springsteen’s approach to housebound boredom is to invite your mates round and, in a week, put together a new album. Not that those mates are anyone: they’re called the E-Street Band. And the album is Letter To You. 

Recorded over five days at The Boss’s home in Colts Neck, New Jersey, a twenty-minute drive from Asbury Park and the real Jersey Shore so steeped in Springsteen history, the album, in his own words, “turned out to be one of the greatest recording experiences I’ve ever had.” That might sound hyperbolic, but Springsteen says there’s a “emotional nature” to the album that he loves, a point that comes across in the Apple TV making-of film about the album. It shows the camaraderie of a group - trusted sidekick Stevie Van Zandt, Patti Scialfa (Mrs. Springsteen), Nils Lofgren, Roy Bittan, Max Weinberg, Garry Tallent, Charlie Giordano and Jake Clemons (the ‘Big Man’, Clarence’s sax-playing nephew) - crafting an album, a band Springsteen says in the film informs how he writes, inspiring him to “write big”. 

Back in the spring of 1974, Springsteen and the band started work on the Born To Run album, labouring over the next 14 months - six of which on the title track alone - to create scale, something akin to the Spector ‘wall of sound’. It was an angry, frustrating time for all concerned, but ultimately, the exhaustive process produced a perennial classic. In sharp contrast, Letter To You took a fraction of the time to make, but the result is, it has to be said, equally impressive. That said, some songs on the album took an awful long time to reach a record: the epic If I Was A Priest was originally written for the Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. album, Springsteen’s debut almost 50 years ago. Dusted off and finally recorded in the November session last year, it’s as fresh as anything more freshly minted, even for a song which treads somewhat on religious sensitivities by imagining Jesus walking through the Wild West. Significantly, it has an important place in Springsteen lore, being one of the songs he played for Columbia Records executives at their first meeting in May 1972, prompting label boss John Hammond to hope that every song on the artist’s debut LP would be like it. 

Another resurrected from the 1970s is Janey Needs A Shooter (which Warren Zevon purloined with The Boss’s permission for his 1980 song Jeannie Needs A Shooter), while Songs For Orphans also dates back to the Greetings era, and has only previously been heard in public before at a single show 2005 Devils And Dust tour. “It's wonderful how the older songs fit so well into this album, Van Zandt told Forbes recently. “It's remarkable really. That, Janey Needs A Shooter and Songs For Orphans are all from the early '70s. To have something fit so well 50 years later - oh my God, I swear we have completely redefined chronological time, I'm telling you! I think rock and roll has changed science. Seventy is the new 40.”

Picture: Bruce Springsteen, 2020/Danny Clinch

Springsteen is now 71, but as if proof that age is just a number, Letter To You arrives in what feels like a period of unblinking industriousness. Like his near-contemporary Neil Young (or even, come to think of it, his somewhat British equivalent Paul Weller), there has been little sign of slowing down as he reaches his more senior years. Letter To You is his fourth in eight years, his second since 2014’s High Hopes with the E-Street band fully on board, and comes just a year after the wonderful Western Stars. All this, the Born To Run autobiography, and that extended run of Springsteen On Broadway, his New York residency that ran for five shows a week from October 2017 until December. The following year. Much like his legendary, near-four hour concerts, Springsteen has never done things by halves.

“I’m at a point in my playing life and artistic life where I’ve never felt as vital,” he recently told the New York Times. “My band is at its best, and we have so much accumulated knowledge and craft about what we do that this was a time in my life where I said, ‘I want to use that as much as I can.’” The product of this is an album recorded live and without need for endless overdubs, but also an album of undeniable energy, power and subtle texture in tremendous balance and, somehow, an inherent sense of love and camaraderie. Missing, of course, from this are the late Danny Federici and Clemons Snr, though their spirits - as witnessed frequently in the Apple TV documentary, are never far from any of the band’s hearts, least of whom, Springsteen himself. The band’s closeness undoubtedly was the fuel that drove the making of Letter To You.

“I had cut a song on the record called Janey Needs A Shooter earlier on for a one-off for Record Store Day,” Springsteen recently told America’s National Public Radio. “But when I listened back to it, it was the closest thing the band had ever sounded to Darkness On The Edge of Town. You know, that was because we all played together and sang at one time, and because we relied only on the instrumentation of the band and no overdubs. So I said, well, I'd be interested in making a record where we return to the template of Darkness On The Edge of Town. And so, consequently, I made no demos of the songs. I simply recorded them on my acoustic guitar into my iPhone, waited until the band got here, played in the songs on an acoustic guitar and then we went and performed the music.” 

“I knew I wanted to make a record with the band,” Springsteen added in his New York Times interview. “I knew I wanted it to be the pure instrumentation of the band: two keyboards, the guitars, the bass, drums and saxophone, and I didn’t want anything else. I didn’t want to demo or have preconceptions of the music, so I didn’t touch the songs until I taught them to the band. The approach is confirmed by Van Zandt, who told Forbes: “I kept emphasising if [Springsteen and the E-Street Band] do make another record - and it was really not clear if we ever would - but I said, 'If we do, let's go back to the old way’, which we had done on three records, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, The River and Born In The USA, where Bruce walks in with an acoustic guitar, plays his songs and everybody has a chance to give their input.”

The result is a classic Springsteen album, neither melancholy or overtly upbeat, but a continuation of the reflective mood he’s been in since the autobiographical period of his book and Broadway show. Along with the songs written in another time, there are nostalgic hat-tips to the past, such as the stonking Last Man Standing, which pays tribute to his teenage band, The Castiles, of which - he reveals in the Apple TV film - he is now the only surviving member. There is similar thought for mortality and absent friends on I’ll See You In My Dreams. While the dynamics of Letter To You may not vary from expectations of what a Bruce Springsteen/E-Street Band album should offer, there is so much more to enjoy that just the comfort food of familiarity. The understated opener, One Minute You're Here is as tender as the title track that follows it, or as prototypical as Ghosts, perhaps serving the simple purpose of being a celebration of what it is to be in this brotherhood of musicians.

Rock bands are, in general, uneven communities. Invariably riven by ego, creative tension and mismatched personalities, they are often held together by artistic tension alone. Bruce Springsteen has, at his disposal, an unique family, even when he dips into the E-Street collective on his 'pure' solo albums. Together they produce something no other entity in rock music is capable of. As hackneyed as it is to say, they are truly more than the sum of their parts. Letter To You, with its raw simplicity, its power and energy is an album to savour, for sure, but also one to just enjoy for what it is. And it may well be one of the best that Bruce Springsteen and his gang have ever produced.

Running down his dream: Tom Petty’s Wildflowers reissued

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picture: Mark Seliger

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

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

Finns ain’t what they used to be

The conventional wisdom is that people from Nordic countries are the world’s most easy-going and contented. Apparently, they enjoy the good things in life more than anywhere else, from health and wellbeing to work-life balance. Finland, in particular, scores by far the best on these things, coming top in almost everything the OECD regards as good, from living standards to employment, education to life expectancy. Finns are, in general, happier with their lives than the OECD average. This even extends to civic engagement: voter turnout, a measure of participation in the political process, was 67% during the country's last general election, an estimated three-quarters of the country’s top 20% earners voting, and even 62% of the bottom 20% casting their view.

Perhaps this explains why a brouhaha has erupted after Finland’s impressive young prime minister Sanna Marin appeared in a magazine profile wearing a very tasteful black blazer with - SHOCK! - nothing underneath but a vintage necklace. Despite the ensemble appearing no racier than a deep-cut ballgown, some social media users went nuts, accusing Marin’s outfit of being “inappropriate”, and that it “eroded” her credibility. In her defence, thousands of supporters countered the outrage, rightly accusing it of being highly sexist, and sharing pictures of themselves (including hairy-chested men) wearing identical jackets and necklaces, accompanied by the hashtag #imwithsanna. Some highlighted the misogyny of the fuss by posting pictures of male leaders exposing their chests, including Vladimir Putin fishing shirtless and one of former Finnish president Carl Gustaf Mannerheim…erm…posing naked on horseback.

What is ridiculous about the whole affair is that the pictures, which accompany a cover feature in the women’s magazine Trendi, are perfectly tasteful, and you’d have to have a particularly skewed moral bent to find them anything less. Inevitably the socially conservative nature of the photo’s criticism is directed at the 34-year-old Marin’s youth and somewhat alternative background. 

In the interview she makes the case for people to focus on her policies rather than her appearance. Unfortunately, the “plunging” (Daily Mail™) picture has had the opposite effect. The magazine’s editor, Mari Karsikas, responded by saying, very sensibly, that the comments about Marin’s picture said more about those making them than the prime minister herself,  adding that it was hard not to interpret the criticism as anything other than misogynistic. Finnish actor Kiki Kokkonen wrote on her Instagram account: “Everyone should be allowed to live in such a way that their character, dignity and professional skills are not determined by clutching at irrelevant straws.”

Still, this didn’t stop entrepreneur Aki Pyysing criticising Marin for “attention-seeking” in a blog post that attacked her economic policies and even mocked the dimensions of her barely visible cleavage in the apparently offending photograph. The post was tweeted by centre-right opposition party MPs Elina Lepomaki and Juhana Vartiainen, though their tweets were later deleted, with Lepomaki admitting: “My mistake. I shared it carelessly and did not read the entirety of the text, which got personal and mocked the prime minister’s appearance.”

Marin’s rise to the top in Finland - when elected in December she became the world's youngest serving head of government (a title conceded in August when 34-year-old Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz returned to power) - has been accompanied by inevitable attention to her youthful image, a point accentuated by her prolific use of social media, especially Instagram. Observers claim that she knowingly would have chosen the outfit for the Trendi shoot…but if so, why should that be a problem? Theresa May’s Amanda Wakeley leather trousers for a Sunday Times interview four years ago was seen as an otherwise dull politician trying to look more interesting, but no more, and yet the fact that the strides cost £995 was enough to generate a vacuous news cycle for days.

Picture: Austin Hargrave/Sunday Times Magazine

Anu Koivunen, Professor of Gender Studies at Tampere University in Finland said the social media storm over Marin’s outfit wouldn't have come as a surprise: “These politicians know very well what kind of discussions they are starting. They are very media savvy. Marin's actions are done with full cognisance.” During her pregnancy, Marin used her Instagram account to chart progress, posting selfies of her baby bump and even a candid breastfeeding shot once her daughter Emma was born. In August she married her long-term partner Markus Raikkonen at Kesäranta, the Finnish prime minister’s official residence, with Hello!-grade pictures of the couple posted to her account. Again, hard to fault a 34-year-old woman doing that, highly progressive prime minister or not.

Imagine Lennon at 80

Picture: Iain Macmillan/Yoko Ono

Today would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday, which would have been a curious prospect at the best of times. The thought of him today, in the age of Trump, coronavirus, Twitter and any one of the myriad cultural earthquakes since his murder on 9th December, 1980, is somewhat mouth-watering to consider, and mind-boggling at the same time.

The most startling reality, however, is that it is indeed almost 40 years since Lennon was taken from us, three months after his 40th birthday, by psychotic fan Mark David Chapman who shot the Beatle four times in the back, outside his Dakota Building apartment in New York. Plenty of our greatest rock and pop icons have been taken too soon - no need here to reel off membership of The 27 Club - but with no disrespect to, say Kurt Cobain or Jimi Hendrix - Lennon was out there in an echelon of his own. Being one of The Beatles, alone, made him a deity: even if you disregard his arguably patchy post-Fab solo career, the body of work Lennon contributed to in just the briefest window of time that he, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were a creative entity transcends almost any other recording act I can think of. A grand statement, I know, but sometimes consideration of their contribution to music history is so awe-inspiring that it can make your head spin. That's not to say that anyone else isn't good. It's just that very little comes close, whatever your viewpoint or degree of objectivity.

The tragedy, here, is that in terms of time, Lennon would only live a further ten years after the breakup of The Beatles. Ten years. Some artists go that long without releasing anything. He would, though, like all three of his former bandmates, continue to be productive, producing the albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, Some Time In New York City, Mind Games, Walls And Bridges, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Double Fantasy (the posthumous Milk And Honey was released in 1984). Each contained no shortage of memorable (if slightly derivative) songs like Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) and the perennial festive hit Happy Xmas (War Is Over). These can all be reassessed today with the release of Gimme Some Truth, a sumptuous, reissued greatest hits selection which now contains multichannel, high-definition remixes of Lennon's best solo work, from Jealous Guy to the withering, McCartney-targeted How Do You Sleep?, as well as rockers like Whatever Gets You Thru The Night (featuring Elton John) and one of my all-time favourite Lennon solo pieces, Watching The Wheels.

The conventional wisdom, such is the perennial journalistic need for competitive comparison, is that the post-Beatles creative spoils were shared by McCartney and Harrison (let's leave poor old Ringo alone), and that even as a foursome, the sum of the parts was never greater than the whole. But that belies the truth that revolutions generally only happen once. The legacy of that whole is immeasurable, given how much of music since 1970 still owes a debt of gratitude to what the Fabs delivered in the eight years between Please Please Me and Let It Be. Lennon's own legacy becomes, often, complicated by his personality, his passions, his interests. And that makes contemplating how he would have spent the last 40 years such a head-shrinkingly impossible task.

One thing is for certain, and that is that he wouldn't have been able to escape his former band. Just as McCartney and Starr, today, and Harrison until his death in 2001, can't (or shouldn't) escape the its shadow, it would have been interesting to think of how Lennon would have dealt with The Beatles never-ending tail. The wide hypothesis is that a reunion, of sorts, would have taken place, perhaps at Live Aid, though this is not a forgone conclusion. Led Zeppelin have had vast sums of money dangled before them to reform, but Robert Plant, mainly, has not given in. Likewise Pink Floyd - with Roger Waters - reformed for Live 8, but with Richard Wright's demise, and little signs of Waters and David Gilmour's frosty relations warming up, that ship has probably sailed. McCartney and Starr have reunited regularly, usually at all-star charity events, but it's not quite the same. Not that McCartney hasn't sat still, creatively, which makes you wonder what it would have been like for him and Lennon to have returned to writing together, even as they reached their respective dotages.

By the time Lennon was giving his final interviews in 1980, seemingly more contented with life, living with Yoko in New York, there appeared to be a mellowing. While traces of his acerbic, sometimes cruel wit remained, you could imagine an eventual reparation in his relationship with McCartney. He is, though, unlikely to have eased up on the social injustices that fired him so. Even at 80, he would have a point of view about the environment and Black Lives Matter. He would have opposed both Gulf Wars. He would still be maintaining that we should give peace a chance. It would have been fascinating to hear his thoughts on the death of his great friend and fellow-adopted New Yorker, David Bowie. Conceivably they would have worked together several times beyond their collaboration on Bowie's Young Americans album and the hit Fame in particular. The pair first met at a party in Los Angeles in 1974, and hit it off. Bowie revealed in 1995 that he thought they'd be "buddies forever", drawn to a similar sense of humour as much as anything else, though strangely they had differing views on each other's work ("I asked [John] what he thought of what I was doing, glam rock, and he said, ‘Yeah, it’s great, but it’s just rock and roll with lipstick on’.").

Lennon was, in Bowie's view, "probably one of the brightest, quickest-witted, earnestly socialist men I’ve ever met in my life," qualifying the statement with: “Socialist in its true definition, not in fabricated political sense, a real humanist." In the same interview, Bowie - of all people - nailed what it was that kept the Beatles' legacy in universal consciousness. "They gave the British the illusion we meant something again and we love hearing that, boy do we love hearing that.”

Like Bowie, it's probable that Lennon's career would have dipped in the 1980s and early 1990s. Even with the patronage of upstarts like Liam Gallagher, with his allusions of being Lennon himself (even naming his son by Patsy Kensit after the Beatle), the creative fires within are unlikely to have dimmed. Contemporaries, like Paul Simon, for example, have continued to produce intelligent while hardly radical music long into their 70s. McCartney himself is still making albums which, but comparison with younger, lesser acolytes, are still on their game. The flames of anger, too, would continue to flicker, just as Roger Waters continues to rail at pet causes.

The most obvious touchstone here are the Rolling Stones. In the 60s it was a binary choice between them and their Fab rivals (which, like most battles in pop was entirely confected, and they were all, actually, good friends). But whereas The Beatles came to a halt, the Stones have rolled on, doing their thing and doing it well. They still hold the title "Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band In The World" with aplomb, and with little sign of relinquishing it, even as their eighth decades on this planet beckon.

And that's a good place to leave this. John Winston Ono Lennon was, from the outset, a rock and roller: "I only liked simple rock and nothing else," he told Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in an interview published in his book Lennon Remembers. Rock and roll - even at its most essential, with Little Richard screaming "a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wop-bam-boom!" - was, for Lennon, a vessel that got directly to the point.  It's quite possible, that at 80, he'd be still getting directly to the point on many things.

This is no time to die for cinemas - and they won’t

Picture: Twitter/James Bond

"Saturday night at the movies, who cares what picture you see. When you're huggin' with your baby In the last row in the balcony." So sang The Drifters in a song that perfectly captured the cinema experience of 1964, which arguably is no different 56 years later. "Well, there's technicolor and cinemascope, and a cast out of Hollywood. And the popcorn from the candy stand makes it all seem twice as good."

Except, more than half a century on, we're not going out to the movies, on Saturdays or any other night of the week. The coronavirus has, evidently, put paid to a British tradition dating back to 1896 when Auguste and Louis Lumière brought their Cinématographe technology to London to show off the short silent films they’d made. In the decades that followed, cinema became both a source of welcome escapism and a window on the world. By the end of the 1920s, just as the silent era gave way to the first talking pictures, cinemas had become fixtures in most major towns. Almost 100 years on, and last year some 176 million cinema tickets were sold in the UK, the second highest on record since 1970. And then COVID struck.

Six months on since the lockdown came, that Saturday night tradition is, like so many businesses, apparently in ruins. An industry that had remained surprisingly resilient in the face of widening home entertainment choices (compare this with, say, the impact of streaming services on the physical media music industry - we still valued that big-screen experience) has been forced onto its knees. Yesterday, the Odeon chain - a name synonymous with cinema - announced that it was cutting the opening hours of some of its UK and Ireland screens, with a quarter of its theatres only now opening on Fridays and Saturdays. Worse came from Cineworld, the chain which controls around one in seven of the UK’s screens, which announced the temporary closure of its venues.

Picture: Twitter/James Bond

The culprit? Well, obviously the coronavirus, but the repeated villain in the piece appears to be James Bond. Last Friday’s announcement from MGM and Eon, the ‘home’ of 007, that No Time To Die was to be delayed - again - to next April, one whole year after it’s original release date, sent a chilling shudder through the cinema industry. It had been counting on the 25th Bond film to fill coffers emptied by months of lockdown closures, followed by restricted openings with reduced seating due to social distancing requirements. That, though, only tells half the story. To blame Bond is not entirely fair. True, No Time To Die would have been an extraordinary draw, but in many respects, this is more to do with Hollywood as a whole. At the end of the day, there’s been an overall dearth of new, high-volume blockbusters to draw in the multiplex crowds, even those prepared to endure distancing and mask-wearing throughout screenings. Without the audiences, studios are reluctant to release the big-draw titles. Without the big-draw titles, punters are reluctant to venture out.

No Time To Die, Robert Mitchell of Gower Street Analytics told Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, “is the straw that broke the camel’s back”, pointing out how release dates from the bigger studios - an industry dominated by just a handful - have been moving for some time. “Ultimately the cinemas need a pipeline of regular content to draw cinema goers in,” he added. The trouble, here, is that the cinema industry has become over-reliant on the blockbusters. Bond may have been seen as the industry’s Autumn saviour, but this year we’ve seen delays to guaranteed seat-fillers like Fast And Furious 9, Marvel's Black Widow, Wonder Woman 1984 and Top Gun: Maverick. What has been released hasn’t exactly inspired confidence amongst the major studios: Christopher Nolan’s Tenet only earned $45 million in the US market. If a cinephile release like that can experience such miserable box office returns, the coming months of a second spike of the coronavirus and local lockdowns simply means that for the studios, releasing a high-budget film simply makes no economic sense. Not even streaming - such as Disney’s live-action Mulan being made available via the Disney+ service on a pay-per-view basis - can truly replicate the cash generated by box office receipts. “If going straight to streaming was a slam dunk, then all studios would be doing it,” one former industry executive told The Times. "The theatrical and studio worlds are interdependent,” they added saying that Disney’s experiment had proved far from conclusive, pointing out that for a film to be a hit on streaming services it “generally needs a good result at the cinema” as well.

This, though, highlights a point that many critics of the film industry have been saying for some time, that the industry’s reliance on a handful of franchises, be it Bond or the Marvel ‘universe’ to sell Saturday night popcorn by the bucketload, is a false economy. A $200 million-budget action movie still needs to cover its costs, as much as it promises to satisfy an audience’s need for the instant gratification that a $50 million independent production might not deliver, even if it would satisfy a more cultural nutrition, not to mention balance the books with a healthy return. One irony of all this, if you can call it that when thousands of people are facing redundancy, is that the UK is consolidating its status as a global production centre for film. Film and ‘high-end’ television production in the UK has become one of the country’s biggest industries, with studio capacity increasing all the time. According to the BFI, the value of UK production activity last year was £1.95 billion, representing 93 new homegrown films and 23 co-productions, with films carrying budgets of £30 million or over accounting for 78% of total UK film production spend. High-quality television production represented another £1.67 billion last year, a 29% increase from 2018. Comcast, the owner of Sky, recently announced plans to build 14 production stages at Elstree, creating 2,000 skilled jobs in the process. Seren Stiwdios - formerly Pinewood Wales, near Cardiff - is planning to add a further 150,000 square feet of stages and other facilities to cope with demand, which has even seen normally US-based productions move to the principality.

Picture: Twitter/James Bond

Arguably the constant demand for television series is understandable, and won’t diminish while we’re all staying at home. Film won’t be going away though: some optimists believe that despite this week’s gloom across the cinema industry, the experience of China, where repeated lockdowns have been ridden out, and cinemas have rebounded, points to a dam-burst of cinematic life next spring. That won’t comfort any of Cineworld’s 5,000 employees facing a bleak Christmas, or for those delightful independent picture houses who differentiate locally from the multiplexes. But for those - like me - who still value the big-screen experience significantly over living room consumption, the industry that has sustained Saturday nights out for more than 100 years is merely going into hibernation. And I will still be at the front of the queue next April for that Bond film.

Dress-down Monday: what to wear when you're WFH

So, to bring you up to speed, we were first told by Boris to work from home “if we can”. Then it was “go back to work, if you can”. Now it’s back to the kitchen table/spare room/sofa once more, “if we can”. Blink, and you may have missed the middle instruction. I didn't, but then, the company I work for has very sensibly adopted a WFH strategy from the outset of the pandemic, and that's fine by me. In fact, throughout this coronavirus-riven last six months I have only worked from home. I've only set foot in my nominal place of work once, and that was for the interview that landed me the job in the first place. Since then, my office has been, initially, the kitchen table, and then, when my bony arse and the dining table chairs decided they were incompatible for the better part of nine hours a day, the front room took over. The sofa and a £5 IKEA coffee table (you know the ones - all white, 55x55cm, made entirely from MDF) became my workspace. The thing is, it has all just worked. What has been weird is that in six months I haven't worn anything resembling formal clothing once. In fact, if memory serves (and that's now getting hazy), the last time I wore my bespoke three-piece suit - bought for a wedding last year - was that job interview, save one family quiz night when I thought, "for a laugh", wearing it would make me - as co-host - look like a game show presenter. It didn't. 

Over the course of these six months I have also lost almost 20 kilos in weight, rendering most of my pre-lockdown work attire ridiculous. Shirts done up would make me look like an ex-con released after serving a very long sentence, and worn tieless, are now so capacious that to leave even one button undone exposes so much chest wig I'd resemble a yacht-dwelling Mediterranean arms dealer. Suits are now so oversized, shapeless and beyond salvage that I wouldn't even pass muster in a Talking Heads tribute act. All this is just as well as I haven't, really, been required to look like anything over the last half-year. On my daily round of Skype meetings, my colleagues have presented a variety of WFH dress styles, from those who - and fair play to them - wear a formal work shirt every day as it helps them get into part, to a multitude of T-shirts (including one today bearing the name of Metallica). All is fine. None of it leaves anyone thought less professional; the work gets done, we move on.

Now, I appreciate that all these descriptions are of the waist up, but if people are wearing their joggers or, in my case during the warmest months of the year, shorts, no-one cares, or should do. So let’s bring in here Ayesha Vardag, Britain’s self-styled “top divorce lawyer” and "the Diva of Divorce", according to TIME magazine, who has issued instructions to staff at her eponymous law firm on what to wear, presumably while physically in the office. In fact, Vardag - in a leaked e-mail reported in The Times and other newspapers - has driven down into some considerable specifics: “I don’t mind cravats, formal waistcoats,” she said, giving a nod to a form of modernity not seen since Bertie Wooster was living in fear of his Aunt Agatha. However, V-neck sweaters and “woolly vests” (i.e. the tank tops and sleeveless cardigans I am also prone to wearing when the weather turns cooler) are also out. I will admit to have worn a black V-neck under my suit for a number of years, ever since Gianluca Vialli brought Italian fashion to Chelsea in the mid-90s, though my appropriation of the style was more out of hiding my gut than trying to look like Luca… Anyway, “Super-tight trousers” are also on Vardag's verboten list, as are shoes with too pointy a toe. 

Pronouncing that lawyers should “look like a pro, not a pretty young thing”, Vardag also turned her attention to female members of staff, noting that women “can still of course be discreetly sexy and colourful and flamboyant at the same time according to your preference”. Women at the firm should “never be tacky or tarty and at the same time never be drab. It’s a delicate balance which most of you know instinctively. The naked look, with lots of flesh, is not OK.” To this Vardag added that she favoured “a Chanel/Dior/Armani look”, including “elegant” shoes, “not flip flops.” Well, duh. Woe betide anyone, either, who failed to maintain their hair, instructing that it “should always be squeaky clean and should at least appear natural”. “Brush your hair!!!,” the memo continued. “Check the mirror before you come out in the morning! Do not look as if you were dragged through a hedge backwards! Consider putting it up if it’s very long.” And for anyone who might be struggling in the Barnet department, Vardag offered her own help: “A chignon [no, me neither…] packs a lot of power punch. I can show you how to tie a scarf and set a chignon if you like. I’m that old.”

“It’s a Savile Row look we’re espousing,” Vardag's missive outlines. “Generally, double cuffs and cufflinks can transform the quality you project. Go for fewer items in your wardrobe, of quality.” In defence, Emma Gill, one of Vardags’ partners at the firm, told The Times that “as a top law firm, our clients demand high standards of professionalism and this is reflected in our dress code policy. While this is embraced by staff, the occasional reminder is in order to make sure we maintain our high standards.” Well, OK. While we’ve all be frothing about the long-term impact of the coronavirus on working practices - and whether we’ll ever return to the nine-to-five, Monday to Friday - little attention has actually been paid to the somewhat ludicrous proposition that mixed-pattern working could mean suits for some, three days a week, jogging bottoms and T-shirts on two days a week. Or not at all. In fact, no one really knows what will happen long term. The government and it’s Olympic-strength flip-flopping on everything might not help, either. 

Years ago, when I worked in the Netherlands, my then-company instigated a ‘dress-down Friday’ at its Amsterdam headquarters in the hope of instigating a more casual atmosphere for the final day of the working week. This, for some of my male Dutch colleagues of a certain age and background, meant wearing trousers in a variety of alarming hues (in fact, of a vibrancy even Michael Portillo in his railway journey documentaries, in which he wears ever-more shocking pastels, would reject for being ‘too much’). For others, it meant adopting the less adventurous American week-round office style, namely chinos and the ubiquitous button-down shirt. At my last company - a Silicon Valley-headquartered software business - de rigeur officewear consisted exclusively of jeans (the expensive-looking indigo kind, not the oil-stained, ragged-at-the-knee variety) for men matched with a double-cuff smart shirt and a blazer of some sort. Those wearing it thought they were edgy software sales types, but when everyone is dressed the same, it's no less a uniform than bankers all in pinstripes. 

This did serve to remind me of the French word for a suit: “costume”. Because that, in essence, is what all of these practices are. Whether you’re wearing a two-piece suit, blazer and jeans, or a tweed jacket with mustard-yellow jumbo cords, it is still nothing more than conformity. For that matter, we could all turn up dressed as Scott Tracy from Thunderbirds and it would matter very little. The fact remains that I actually look forward to the day when I can put on a smart suit and shirt, and lace up one of the pairs of formal shoes I’ve got gathering dust in a wardrobe. And I’m not in any way someone who likes to conform like that. I guess, though, it does come down to your personal style, but also the type of work you do. But it also depends on what your employer actually expects. Only 55% of workplaces have a dress code, according to the website Salary.com, and very few companies outline their expectations when onboarding new employees.

For many workers, it's trial and occasionally error. Many's the newbie who turns up on Day 1 wearing collar and tie or an expensive designer suit, only to discover they stand out amongst an office crowded by more casual business attire. When I worked in Silicon Valley I was told that wearing anything other than the local camouflage would stand me out as a 'suit'. So, jeans and whatever it was for two years. "If you work in law, regularly meet with executives, or otherwise hold a high-level position, you might be asked to come dressed 'business formal' or in 'boardroom attire'," advises lifestyle guru Jacqueline Curtis in a post on moneycrashers.com. "This is the highest level of professional dress". She recommends tailored suits in dark, neutral colours for men, a white shirt with a high-quality tie in "muted" neutral colours. "No novelty ties," she points out, instantly flagging the obscenities worn by The Fast Show's resident office "laugh", Colin Hunt. "Shoes should be closed-toe oxfords in brown or black, not loafers," she adds. So, what about my preferred brown suede numbers? Women are advised to follow a similar conservatism - skirt or trouser suits in neutral colours, closed-toe heels in similar non-startling hues.

Reading Curtis's advice, however, I recognise how few professions require such office attire these days. Even bank dealing rooms. The norm seems to be "business professional" which seems to sit somewhere between conservative and casual, and is more broadly open to interpretation. And then, if you're lucky, you'll work in an environment where it - mostly - really doesn't matter how you dress, as long as you don't cause offence or look like you've turned up in your decorating outfit. The bottom line, says Curtis, is to "err on the side of caution", especially when new in an organisation. Keep it “clean, tailored, and professional” is her advice. I suppose, then, the best guide is to simply understand your stakeholders, those you work with, those you work for and those you would, in normal times, encounter from outside your organisation. 

However, these aren't normal times. Your guess is as good as mine as to when they will be normal once again, by which time I'll have lost even more weight, and frankly will look ridiculous in anything I might have worn even six months ago. Which means taking out another mortgage on a new wardrobe that does fit, but let's cross that bridge when we come to it, eh? For now, I'll continue to dress appropriately, safe in the knowledge that the only people who can see what I wear below the waist Monday to Friday are my family, occasionally fellow customers at Waitrose during a lunchtime run, and the postman. Oh, and the cat, but her opinion really doesn't count.

It's the vinyl countdown - Record Store Day is with us again

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

To some of us, buying records - and I mean the round, mainly black objects with a hole in the middle - is more than the fetish those who remain indifferent to physical music ownership might think it is. Each to their own. For everyone who maintains that Spain can't be beaten for a holiday (remember them?) another will insist on Greece. For Nike see Adidas. You get my point.

Music's digitisation, first with the CD and, latterly, streaming services, has undoubtedly set free consumption, and facilitated it into our busy, mobile, portable lives. However, it also abandoned the pleasures of opening a brand new record, removing it from the sleeve while still studying the artwork and liner notes, and then sitting down to listen. Well, at least, that's my justification. It's also why I'm one of those happy to be ensnared by Record Store Day, the normally annual vinyl-buying splurge designed to help out independent music dealers as they compete with the few remaining record chains, the Amazons of this world, the supermarket checkout impulse-buy points-of-sale, and streaming.

COVID-19 has forced RSD to this year postpone the regular April fixture into three smaller 'drops' - the first in August, a second today and the third next month. August's drop met with no shortage of custom, with record shops reporting brisk in-store business and the now-familiar queues forming at sunrise by punters keen to bag special releases and the odd rarity. It is, at the end of the day, a purely indulgent, self-serving frenzy, but the punters get something unique and the shops do a decent bit of business. Those that get it right, of course.

One emporium local to me, which didn't open physically on the day (unlike plenty who did), decided to do its RSD trading entirely online, with a clunky system by which you registered interest in a release in advance and then waited on the day for an e-mail at 6pm to say you could then go online and buy it. When this didn't work at the time when everything was supposed to be up and running everyone went to the shop's website and promptly crashed it, rendering Record Store Day a frustrating Saturday evening hitting 'refresh' a lot. For  RSD read RSI. Now, I appreciate that the shop in question may have stayed shut out of consideration for its staff, but it's the kind of experience that doesn't do well for customer loyalty. And makes me wish I'd been queuing up at the crack of dawn to spend my money somewhere that managed to get it right.

Perseverance, however, paid off in the end. Stupid or not, we got what we wanted from retailers who had got their e-commerce acts together: releases as disparate as The The's latest RSD-only single (a regular occurrence, but you wish Matt Johnson would do a new album, rather than these one-offs...) and a compilation of Memphis soul obscurities, the obligatory release from The Dame (BowieNowChanges) and a vinyl reissue of Peter Bruntnell's sublime Normal For Bridgwater. Happy days. Today's drop will be a little more modest (just 89 releases as opposed to August’s 345), but that may not be the point: whether you’re interested in a Two-Tone 40th anniversary compilation, Paul McCartney’s debut solo album, The Yardbirds classic Roger The Engineer or even Britney Spears’ Oops! …I Did It Again, it's sometimes worth taking a punt on RSD, buying something you've either never heard before, or haven't owned since you had it as a crudely taped copy back in the day. That’s half the fun of record curation in middle age.

“The real thing, the real joy, is in the tactile relationship, between you and the artist,” says Simon Tyler, who runs the splendid Creekside Vinyl in Faversham, Kent. He points to the physical object itself: “This square piece of cardboard with a 12-inch round record slipped inside," he says, “It's a magical object.” Not surprisingly, Simon says that the magic begins with the record shop itself, a point I wholeheartedly agree with. The imposition of lockdown on in-store retailing severely curtailed the pleasure of browsing and discovering something you didn't even know you wanted. Or in the case of shops like Simon’s, a natter with a friendly and knowledgeable proprietor. 

“Firstly,” he says, “you hear the shop as you walk along the street. The strain of music drifting out of the double doors turns your head. ‘What’s that? Is it? Oh God, yes! I haven’t heard THAT for years!’.” Once inside, the tactile experience draws you in further. “You see row upon row of albums calling to you like a siren,” Simon says, describing his own shop’s experience, in a calming corner of Kent's oldest and quaintest market town. “You walk across the threshold and let your fingers browse across the top of the records. You see familiar pictures and faces, and new images that offer a strange fascination. They tease you; they reveal and yet conceal the secrets within.”

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

Simon’s view is obviously biased, owing to running a generously stocked shop full of vinyl records, but he’s spot on. Some people can enter a fashion boutique and feel tempted to buy the place up; record shops, for me, hold the same appeal, such is my interest in buying something new or something worth hearing anew.

There is, as Simon says, a magical experience to opening up a freshly-bought record, but to me it is more about the listening experience. That, I recognise, sounds like I've swallowed the music industry's Kool-Aid and gone back for seconds. Records are, though, magical objects, which may go to explain figures from the BPI, the UK's recording industry body, earlier this year which revealed that many people who buy LPs never actually get round to playing them (and not just those like me who acquire too many and then struggle to find time to listening to them). 

Moreover, the BPI found that as many as a fifth doesn't even have anything to play their vinyl on. This reflects strangely in light of vinyl enjoying sales growth for 12 consecutive years in the UK, now accounting for one in every eight albums bought as a physical format. 

Over 4.3 million vinyl LPs were sold in the UK last year, a 4% increase on 2018. In the United States, vinyl sales have just surpassed sales of CDs for the first time since the 1980s, accounting for $232 million of music sales in the first six months of this year, as opposed to just under $130 million for CDs, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. That, the RIAA has revealed, is a 4% increase for LPs and a 48% decrease for the shiny silver discs. This might also reflect the times we’re in, but despite my love of vinyl I’ve still continued to buy CDs that I might want to play in the car. However, seeing as lockdown and all of that has meant I’ve hardly used my car since March, my listening has been largely done at home over the last six months. 

However, while all this love for vinyl is admirable, it can’t be ignored that physical sales continue to drop, and the pandemic isn’t helping. Industry figures have shown that overall physical music sales continue to drop exponentially as streaming has grown, both for ‘free’, ad-supported services as well as premium subscriptions. That, at the end of the day, is not good news for the artists themselves, who get a lesser cut of the action than they do with physical sales. For the so-called ‘heritage acts’, like Fleetwood Mac, who’ve re-released back catalogue material on vinyl to relatively healthy receipts, physical sales might offset lower income from streaming. For those in middling industry positions, now also denied the opportunity to play live - which, these days, is what makes them money, the virus has hit them hard.

Picture: Creekside Vinyl

Record Store Day, at least, will provide a momentary fillip for the artists who take part - even if their releases aren’t even taken out of the shrink wrap, a phenomenon identified by the BPI in its All About The Music yearbook. “A proportion of people are buying vinyl because they’re a superfan,” said Rob Crutchley, the book’s author, when it came out in April. “Even if they don’t actually have a turntable they’re still keen to support the artist and have the artefact itself."

"There is still a strong core of fans who also value the opportunity to acquire, own or gift recorded music on physical format,” Cruchley added, pointing to the custom of artists using Record Store Day to give fans something unique. “Sometimes it can be because they’re catalogue titles that are being re-pressed in a new edition - maybe a run on a different coloured vinyl - other times it might be a new title that has a limited press on a certain format.” 

This, then, points to the irrationality of consumerism overall. I’ll be the first to ’fess up - mainly to my partner - at buying albums that already exist in my collection. In some cases, it’s for new sonic experiences - remastered, refreshed editions on 180g vinyl that have improved upon recordings made many years ago and now benefit from modern studio and reproduction techniques. Or they’re albums bought on CD early in the day, often when the new digital discs were effectively crude transfers from analogue recordings. In some cases, they’re albums I’ve only ever heard on cassette tape, furtively 'borrowed' from my brother and recorded while my dad was out at work. 

“The joy of records is in the experience,” says Simon Tyler. “That joy is deeply personal, and long may it continue.”  Record buying is, then, one of the cycles of life. There is little real justification for buying an album again “because it sounds better”, but the same applies to replacing that VHS copy of The Godfather, with the DVD, then the Blu-ray Disc and ultimately the 4K Blu-ray version to play on your super-duper new flatscreen TV. And I know you wouldn’t buy a new copy of a classic book because it’s been given a new cover, but there’s a difference. There really is.

Let’s get the next one out before we get the next one out

Picture: Michael Kovac/Getty Images

To another pet topic: James Bond. We haven’t even got our peepers on the much-delayed No Time To Die, Daniel Craig’s final outing as 007, without the rumour mill grinding away over who will be his replacement. This week's outbreak has been prompted by online reports Tom Hardy has landed the gig, claims so convincing that, apparently, betting has been suspended on all other candidates. There’s no confirmation or denial from anyone actually in the know, of course, but you'd also hope that the subject wouldn't even be on the table until No Time To Die actually hits screens in November ( assuming Boris - that’s the prime minister, not some Spectre supervillain - doesn’t have other ideas). 

Be that as it may, the resurrection of speculation about Hardy - a longtime resident of the list of potential 007s - has instigated more debate about the optimum age a Bond actor should be. Hardy is currently 43, and if he won the role, would be the oldest new James Bond since Roger Moore was cast in Live And Let Die aged 46. Moore would make his final outing as Bond in A View To A Kill at the age of 58 (not far off retirement age for a British civil servant), and his love scene with the-then 30-year-old Tanya Roberts was somewhat icky. 

There is, though, no formal recipe for what makes a Bond. In Ian Fleming’s books, the character was in his mid-to-late 30s, a little older than Sean Connery when he was cast in Dr. No, and older still than George Lazenby when cast in On Her Majesty's Secret Service at 29. Daniel Craig, was 38 when Casino Royale came out, and has without doubt redefined the character for the cinema. So, when Eon Productions do come to cast 'Bond 26' - and if Hardy is the man for the job - they’ll be contending with an actor who'll be, probably by the time the film comes out, in his mid-40s. Not that it should be an issue: with roles in films like Mad Max, The Revenant and The Dark Knight (as well as Layer Cake with Craig), Hardy has built up a repertoire of playing solid, physical characters, which would continue the trend set by Craig’s more muscular Bond (as opposed to Pierce Brosnan, his predecessor, who took the character back to the suave, less brooding, days of Moore, though thankfully with well-cut Brioni suits, rather than those awful safari jackets and flares).

Despite Hardy being installed as the nailed-on favourite to next play Bond, there is still no shortage of other names being talked of, with posh boys James Norton and Tom Hiddleston (largely the result of playing a Bondesque character in The Night Manager), Bodyguard’s Richard Madden, Michael Fassbender and even Idris Elba in the frame (despite now being 48). 30-year-old Jack Lowden from Dunkirk appears to be the youngest name mentioned. However, this is speculative, and pointless speculation at that. Plus, we shouldn’t get too carried away, even if Hardy’s name refuses to go away. 

The week's news flurry was the result of a post on a fairly obscure blog, The Vulcan Reporter, which, as its name might suggest, has history as a portal for Star Trek stuff. Quite what authority it has, then, to make the claim about a new Bond being cast by the normally militarily tight-lipped Eon is not known. Even if The Vulcan Reporter has taken a complete punt - one, by the way, that every newspaper in Christendom has reported on - it isn’t a bad shout. Hardy has, somewhat like Daniel Craig, been able to quietly move between parts throughout his career without establishing one that would prejudice the audience's view of him as a Bond. Roger Moore, of course, had already played Simon Templar - not a million miles from 007 - in The Saint on TV before he made Live And Let Die. Hardy has played both heroes and villains, including both Ronnie and Reggie Kray in Legend, as well as Al Capone.

Would an even more rugged Bond work for these times? When Casino Royale appeared, The Bourne Identity had beaten Bond to it by four years, redefining the spy-based action thriller for the new Millennium. While Casino didn’t need to replicate Bourne, there was certainly an amping up of action sequences to match him. The opening parcour chase in Madagascar threw down a marker at an instance that Bond would not take his new cinematic rival lying down. Hardy certainly could compete with the physical aspects of maintaining the Craig Bond’s exhausting action sequences, as the No Time To Die trailers have emphatically previewed. Plus, any actor needing a north star here need only look at Tom Cruise, still doing his own stunts in the Mission: Impossible franchise (something I bore witness to one frosty January morning in 2018 when my girlfriend and I were walking to the Tate Modern and just happened to see Cruise sprinting across Blackfriars Bridge while being filmed for M:I6).

The big question, though, is whether Hardy can do suave. Again, Craig nailed this 007 characteristic against expectation (as did the criminally underrated Timothy Dalton, who played a fine Bond in The Living Daylights and Licence To Kill). This, though, is harder to gauge: Hardy’s history of characters has not pandered to any one class of character, but this may be to his advantage. 

There’s nothing in the script that says that, just because Bond knows his claret from his Beaujolais, the actor playing him should do, too. After all, Sean Connery was a former milkman of a working class Edinburgh background. And, almost 60 years since Dr. No, his shadow - justifiably - still hangs over the role. And, I suspect, always will.

Anyway, before we get too carried away over Tom Hardy or anyone else playing Bond in a presumed 26th film, some time in hopefully the near future, we really must get the current James Bond out in front of the world. No Time To Die should have had its premiere in April, but COVID-19 did its best, and even 007 - who has, in the past, overcome the most dastardly plots to threaten the world - was pushed back to November. So, maybe, let’s focus on getting the next Bond film out, before we start talking about the next James Bond, eh?

Time for a Monday Moan? Not just yet

Picture: BBC Sport

Long-standing readers of this blog might recall a tradition that set in during José Mourinho's brief final season as Chelsea manager. After signing a new contract on August 7th, 2015 (which, incidentally, would have expired only last year), Mourinho oversaw a run of games that saw Chelsea pick up just 11 points from their first 12 Premier League fixtures, and exit the League Cup to Stoke by October. By December 17th, when Mourinho left Stamford Bridge for a second time ("by mutual consent"), the club had lost nine of its 16 league matches. Chelsea were in something of a death spiral and, at the moment of the Portuguese's departure, were one place above the relegation zone.

Along the way, my posts became exponentially more exasperated, to the extent that, like my very first missive in the blogosphere (a rant about England's exit from the 2010 World Cup, written the morning after), I established a history of letting rip on the first working day of the week. During Mourinho's progressive denouement at Chelsea, my Facebook updates to promote such posts became known as The Monday Moan.

That I mention this today, the Monday after Chelsea lost yesterday - and didn’t lose well - is something of a coincidence: it is too soon, two games into the new season, to get into a cycle of misery, especially as they won their first, last Monday, against Brighton, and they were, yesterday, playing the newly-crowned English league champions. But this is what football is about. A bad result at the weekend - even one as gloriously sunny and summery as this one was - is all it takes to start the week in a fug. But (and here’s where a football fan’s acute sense of denial instantly kicks in) there is need for some - some - perspective.

To summarise, Chelsea, with their expensively assembled, £230 million of summer acquisitions, were facing Liverpool at the Bridge in only their second competitive game of the season. In some respects, a tough break to meet last season’s champions so soon, but then to think that way is to already take on a defeatist view. Chelsea, after all, did finish fourth - an unlikely outcome, given the challenges of a transfer ban and relying heavily on youth last season. But that shouldn't necessarily mean that meeting Liverpool is anything less than a peer encounter. Chelsea-Liverpool has always been one of the fixtures I’ve attended religiously, dating back to the late 1970s, when the Merseysiders were imperious and the Londoners were in the mire of financial crises. That, to the 11-year-old me, was less apparent. What drew me in was that these two teams represented the classic football confrontation: the blues and the reds. Human Subbuteo. And thus it has continued for 40-plus years, all through the storied (and well-documented - see my post from June, Red Rain) history of encounters between the teams. 

So, then, yesterday. A cagey start by both sides saw Liverpool increase their presence, pressing Chelsea high and clearly setting out to test a largely unchanged defence, their Achilles heel all last season. That approach won out on the stroke of half time when Andreas Christensen lost his head and rugby-tackled Sadio Mané to the ground as he charged through on goal, to be rightfully dismissed after a VAR review of the initial yellow card. No one, least of all Christensen, should have had any complaints. After the break, Liverpool came out to face ten-man Chelsea with renewed, ominous purpose, Mané proving the tormentor twice, scoring within five minutes of the interval, and again, four minutes later. Perhaps Chelsea could be credited with keeping the scoreline at 0-2 for the remaining 35 minutes of play, but it was the nature of those two conceded goals that require the attention.

That £230 million has mostly been spent on attacking players, and given Timo Werner’s exciting pace (and a couple of decent chances yesterday he’ll regret), and the gradual introduction of the £71 million Kai Havertz, Chelsea could have one of the most fearsome attacking line-ups in the Premier League, given all the other options in Frank Lampard’s toolbox. But, as has been recanted verbatim over recent months, it’s at the back that changes are needed, and needed fast. Ben Chilwell, the left-back Chelsea coveted for some time, is yet to make his debut due to injury, meaning the defensively weak wingback Marcos Alonso continues to have put his lack of defensive pace and positioning on display. So it proved with Mané’s first goal, the result of Liverpool sending the Senegalese winger, plus Keïta, Alexander-Arnold, Salah and Firmino into the final third, baffling Chelsea’s defenders (now with Tomori replacing Christensen). Firmino beat Alonso to cut the ball across for Mané to head into the goal. For once, Chelsea’s Kepa Arrizabalaga couldn’t be blamed, directly. For what happened next, he could.

They say that if you’re already in a hole it’s a good idea to stop digging, but Arrizabalaga has clearly not heard this adage. As if he needed to add to the growing list of calamities, what seemed like a bread-and-butter clearance out to Jorginho was intercepted too easily by Mané, who simply poked it into the net with the casual ease of someone sweeping a tin can out of the way.

Almost to a newspaper, every back page today has said the exact same thing: Édouard Mendy cannot arrive from Rennes soon enough. We’re told that the goalkeeper's £20 million signing is imminent, but on this display from Chelsea's current stopper, Frank Lampard’s first duty this morning was probably to bang on Marina Granovskaia’s office door with a demand to know where she currently is with the Mendy deal, and to even offer a few quid of his own money to tip the balance of any last-minute wrangling.

Taking a step back, Chelsea weren’t helped yesterday by reticence. It was almost as if they were intimidated from the outset by Jurgen Klopp’s champions. They certainly allowed Liverpool’s high press to get the better of them, meaning that the Londoners’ defence was, once again, thin ice waiting to crack. The suggestion, here is one of a gulf in class, but when you look at where Chelsea have spent their money this summer, I genuinely think that they’ve got what it takes to compete within the top four. But it will take time. The veteran Thiago Silva, signed from PSG, has yet to make his debut, like Chilwell, meaning that the obvious weaknesses in defence have yet to be strengthened. Havertz is only two games in, and while Werner is looking sharp, he’s still, understandably, getting his timing right. With the other newbie, Hakim Ziyech, injured along with Christian Pulisic, arguably, the natural heir to Eden Hazard, Chelsea’s expensive new line-up is yet to take shape. Lampard, though, for all his exalted status amongst the club’s fans, also needs to learn better of what to do with these assets. One criticism of last season was that he wasn’t able to settle on an optimum defensive line-up, and that appears to have continued into this season. None of his central defenders appear rooted in the role (with Antonio Rudiger not even in yesterday’s squad), so with a risky goalkeeper and a never-the-same line-up in front of him, the inconsistencies have been laid bare.

Ever the diplomat, Lampard tried to put a supportive arm around his first-choice keeper. Accepting the Spaniard’s “clear mistake” for Liverpool’s second goal, he said after the match that: “We have to keep working, Kepa has to keep working.” Though acknowledging that it had been two games out of two that Kepa had dropped a clanger (conceding Leandro Trossard's goal last Monday against Brighton), he said: “Players need support, particularly from myself. I give that to all the players. Kepa has to keep working, nobody tries to make mistakes in football, it is the nature of the game. You have to be strong, you keep going and that is where he is at." Quite what Lampard’s mood is like privately is up for debate.

What he does know, or at least should know, as he opened up training this morning at Cobham, is that all the spending on top European attacking talent will amount to nothing if his defence continues to leak goals like they did last season. And, at risk of sounding ungrateful, the addition of just two new defenders (well, I say ‘new’, but Silva is now 35), means that more, much more, needs to be done with what Lampard already has in the department. In Reece James and Fikayo Tomori, for example, two youngsters of genuine promise, but still with much to learn. Stability - rooted in a goalkeeper who knows what he’s doing and can command those in front of him - is essential. That won’t come quickly, or easily.

But, to step back a bit further, there's a reason why I'm not yet ready to reinstate the Monday Moan. Yesterday's game was a tough schooling for Lampard, and from the one club Chelsea fans would have preferred not to have received it from (well, maybe the other club, if you include Tottenham). Two games in, it's too soon to press the panic button. For context, go back to 2016 and Antonio Conte's first season in charge. By September 11th, Chelsea's early season wins had been arrested by a 2-2 draw with Swansea. Then came back-to-back defeats - to Liverpool and Arsenal, the latter a humiliating 3-0 reverse. Conte had seen enough and switched to the 3-4-3 wingback system that would propel the team to Premier League champions eight months later, and with a 13-point margin over runners-up Spurs. The point here is that it really is too soon to moan, even if, this morning, it's fully justified.