The children of the 21st century are still listening to The Beatles

It’s more than half a century since The Beatles broke up, 43 years since John Lennon was murdered, and almost 22 since George Harrison passed to the next world, but in that time the Fab industry has been relentless, respectfully - mostly - but efficiently mining a legacy generated in those ten years between 1960 and 1970 when they were originally making music together.

Next Thursday we’ll get to hear what has been pitched as the band’s “final” recording with the release of Now And Then, an apparently lost demo that Lennon recorded onto a cassette at home in New York in 1977. In 1994, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono gave the tape to then-surviving Beatles Paul McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starr, who were able to recover their bandmate’s voice from other demos, add their own and instruments, and release the songs Free As A Bird and Real Love as singles in 1995 and 1996, part of The Beatles Anthology project. 

Now And Then was also on the tape, but technical limitations at the time prevented Lennon’s vocals from being adequately recovered. But now, using the same AI technology Peter Jackson used to isolate dialogue in Get Back, his epic 2021 documentary series about the making of the Let It Be album, it will be released next week as “the last Beatles song”. It features Lennon’s original vocals from the tape, along with guitar added by Harrison in 1995 (before the project was abandoned in the belief that the track was unsalvageable). Last year, Starr recorded the drums with McCartney adding bass, guitar and piano. String arrangements from Eleanor Rigby, Because and Here, There And Everywhere were worked into the mix. 

The finished track will be officially made public next Thursday, with a full release on Friday. A 12-minute film - Now And Then - The Last Beatles Song - will premiere on The Beatles’ YouTube channel on Wednesday, telling the story of how the single came about.

There had been rumours for a while of an unreleased Beatles song coming out, and a rough version of Now And Then was said to be available online, but next week’s official release of the single commences a new wave of commercial activity for the Fabs, which will see fifth - and expanded - reissues of the legendary ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ Beatles compilation albums, respectively covering 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, going on sale on 10 November (handily the day before my birthday... 😉). 

Originally released in April 1973, the new, improved and expanded editions of the albums will include Now And Then and comprise various packages, including a six-LP 180g vinyl option and a four-CD version. All 75 songs have been newly remixed in stereo by Giles (son of George) Martin and Sam Okell at Abbey Road using the ‘de-mixing’ technology used for the recent reissues of individual Beatles albums. Of course, with the exception of Now And Then, everything on the two albums will already reside in most Beatle fans’ record collections, but that won’t stop them being acquired again for some 35 extra tracks not included in previous releases, with greater inclusion from the Revolver, ‘White’, Abbey Road and Let It Be albums.

Of course, this is another cash grab by a band that, despite existing for that relatively brief ten-year period, and disbanding more than half a century ago, has become one of the most enduring franchises in entertainment. Which isn’t all that new: in 1964, their canny then-manager, Brian Epstein, negotiated a $10,000 fee for the band to make three appearances on CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show. Even in 1964, that wasn’t a particularly large sum of money, but Epstein’s deal ensured that their US TV debut was seen by a record 73 million viewers, giving the band unprecedented commercial exposure and launching the ‘British Invasion’, from which they profited handsomely (though, you could argue, costing John Lennon his life just 16 years later).

Interviewed by CNBC a few years ago, former Philadelphia news anchor Larry Kane, who covered The Beatles on their 1964 and 1965 US tours, said the band could never have imagined how long - or how lucrative - their careers would turn out to be. “It was always a big question for them: when was the bubble going to burst? I don’t think they had any idea it would go on like this. I asked Brian Epstein in 1964 how long it would last. He said ‘Larry, the children of the 21st century will be listening to the Beatles.’ He was right.”

Experts will attribute this longevity to the fact that The Beatles were, to use marketingspeak, ‘first movers’, establishing their brand in a way matched only by the Rolling Stones. Following that Ed Sullivan debut, Gretsch and Rickenbacker guitars, as used by the band, flew out of American musical instrument shops, the start of an entire industry in replica Beatle ‘mop top’ wigs, collarless suits, Yellow Submarine toys - you name it. Now, however, we’re well used to bands manufactured for pure profit, but even if, in hindsight, The Beatles were the marketeer’s dream back in October 1962 when Love Me Do came out - four clean-cut young lads from working class Liverpool, singing simple songs about romance. When billboards started appearing in America saying “The Beatles are coming”,  a commercial phenomenon as powerful as Coca-Cola, Ford or McDonalds was about to be unleashed.

63 years after the group’s formation in Liverpool, global Beatlemania has never bitten the dust. The relentless re-releases, compilation albums, physical and multimedia projects and even the incredible Cirque du Soleil Love show in Las Vegas have not only kept the legacy alive, but the tills making money. In fact, taken as a whole, The Beatles’ financial impact continues to eclipse anything or anyone else the music industry has ever produced, with McCartney, Starr, and the estates of Lennon and Harrison, together with The Beatles’ holding company, finding myriad opportunities to leverage the Fab brand that were never available to the band when they were formally together.

The Beatles continue to be the biggest selling music act of all time. Data a decade ago put their total worldwide album sales at more than 600 million (177 million alone in the US, with Elvis Presley behind them on 135 million). Even in 1964 they made the equivalent of $188 million. Paul McCartney is today worth around £650 million, with Ringo Starr worth £247 million, by default making him the world’s wealthiest drummer (though compare this with Taylor Swift who, according to a Bloomberg report yesterday, has just become America’s first billionaire pop star by value).

It was, though, business that contributed to The Beatles’ original collapse as a band: Epstein’s death from an overdose in 1967 let to the organisation behind them entering a tailspin, even if the creativity relented. The year before, the exhausted band had famously given up touring in order to focus on the quality of their music, much to Epstein’s annoyance, who saw them cutting off their noses to spite their commercial teeth. 

Following his death, they lacked the business acumen to manage their finances. The Magical Mystery Tour film was a whimsically distracting box office dud, while the loss-making Apple Boutique took the quartet further into internecine sensitivity (Abbey Road’s You Never Give Me Your Money could well have been a boardroom comment). The looming denouement would come to a head in September 1969 when Lennon informed McCartney and Starr, amid discussions with businessman Allen Klein over renegotiating the band’s contract with EMI, that he was leaving. Just not straightaway. The following April, McCartney counter-announced that he was going to leave. Such discord, of course, is now long forgotten.

“It was the closest we’ll ever come to having [John] back in the room so it was very emotional for all of us,” the now 83-year-old Ringo Starr told journalists about their work on Now And Then. “It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.” McCartney - still considered by many The Beatle who broke up the band - was equally as emotional: “There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” he said of the AI-rendered production. “And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.”

The world will have to wait until next Thursday to hear the song and judge for themselves whether it is a worthy addition to the Beatles canon, or just a sentimental paragraph in their lengthy history. It is, though, a history that shows little sign of ending. “Kids are listening today who never have seen Paul or me, they're into the music,” Ringo Starr  told USA Today a decade ago, and he’s still right. “The thing I’m most proud of is the music, not the haircuts. The music is it. That's what will last.”

He’s right. Contrarians will readily say that so-called ‘legacy’ acts like The Beatles are holding up the production line of new music, but I would counter by saying that their music is timeless and artistically classic. Shakespeare may have written his last play 400 years ago, but his work is as relevant and loved today as it was then. Perhaps pretentiously, I’d say The Beatles should be given the same consideration.

Arrested development - the brief career of the biggest band in the world

It is New Year’s Eve, 1983. I am with my brother and sister-in-law at Wembley Arena to see a band, universally tagged the biggest in the world by the press, play what would be their last gig on home soil for almost 24 years. It’s also the biggest party of the year: for a start, it’s New Year’s Eve, and it’s also the guitarist’s 41st birthday. The band is at the very top of their game. The album they’re midway through touring is a number one simultaneously in the UK and the US, and one of the biggest sellers around the world that year. It would be regarded as one of the records that defined the 1980s.

Several months previously, the band had sold out New York’s Shea Stadium, in the words of the lead singer, “borrowing it from The Beatles”. Performing to 67,000 people, they could have played to more, such was the demand for tickets, with local news stations warning those without to not even bother turning up. According to a pre-Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant, reporting on the gig for Smash Hits, all day long every car radio in the Greater New York Area was pumping out just one song - theirs, indicative of it becoming the top-selling single in the United States for the whole of 1983.

“Today it seems like The Police are the biggest group in America, just as on another day it might seem like the Rolling Stones or The Who,” Tennant writes. But, he adds, there is a darkness setting in with the trio, then still only six years and five albums into their career. Rumours in the US music press suggest that they’re about to split up. They say that Synchronicity, that record-breaking fifth album, had been made under strained circumstances, with frontman Sting, guitarist Andy Summers and the drummer (and band co-founder) Stewart Copeland barely communicating with each other in the studio.

“We’ve got the biggest album, the biggest single, the biggest video, the biggest concert tour,” Sting tells Tennant ahead of the Shea Stadium show, branding rumours of ructions as “RUBBISH!”. But the then 31-year-old singer says, tellingly: “We’ve realised what our strengths are and what our weaknesses are. In a sense we must get on terribly well to be onstage together. We still work as a group, our records are better than they’ve ever been. Something somewhere works, man, and it’s worth the difficulties, it’s worth the problems.”

A year on, with the Synchronicity tour concluded, it is announced that The Police are going on hiatus. A sixth album is reportedly considered, but in the end that turns out to be that. It would take another 23 years, and a cash-grab one-off ‘reunion’ tour, that the biggest band in the world in 1983 would play together. Sting would release his debut solo album The Dream Of The Blue Turtles in 1985, carving out a career on his own that would make him a brand in his own right – a rainforest-saving (and other good causes), tantric sex-shagging, Karl Jung-following Tuscan vineyard-owning multi-millionaire property magnate.

However, what gets forgotten in pretty much every profile of Sting is the six years that turbocharged his rise, namely The Police, and how they appeared at the tail end of punk, consciously trying to exploit its aesthetic without actually being punks.

Picture: Rocket 88 Books

40 years have elapsed since The Police disbanded (the first time), but the six years in which they produced five albums and a steady stream of properly big hit singles tends to get overlooked when the music press comes to write somewhat hagiographic profiles of the biggest beasts of the rock era. Perhaps that will change with the publication, today of Stewart Copeland’s Police Diaries. Sourced from the drummer’s personal journals, it outlines how, in late 1976, Copeland – the son of a CIA agent and who’d been playing with proto-prog rockers Curved Air until quite recently - decided that punk, then ruffling feathers via the likes of the Sex Pistols, provided a platform for commercial success. 

Calculatingly, too, he concluded that forming a trio would maximise financial efficiency (citing Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience as models). So he set about finding a couple of bandmates: “Blazing on my drums gets me breathing too hard for vocals, so either the guitarist or the bassist had to be the singer. I had a pretty utilitarian view of singing and placed more value on charisma than vocal excellence. Besides, in this new scene it was mostly yelling anyway,” he wrote in one diary entry.

The first to sign up was Corsican guitarist Henry Padovani, a friend of a friend, but lacking vocal skills. That role – after considerable effort trying to track him down - went to a Geordie bass player and former school teacher, then playing in a north-eastern jazz combo called Last Exit, with whom Copeland has been introduced to when Curved Air played Newcastle in September 1976. 

“I had called [Sting] out of the blue and asked if he had any ambition to hit the big time down in London - without his band,” Copeland writes. At first the singer was unconvinced of Copeland’s pitch, but expressed some curiosity: “In two words, ‘keep talking’, our relationship was defined for the next two years. I had to keep talking up our prospects so he could confidently pour his mojo into our combined mission rather than into all of the other options in the big city. I also learned right there that he was a free agent and open to suggestion. Excellent! He got an earful of my grandiose designs and convincing certitude but I was careful not to emphasise the punk thing. It was more about how we could use this new scene to get around the sclerotic music business empires and storm the walls.”

Picture: Stewart Copeland

Eventually Sting would come down to London in December 1976 and join Copeland’s venture (although the move was mainly to allow Sting’s then wife, Frances Tomelty, to pursue an acting career). In early 1977, Copeland and Sting found themselves playing in a short-lived prog-ish foursome called Strontium 90, where they were joined by session guitarist Andy Summers, who was a good ten years older than them, and had previously been in the ’60s outfit Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band. With the nascent idea of a punk trio still in play, Summers was asked if he’d join the other project, leading to Padovani getting the elbow.

The new band would make their live debut at a Birmingham club in August 1977, setting in train an extraordinary, six-year race to the very top. As a trio, they were still unique: most bands at the time had four members at least, but with Copeland’s frenetic drumming, Sting’s vocals (and, let’s not forget, cheekbones) and Summers’ versatility as a guitarist, they appropriated punk just as it was starting to morph into ‘New Wave’, that crystalisation of mid-70s, double denim-clad, pub rock R’n’B.

The Police as a recording entity wouldn’t come into being until the beginning of 1978 when the all-blond trio (dyed for a money-making chewing gum commercial that was never aired) started recording their first album at a tiny studio in Leatherhead, Surrey, with just £1500 borrowed from Copeland’s brother Miles to fund the project.

Outlandos d’Amour would take six months of stop-start recording to make, but before it was finished, an early single was released in the April, Roxanne – a ribald tale about a prostitute…which subsequently earned it a BBC ban. With the record finally in the can, another single was released that August, Can’t Stand Losing You, but as that covered the equally thorny subject of suicide it, too, was banned. 

With the album’s release in October 1978 the band commenced a promotional tour, from which, bizarrely, in the even more sensitive United States Roxanne took off as a single, presumably due to Americans being unable to work out what “put on the red light” was all about. Emboldened, A&M Records re-released it in the UK the following April, scoring a hit. The Police started to take off. Another reissue, of Can’t Stand Losing You, even came close to becoming No.1 in the UK, beaten only by the Boomtown Rats’ I Don’t Like Mondays.

It’s around this time that I came into the picture. I was just too young to be a punk native, but as I turned 11 in 1978 I started to become more independently musically aware. Radio One was playing the likes of The Jam, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and The Blockheads, Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds. Dire Straits’ pub rock-influenced Sultans Of Swing was a radio hit, and US imports like Blondie and Talking Heads were presenting an alternative view of the term ‘punk’ with their less phlegmatic, New York-savvy take on the genre. For me, pre-MTV and not yet reading the music press (I certainly wouldn’t count Look-In amongst that club), music was something to be consumed aurally. Weirdly, I discovered Genesis around the same time, despite punk nominally coming along to do away with such groups.

In October 1979, a month before I turned 12, The Police released their second album, Regatta de Blanc. Again recorded on a shoestring at producer Nigel Grey’s Surrey Sound in Leatherhead, its title alluded to the band’s “white reggae” interpretation of New Wave (albeit with another somewhat pretentious Francophile title). Like it’s predecessor, it was a three-way effort recorded with little instrumental embellishment – just guitar, bass, drums, vocals and romping songs.

Regatta de Blanc was only the second album I bought with my own money, and it would commence a competitive obsession about The Police that I had with my friends James, Colin and Rob, trying to buy their singles before each other (which reached peak obsession when we all bunked out of school to visit the local high street record shop to buy the fourth album, Ghost In The Machine on the day of its release). Regatta would give the world more singalong singles - Message In A Bottle, Walking On The Moon and The Bed’s Too Big Without You – each built around the relative simplicity of the band’s construct.

That, though, would start to shift with the third album, Zenyatta Mondatta, released another year later. Musically, 1980 was caught between rock and a hard place. Punk had well and truly been and gone, and pop was about to be reinvented again by dance and electronica. New Romantics, all of whom had been into progressive rock in the mid-70s, then punk, were on the verge of turning the synthesiser into a mainstream pop instrument, and not just something used for elongated noodly solos by the likes of Tony Banks and Rick Wakeman. Savvy magpies that they were, The Police added keyboards to their palette, causing some eyes to roll north, given how they’d produced two successful records so far built around guitar, bass, drums and a voice. 

It wasn’t, though, an overt shift: Zenyatta spawned more supremely radio-friendly hits, like Don’t Stand So Close To Me (the somewhat conceited parable of Sting’s experience as a school teacher - “Young teacher/The subject of schoolgirl fantasy...” – and that heinous couplet “He starts to shake and cough, just like the old man in that book by Nabokov”, the first of many occasions when he will go to great lengths to demonstrate how well read he is). Less erudite was De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da, a classic case of pop eating itself in being a song about the how rudimentary pure pop can be.

Sting’s - we assume – tinkering with the formula that had sustained them thus far would reach a new degree of critical discord another year later (yes, the band was still releasing albums annually) with Ghost In The Machine, which thankfully did away with the French titles to make a more strident literary reference, the book by psychologist Arthur Koestler. 

Recorded partly in Montserrat, with the Peter Gabriel/Phil Collins engineer Hugh Padgham (responsible for creating Collins’ ‘gated reverb’ drum sound) marking his debut as assistant to Grey, Ghost took The Police in an at-times darker musical direction, with their sound broadened out by more synths and live brass instruments. It wasn’t without its bright pop - Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic captured the sunny vibe of the island recording environment - but singles like Spirits In The Material World and Invisible Sun, inspired by the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, along with the album’s two closing tracks, Secret Journey and Darkness, sounded a world away from the playful rock that had launched The Police only four years previously.

Via those four albums in as many years, The Police become imperious. Sting, in particular, was everywhere, thanks to the cheekbones that had already made him a staple (but not the staple, hem, hem) of teen poster magazines the world over. But that, then brings us logically to “the biggest album”, Synchronicity.

Comparable with, I suppose, U2’s The Joshua Tree, Michael Jackson’s Thriller or Prince’s Purple Rain, it was the record that saw the band’s 45-degree trajectory reach its zenith – and their demise. On the one hand, it probably was one of the albums that defined the 1980s when it appeared in 1983, but on reflection 40 years later, was also beset with a pretentiousness in which The Police did, somewhat, disappear up their own arses (a feat that would indeed be replicated by U2 and their bastard offspring, Coldplay).

I recently listened to the Hugh Padgham-produced Synchronicity again and was struck by how much they were trying to cram into it sonically, verbally and musically. There’s no doubt that Every Breath You Take is a singularly distinct hit, even after four decades of over-exposure. It is also, still, a source of contention between Sting and Summers, who have had a longstanding dispute over the song’s writing credits, a disagreement the guitarist says is still “very much alive”. 

The dispute centres around Summers’ dampened chord sequence which drives the song. Sting’s original demo didn’t have any guitar at all, which became a source of contention: “Stewart and Sting couldn’t agree on where the drums and bass were going to sit within the song,” the now 81-year-old Summers recently explained to Canadian podcaster Jeremy White, revealing that Every Breath You Take wasn’t even going to make it onto the album. “That song was going in the trash until I played on it, and that’s all there is to it. And I think that’s composition, absolutely.” 

At that point in Synchronicity’s recording, The Police were struggling for material. “The famous story is that Sting just turned to me and said, ‘Well, go on. Go in there and make it your own,’” Summers explained. “I had all this sort of stuff under my fingers. I was The Police stock-artist guitarist, if you like. And I went in and I got that lick almost, it was like one take. Everyone stood up and cheered.” There was further turbulence with the song when the album came to be mixed, with Summers feeling that the mixing engineer had “ruined” the guitar sound.

Internecine grief notwithstanding, Every Breath You Take would go on to become the best-selling single of 1983 and the fifth biggest-selling single of the entire 1980s. But its stormy gestation became totemic of the dynamic within The Police by that point. And Summers’ revelation that they were struggling to fill the album is also telling, given the patchy state of the rest of Synchronicity.

King Of Pain and Wrapped Around My Finger are two of Sting’s finest torch songs. But there are too many misjudgements on the record. Mother – in which Summers largely shouts manically “Every girl I go out with becomes my mother in the end!” should have remained a demo, while Copeland’s Miss Gradenko just goes nowhere. The two title songs – Synchronicity I and Synchronicity II – are a screeching mess. One of the highlights, the jazzy Murder By Numbers didn’t even make it to the original vinyl release, making it worth listening to the end of my cassette version for.

The Police in 1983
Picture: James Milton

Clearly with Synchronicity The Police had started to outstay their welcome, despite the album’s gargantuan success. The promo videos, Sting’s limelight-hogging (whether intentional or not), his pretentious, thesaurus-swallowing lyrics and overtly confessional writing were all starting to grate. Like its four predecessors, Synchronicity had three or four discernible hits, but unlike its predecessors there was a diminishing rate of return on all the rest. That said, its commercial success - perhaps justifiably, if critically disproportionately – warranted its inclusion this year in the Library Of Congress’s United States National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

The Synchronicity tour – on which I saw The Police at Wembley - expanded the band in every dimension: backing singers, huge video screens, enveloping sound, the mad costumes from the videos. Ever the politician, Sting’s rebuttal to Neil Tennant masked the fact that, in all probability, he knew The Police were over. Speaking about the Shea Stadium gig some time ago, he recalled that, during the performance he’d thought “‘This is it, you can’t do any better than this’. That’s the point I decided to stop.”

With the Rolling Stones just marking their 62nd year making records with the release of Hackney Diamonds, and Paul McCartney still actively being Macca, it’s clearly possible for some acts to enjoy longevity. But only just. The Beatles themselves lasted barely a decade, and yet carved a place in music history unsurpassed by anyone else, commercially or creatively. The Police blazed for even less time - five albums over six years. 

37 years after they broke up the dynamic between the trio remains awkward. Summers has hinted at legal action over the Every Breath You Take dispute, while Copeland admitted recently to The Times that he and Sting continue to have a complicated relationship (“We love each other, but we’re not birds of a feather”). But for, probably, a good half of their original three years together they were a terrific band. 

The recently re-released tour film Around The World shows just how good they were, following the group on their 1980-1981 world tour when, according to Summers, they had “just about enough popularity to get booked around the globe”. He’s being cute, of course. Only three years since their formation, they were still full of punkish energy. While they may not be as revered as titans of punk and the New Wave like The Clash, the Pistols or The Jam, their live performances were every bit as frantic - Sting’s stage charisma, Summers’ innovative guitar work, and Copeland’s extraordinary drumming. “We were always a very guerrilla band,” he told Super Deluxe Edition’s Paul Sinclair recently, and he is right - up to a point. His book outlines just how guerrilla they were, but also exposes how ego and overreach led to The Police burning bright for only a short period of time.

Stewart Copeland's Police Diaries is published today by Rocket 88 books

Aged like sparkling wine – the Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds

Let’s get over the whining. Let’s forget the persistent grumbling. Let’s just quietly ignore the fact that the Rolling Stones are long past their raw original reinterpretation of the blues and the blatant cultural appropriation that fuelled their emergence, together with the sexually-charged mischief that set them apart from That Other Band. Instead, let’s revel in Hackney Diamonds, their first collection of original new songs for 18 years.

Because, for the first part, it defies logic: it doesn’t sound like a band led by an 80-year-old lead singer, with a near-80-year-old pirate-guitarist and his 76-year-old ‘younger brother’ combining to produce the sort of energy emitted by outfits a quarter of their history. Even if you view the Stones today as barely bothering to masquerade their self-parody, they’re still capable of doing something that no one else is capable of: being the Rolling Stones. 

That point hit me someway through their set in June last year at their historically significant Hyde Park Calling gig. On what was my fifth time seeing the Stones live, and with Charlie Watts 10 months gone (his absence still raw within the band), they lived up to their moniker - The Greatest Rock And Roll Band In The World™. Because in the course of those two hours they didn’t put a step out of place to in any way diminish the Rolling Stones brand. And, yet, I couldn’t get out of my head the fact that this was an outfit then celebrating 61 years since former schoolboy friends Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reunited on a platform at Dartford Railway Station, forging a musical partnership that, even with frequent schisms in their own relationship, endures to this day. 

Not that they need the work. Their last, Covid-interrupted tour had barely ended before there was news of a new album, their 24th (or 26th if you’re counting US releases), although Jagger has maintained that none of them were in any “urgency” to record new material. And, yet, here we are, with Hackney Diamonds - 12 new songs, including final appearances from Charlie Watts (on the tracks Mess It Up and Live By The Sword, which also features Bill Wyman), involvement from Sir Paul McCartney and Lady Gaga.

“Everyone seemed happy to do a tour every few years and nothing for the rest of the time,” Jagger recently told The Times, adding that the business has flipped. “In the old days, the tour used to be a promotion for the record and the record was the thing. These days you make loads of money on the road and you don’t make much money on the record, which means you’re still selling tickets even when you don’t have a new album to promote.”

Picture: Facebook/Rolling Stones

He suggests that it reduces the incentive to make something new: “You end up thinking ‘They just want to hear Paint It Black [on tour]. They don’t want to hear anything else. They’re quite happy. Who cares about our new record?’”

Jagger clearly did, and corralled Richards, Ron Wood and drummer Steve Jordan, Watts’ anointed understudy, into the studio this time last year, setting the target of releasing it now, a deadline they met, reflecting the consummate efficiency with which Rolling Stones Inc. operates. 

In the end it took them just three weeks in a Los Angeles studio to complete, making use of chums who were around at the time, like Lady Gaga, who sings on the luscious, gospel-influenced Sweet Sounds Of Heaven, which also includes keyboard work from Stevie Wonder. Sir Elton John turns up playing keys on Get Close and Piano, while McCartney adds bass on the punky Bite My Head Off.

Viewed through the prism of the kind of commentary I opened this post with, it’s very easy to see Hackney Diamonds as The Stones By Numbers. As is the customary gag, they even let Keith sing on one (Tell Me Straight). But that ignores the fact that the Stones’ very essence runs through the album from start to finish (which, incidentally, ends with a cover of the song that birthed the band - Muddy Waters’ Rolling Stone Blues).

It is a very good Rolling Stones album indeed, and by a country mile an improvement on the somewhat pointless Blue & Lonesome. Some have suggested that it’s their best album since Some Girls, the album that signalled the end of their prime (Tattoo You, which followed in 1982, was cast in the same period and can be seen as largely a collection of ’70s outtakes). 

Here’s where they’re clever: from the outset, Angry, to the conclusion, you will think you’ve heard it all before, except you haven’t. No one ever bought a Stones record for Beatles or Bowie-like progression, so there’s not likely to be any disappointment with Hackney Diamonds. It’s a Rolling Stones record. It’s what they do. It’s what they do that no one else does. And it is brilliant.

He only went and blew the bloody doors off!

Michael Caine in The Great Escaper
Picture: wyrdlight

I have an 89-year-old uncle, Michael, who hasn’t been particularly well recently. He’s a big bloke, my Uncle Michael, born in Wimbledon in 1934, who went on to spend a large part of his career in the Royal Navy. By coincidence, another 6’2” Michael - Sir Michael Caine - is currently starring in a film, The Great Escaper, with the late Glenda Jackson, in which he plays a Royal Navy veteran who, at the age of 89, leaves his old people’s home to to travel to France to attend the 70th anniversary of D-Day.

Caine’s performance is said to be one of his best. It is now certainly his last. Having recently told The Telegraph “I am bloody 90 now, and I can’t walk properly and all that. I sort of am retired now,” Caine has now confirmed that he is.

“I keep saying I'm going to retire. Well I am now," Caine said today in a BBC Radio interview. “I’ve figured I’ve had a picture [The Great Escaper] where I’ve played the lead and had incredible reviews... What am I going to do that will beat this?. The only parts I’m liable to get now are 90-year-old men. Or maybe 85…,” he told the BBC’s Martha Kearney. “So I thought, I might as well leave with all this.”

In doing so Caine brings the curtain down on a seven-decade career that has seen him appear in, now, 176 films since his debut (a walk on part in the 1950 naval yarn Morning Departure) , encompassing everything from drama, comedy and action, to sci-fi, horror and fantasy. That alone is a testament to his legendary work ethic, one which, even after he’d become a proper Hollywood star, rarely saw him turn down roles, even if some included the atrocious Jaws: The Revenge and On Deadly Ground (the ridiculous Steven Segal eco-thriller in which Caine applied a questionable American accent). “I choose the great roles,” he has said, “and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.”

Such blips aside - even De Niro has put in some stinkers - Caine’s body of work comprises some of my favourite films down the years (too many to list, but I’ll give you, in particular order, Alfie, The Italian Job, Zulu, A Bridge Too Far, Dirty Rotten Scandals and The Muppet Christmas Movie just for starters. Then there is Funeral In Berlin, his second outing as the anti-Bond, Harry Palmer, in which he delivers the following exchange:

    Waiter: “Bitte?”
    Palmer: “Nah, Löwenbräu”

Another that deserves attention is Get Carter, Mike Hodges’ grim-as-the-decade-it-was-made-in 1971 directorial debut in which Caine plays the eponymous gangster Jack Carter. It marked a somewhat darker shade of acting for Caine, given the more frivolous fare of some of his work in the previous decade. 45 years later Caine returned to crime with Christopher Nolan’s Batman reboot, Batman Begins, the first of a trilogy in which he played Bruce Wayne’s surrogate guardian Alfred (also spawning Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s attempts to out-Caine themselves during their impression contests in The Trip). 

Picture: Warner Bros

The Dark Knight films commenced an unlikely working relationship between Caine and Nolan, seeing the actor cast in The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet (though not, contrary to expectation, Oppenheimer). Nolan does appear to rely on an ensemble, but the regularity with which he’s cast Caine - in the closing chapter of his film career - has had much to do with the actor’s personal philosophy to the craft. Nolan has regularly called out Caine’s professionalism and preparation on set as two of the many reasons for casting him, something Nolan would also see as rubbing off on the younger members of the cast.

Until today Caine had been talking about retirement for a number of years, first floating the idea in 2008. Two years ago it came again when he announced that his role in Lina Roessler’s comedy Best Sellers might be the last. If, as seems definite, The Great Escaper is the end, it will be poignant. “The character of Bernie is an old cockney soldier, which, funnily enough, I am,” he told Kearney. “He fought in the Second World War - I fought in the Korean War - so it’s an entirely different frame of mind, but the same really.”

“I’d retired when was sent the script,” he went on to explain. “I’d turned it down three times. But I kept falling in love with him every time I read it, and so I did it. I just loved the character of Bernie. I thought he was incredible, and it’s so beautifully written.”

It did, though, present Caine with a full stop: “With Covid and all that, I hadn’t done a picture for three years, and I thought I was finished. And I suddenly did it - and had such a wonderful time.” It wasn’t without its challenges, given that age has been visibly catching up with the 90-year-old. “They gave me a very good walking stick, and I was able to do scenes that needed that,” he explained. Oliver Parker, the film’s director, said the production team got the best out of the actor: “We were careful to ensure that Michael wasn’t working too hard,” Parker said recently. “For him to have returned to acting after not having made a film in a while, and in the way he did, was quite a thing.”

“I’ve rarely seen him playing a character that has such frailty,” Parker said at a press conference for The Great Escaper. “He’s always been Michael Caine - carefree, confident and cool. Here he’s playing a man who is struggling to keep control. And for the audience to invest in that he really has to share his vulnerabilities, and I really was thrilled at Michael’s ability to do that.”

Caine himself has been philosophical about ageing. “The worst thing about it is that so much disappears from your life,” he recently told the Daily Telegraph. “You can’t run around, you can’t play football, and you gradually realise you’re approaching death. It could be just around the corner at 90.”

Caine may be retiring from acting, but he’s about to commence a new career as a fiction writer. Next month he will publish his debut novel, the thriller Deadly Game. “I’m quite happy,” he told the Telegraph. “I’m sitting here writing, doing my thing. I like it. I have two children, three grandchildren and a wife. Everyone’s going to join me eventually. No one’s going to say, ‘I’m so sorry you’re going to die - I wish you were like me and not going to die.’ Everybody’s going to die. At least I’ve lived to fucking 90; I didn’t die at 9, or 19 or 29. I’m 90, and I’ve had the best possible life I could have thought of. The best possible wife, and the best possible family. They may not be a family that other people would say is the best possible family - but the best possible family for me.”

If The Great Escaper is to represent the final reels of celluloid for the man born Maurice Micklewhite in Rotherhithe in March 1933, the son of a Billingsgate porter and a cook, it will mark the closing call of a remarkable acting career. 

It’s a career that sprang out of no particular artistic instinct at all, apart from some am-dram stuff as a south-east London teenager. After being demobbed from the army after active service in Korea, Caine became the assistant stage manager of a theatre. On becoming an actor, a billboard for The Caine Mutiny provided his stage name (he only legally became ‘Michael Caine’ in 2016), which was followed by television and regional theatre work. The 1960s saw Caine emerge as one of a group of British actors which came to symbolise the decade (a group which includes Terence Stamp - with whom Caine shared a flat - Sean Connery, David Hemmings and Peter O’Toole) and, indeed Britishness, coinciding with The Beatles, the Stones and the blood-rush of British pop culture that erupted in the decade.

Arguably some of Caine’s most memorable work occurred in the 60s, be it in Zulu, Alfie or the The Italian Job, a film that 54 years on is still being quoted, most recently by Sir Keir Starmer. Following the Labour Party’s surprise victory in the Rutherglen & Hamilton West by-election, the Labour leader told party workers: “They said that we couldn’t change the Labour party and we did it. They said that we couldn’t win in the south of England and the north of England, and we did it. They said: ‘You’ll never beat the SNP in Scotland,’ and Rutherglen, you did it. You blew the doors off!”

Picture: Paramount

It’s unlikely that Caine, a self-professed Tory voter (although he did support Tony Blair in 1997) would warm to the reference to his character Charlie Croker’s most memorable line in The Italian Job, but its testament to his place in cinematic history. He may never have been the greatest British actor, in the thespian sense of an Olivier, a Richardson, a Gielgud or a Guinness, but he was a great British movie star, in the galactic sense of a Connery or a Roger Moore, transcending ordinary. May I wish him a happy retirement.

Cinema for the ears: Steven Wilson’s The Harmony Codex

Let me toot my own horn a little: in his memoir Limited Edition Of One, polymath musician, songwriter and producer Steven Wilson mentions me in a section about David Bowie (he traces his love of The Dame to the purchase, by my parents, of a copy each of The Laughing Gnome for our respective birthdays in 1973, which are only eight days apart, having known each other since infancy thanks to our mums meeting at post-natal clinic).

The only reason I mention this, apart from showing off, is that the same book contains a short story written by Wilson called The Harmony Codex. “Dystopian sci-fi,” he described it recently to the NME. “Like a lot of my music, it had a very dreamlike quality”. 

As the story was coming together Wilson was also working – in his customary restless manner – on his seventh full solo album under his own name. “As I was writing the story I was beginning to develop the initial ideas for this record [which has just been released and takes its name from the short story]. It felt logical to have a narrative feel to the songs, to match the cinematic quality of the music,” he continued in his NME interview. “It made sense to write an imaginary soundtrack for that short story, writing music based on its characters and ideas.”

The result is a multidimensional experience that is Wilson’s best solo record to date. But before I get into that, a little context: he has been at this game a very long time, producing his first music while still at school in Hemel Hempstead, and very quickly started building a music career via various projects and outfits like No-Man (with Tim Bowness) and Bass Communion. In the process he has explored myriad genres from trip-hop to jazz, ambient to prog rock (most notably with Porcupine Tree). His last solo album The Future Bites featured a spoken vocal appearance from no less than Sir Elton John, and its predecessor To The Bone included the ABBA-esque Permanating. None of this is pastiche, but a reverence and love for the panoply of popular music including, yes, pure pop (don’t get him going about The Rubettes…).

Despite all this, the standard line is to describe Wilson as one of those artists who people who know, know (implying that those who don’t, won’t). His reputation has been augmented further by becoming the go-to producer of multi-channel remixes of classic albums from everyone from King Crimson and Jethro Tull to Chic and ABC. And yet, if you sat opposite him on the Tube many probably wouldn’t recognise him as someone who has and does sell out arenas.

Die-hard fans, who packed out Wembley Arena last November (notably on my birthday) for a temporarily reformed Porcupine Tree concert indicated the level of fanaticism that follows Wilson around the world. “I’m in the enviable position of having a fanbase who almost expect me to do the unexpected,” he told the NME. “If they feel like I’m making concessions to the music industry, they spot it a mile off and rightly pick me up on it.”

A cute sentiment, but Wilson is also in the enviable position of being able to do exactly whatever he wants. With each solo album since 2008’s Insurgentes he has continually changed the complexion of his music, confounding those still of the stubborn view that he is a prog rocker in the tradition of bands like King Crimson and Genesis. In truth, Bowie has probably been his touchstone, just simply for never conforming to any one genre, and never standing still, either. And that’s quite a feat in itself.

“I always talk about people like Bowie and Zappa and Neil Young and Kate Bush as being role models, in the sense of how they conducted their careers - that constant sense of reinvention and confronting audience expectations,” he told that august organ The Spectator a couple of years ago (the interview’s standfirst contained the line “The most successful musician you’ve never heard of”). 

“At the same time, I’m also conscious that it was easier for them, because I live in the age of social media. The problem with social media is that you get a response within five minutes of doing anything. You release a new song into the world, which might be different to anything you’ve done before, and literally within minutes you have an incredible wave of feedback, much of which will be negative. And I’ve come to like that. Maybe I’m a masochist. I prefer that to the indifference that most bands who just recycle everything over and over again get. Like the fans will go, ‘We love this. More of the same’. I feel that’s too easy and too lazy.”

Lazy he has never been. Peter Gabriel has been working on i/o, his first album of brand new songs for 21 years and it still hasn’t seen the light of day as a complete work. I actually can’t count how much material Wilson has released in that time.

A limited edition of one - Steven Wilson
Picture: Hajo Mueller

You certainly wouldn’t call The Harmony Codex “more of the same”. Whereas The Future Bites took a knowing lurch into pop, it’s successor is still accessible but with more musical tangents, and arguably more interesting for it. Inclination opens the record with a pulsing drum beat reminiscent of the aforementioned Gabriel’s stunning work on The Last Temptation Of Christ soundtrack, and builds over four minutes into something similarly rooted in the desert heat of The Holy Land. It is more electronica than anything, with Slovak guitarist David Kollar performing a guitar solo that defies the laws of ‘soaring’ axe work in traditional rock music.

It is notable that for a musician who, in Porcupine Tree and the first part of his solo career drove an at-times heavy, metal-like thrash, electric guitars are used sparingly and texturally throughout The Harmony Codex. In their application, guitars are just some of the brushes in the artist’s jar, not driving songs but contributing to their palette.

Into this, Wilson has put together an extraordinary collection of guest musicians, contributing something distinctive to the different directions each song takes. Pink Floyd/David Gilmour alum Guy Pratt adds bass to the single What Life Brings (which also features longtime Wilson cohort Craig Blundell on drums). Another regular collaborator, keyboard player Adam Holzman (son of legendary Elektra Records boss Jac Holzman) pops up throughout the album, most prominently on Impossible Tightrope, a frenetic jazz-rock workout which harks back to Wilson’s third solo release, The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories). Another member of that album’s cohort, Theo Travis, provides a bonkers sax solo.

A calmer moment is provided by Rock Bottom, a duet with another of Wilson’s closest musical friends, the Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb (who also co-wrote it), and it is a beautiful, if slightly dark, love song which is also emblematic of the entire album’s exquisite production. It is in this regard that you recognise Wilson’s professed desire to create “cinema for the ears”. It’s no wonder, either, that he has invested a great deal of effort in the use of spatial audio technologies, and publicised the album’s release with a series of listening sessions around the world in which lucky punters were exposed to its full multidimensional effect.

I can’t begin to imagine what The Harmony Codex’s title song – for me an absolute highlight – must have sounded like in those listening environments. At almost ten minutes in length, it is a dreamlike experience, invoking the short story that inspired it. It reminds me greatly of Vangelis’s music for – yes, another film  - Blade Runner, and includes ethereal electric piano from Holzman as well as the first of two spoken word contributions on the album from Wilson’s delightful wife Rotem. It is as enigmatic as it is transporting. It is also unconventional, an ambient moment in the middle of an album, rather than the ‘slow one’ that traditionally ends it. “Part of this record is confidence from having done this for a long time now,” Wilson explained to the NME, “which means I can think ‘No, fuck it! I can put a 10-minute ambient piece on the same record as an acoustic song and an electronic pop song.’ It’s good to embrace that.”

The song that does end the ten-track album is Staircase, an epic, reflective track that warrants the involvement of Holzman and Blundell again, as well as Nick Beggs, another member of Wilson’s touring bands (and currently on the road with Howard Jones), who combine to create a song that both typifies past approaches (i.e. prog-ish) as well as Wilson’s drive to expand. 

It, too, is cinematic in its expanse, drawing reference to the Dutch conceptual artist MC Escher’s never-ending staircase (suggested in the album artwork). Written from a perspective that, I suspect, all of us in our mid-50s ponder on – the journey that has taken us to now – it also provides commentary on modernity: “Plagued by poor health/But you stockpile more wealth/Congratulate yourself/A sense of proportion/An act of extortion/There's too much distortion/You sink in stages/As you're approaching middle ages (You're up to here in debt)” trills its third verse. It ends with another appearance from Rotem Wilson, again speaking as the album oozes into another dreamscape facilitated by vintage synths (including the ARP 2600 that was a staple of the 70s).

For those who want more of The Harmony Codex there is more: an expanded edition includes remixes by, among others, Manic Street Preachers and Tears For Fears’ Roland Orzabal, underlining the point that for all of Wilson’s apparent anonymity, he can command the attention and involvement of some very heavy hitters indeed. 

It’s only what is deserved. He’s hardly flown under the radar these last thirty-odd years, and while some of that has probably suited him, to be at this stage of a career and still producing albums of this ingenuity, ambition and immersion, and not resorting to a lazy covers project, deserves commercial success as much as the acclaim that continues to come Wilson’s way.

The Harmony Codex is out now on Virgin Records

Roger Waters presents the dark side of Dark Side Of The Moon

I’ll admit to wrestling with my conscience about giving Roger Waters any airtime at all over the release, today, of his, on first consideration, bizarre remake of The Dark Side Of The Moon. 

To say that he is a polarising figure is an understatement: quite where he fits into the post-truth culture spectrum is anyone’s guess. The conventional take is that Waters has always been a troubled individual: the death of his father, a former conscientious objector and Communist Party activist, during the Battle of Anzio in 1944 when young Roger was just five months old has loomed large in his work, one way of another.

But of the various world issues Waters has been vocal about, his views on Israel have generated the most controversy, to the extent that his performances of songs from The Wall, in which he dresses in quasi-Nazi uniforms have lead to his solo shows been banned, with accusations of an anti-semitic agenda continuing. All of which, of course, Waters has denied.

Even this week, on the eve of his reinterpretation of The Dark Side Of The Moon being released, the topic was thrust back into the spotlight when David Gilmour seemingly reignited his feud with Waters by retweeting a post about a documentary produced by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, in which musicians and producers who’ve worked with Waters recall their experience of him making anti-Semitic remarks. Gilmour’s wife, the writer Polly Samson, has played her own part in the froideur, earlier this year branding Waters “antisemitic to [his] rotten core”, “a Putin apologist” and “a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac”. Which told him.

Waters has inevitably dismissed the film as a “flimsy, unapologetic piece of propaganda”, but the flare-up of antisemitic accusation provides a profoundly uneasy context for Dark Side Of The Moon Redux to be released. Because it is, in fact, genuinely intriguing. 

Remakes of anything are rarely any good. Name a film reboot or “updated” TV show that doesn’t suffer the foreshadow of the original work. Albums are no different, whether the stream of ‘unplugged’ reinventions in the 1990s or the occasional novelty reggae reworking of a Beatles record. Covers albums by the original artist are inevitably regarded as “lazy”, no matter how inventive the treatment, or feted the artist (Bowie’s Pin Ups, anyone?). 

The original Dark Side was and remains seminal, even if Waters himself once dismissed its lyrics as adolescent “lower sixth” drivel. Released 50 years ago, and providing a platform for Waters, largely, to expand upon on life, death, wealth, fame and his own complex psychology, it became totemic of 1970s progressive rock and should, today, still be regarded as one of the most important albums of the entire rock era. 

So why remake it, 50 years later? Why jeopardise the original’s justifiable legacy in what might seem a petulant attempt to reclaim it as Waters’ own? 

Waters will (and does) argue that Dark Side was his to begin with, and he can do whatever the hell he likes with it. “I wrote The Dark Side Of The Moon. Let’s get rid of all this ‘we’ crap,” he told The Telegraph recently. “Of course we were a band, there were four of us, we all contributed – but it’s my project, and I wrote it.” In the same interview he also accused his former bandmates of being unable to write songs: “They’ve nothing to say. They are not artists! They have no ideas, not a single one between them. They never have had, and that drives them crazy.” Ouch.

The origins of the Redux project date back to the pandemic, when Waters and his touring band got together virtually from wherever they were locked down to record stripped down versions of songs like The Wall’s Mother, Comfortably Numb and Vera. “When we recorded [the Lockdown Sessions], the 50th anniversary of the release of The Dark Side Of The Moon was looming on the horizon,” Waters explains on his website. “It occurred to me that The Dark Side Of The Moon could well be a suitable candidate for a similar re-working, partly as a tribute to the original work, but also to re-address the political and emotional message of the whole album.” 

He stresses that the new version is not “a replacement for the original which, obviously, is irreplaceable”, but serves as an opportunity for the now 80-year-old to look back 50 years into the eyes of himself on the cusp of 30. “And also it is a way for me to honour a recording that Nick [Mason] and Rick [Wright] and Dave [Gilmour] and I have every right to be very proud of,” a statement in marked contrast to his comments to The Telegraph. A penny, then for Gilmour’s thoughts, given that the remake is sparse and notably devoid of either his signature guitar solos, or his sweet, higher register vocals which provided a contrast to the darker, deeper sourness of Waters somewhat manic singing. 

Much of that sparsity comes from a significantly downscaled group of musicians around Waters than those who participated in the Lockdown Sessions. For the most part, Waters has worked with producer Gus Seyffert and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson as the album’s musical core, with Syrian singer Azniv Korkejian providing a very different approach to Clare Torry’s soaring vocals on the original Dark Side’s The Great Gig In The Sky.

In his reimagining, Waters turns narrator, speaking in a near-whisper instead of singing entirely new passages of words that provide the most telling reflections of his octogenarian perspective. As such, the songs acquire a poignancy, especially on the themes like mortality.

Elsewhere there is a more genteel pace to songs, most notably the original’s hit single Money, which turns into a blues shuffle, Waters’ cynical intonation possessing a Leonard Cohen-like timbre. Some still rankle at multi-millionaires like Waters and Gilmour (who has performed the song on his solo tours) singing about wealth, but it is still a unique piece of music that actually works well with Waters’ new treatment. 

Equally so with Us & Them, always my highlight of Dark Side, which takes on an even more reflective tone than the original, which ruminated in 1973 on the futility of war. Conflict, or at least highlighting its human waste, has always been one Waters’ passions, but in taking on the lead vocals (from Gilmour) on the reimagined version, Waters contemporizes its themes. Just don’t ask him about what he’s trying to say about the war in Ukraine.

That, though, does raise the question as to why Waters has remade Dark Side, beyond simply saying ‘up yours’ to his former bandmates. The 1973 release’s 50th anniversary earlier this year was marked by the inescapable celebratory box set (coming in a long line of reissues), so at least Waters has given Dark Side’s ten songs fresh thinking. In some sense, this new vision is overlaid on the original’s themes about the passing of time and human weakness with a current world view (even if Waters’ world view is somewhat jaundiced).

The Redux version, then, works as a curiosity. There is even a moment of levity on the new version of Brain Damage, in which Waters himself is heard asking “Why don’t we re-record Dark Side Of The Moon?” before responding with “He’s gone mad” (the original song, of course, was part inspired by Syd Barrett’s pychosis, opening with the spoken words of Floyd roadie Chris Adamson saying: “I’ve been mad for fucking years. Absolutely years. I’ve been over the edge for yonks, been working with bands so long.”).

Picture: Kate Izor

Musically, Waters has always been a conundrum. Technically limited (“it’s just the same bloody four chords”, a musical friend once observed, correctly, of Waters’ songwriting), he has nevertheless managed to create compelling theatre with his solo work. His first solo album-proper, 1984’s The Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking remains a firm favourite of mine, and his last release of entirely new material, Is This The Life We Really Want? was essentially the de facto sequel to Dark Side with its rumination on authoritarianism, commercialism and greed. 

Inexorably, Redux picks these batons up again, perhaps demonstrating the political maxim that anything worth saying is worth repeating. You just wish that sometimes Waters would choose his words more carefully. At 80, that’s unlikely.

Pushing the envelope - Netflix ends DVD rentals

Picture: Netflix

The DVD had barely been in existence when I moved to Silicon Valley at the beginning of 2001. I should know: I’d been involved in launching the format just four years earlier. It was, as tech executives are prone to say, a “game changer” - storing an entire film on, effectively, a CD with picture quality visibly superior to VHS tape. No wonder it was the subject of an obligatory ‘format war’ between rival companies promoting their respective high-capacity video disc platforms with the hope of benefitting from lucrative patents.

As the DVD was in 1998, the Internet was in relative mass-adoption infancy when 26-year-old former US Marine and Stanford computer science graduate Reed Hastings launched Netflix in the Silicon Valley satellite town of Los Gatos. Hastings cleverly combined the nascent DVD format with an online portal for home video rental to rent out new-release films for $6 each, with up to three discs at a time sent out by post. The first disc Netflix sent out was a copy of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice.

Four years later the New York Times reported that Netflix was sending out almost 200,000 discs every day to some 670,000 monthly subscribers, a figure that soon ballooned to a million. By then, amongst hyper-tech savvy Silicon Valley residents, Netflix’s distinctive red envelopes were landing on doormats like leaves in an autumn storm. Moreover, it became routine for subscribers to go to ever-more creative lengths to post them back to Netflix before late fees were applied. I was travelling quite a bit within the US at the time for work, so I would take my return envelopes with me, looking for the most obscure and remote postbox locations from which to send them, just for a laugh. 

Equally entertaining was the creation of the wishlist from which films were chosen: unlike a traditional video rental shop, browsing Netflix’s menus ensured that at any given time, as soon as you’d returned one disc, another would be on its way. As a result, there would be tremendous expectation of a new disc or discs arriving in the post.

Of course, this all now seems rather arcane, given the overwhelming pivot toward on-demand services such as Netflix itself. But go back to the early 2000s and Netflix can be credited with not only driving the popularity of DVD, but also opening up a mesmerising choice of rentable titles, from big-budget blockbusters to independent productions, documentaries and cult Japanese anime films. 

Indeed at one point, Netflix was sending out more than a million discs a day drawn from a 75,000-strong library, enabling the likes of me to experience films I would never have watched had I been hurriedly scanning VHS spines - with my head cocked awkwardly to one side while trying to read vertically - in a traditional rental shop, the likes of which arguably Netflix put paid to.

Incredibly, though, Netflix has not stopped its DVD service, even after launching its now ubiquitous streaming platform in 2007. Until now: “After an incredible 25-year run, we’ve made the difficult decision to wind down at the end of September”, Netflix’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos said earlier this year, hailing how the company’s DVD postal service had “paved the way for the shift to streaming”.

Picture: Netflix

Not surprisingly, maintaining the DVD rental business has, according to Sarandos, “become increasingly difficult”, accounting for just $126 million of Netflix’s total revenues of over $31 billion. Still, not a bad return. However, the end of DVD rentals does come at a time of changing fortunes for Netflix, for the first time in its 25-year history. Rival streaming services such as Disney+, Apple TV and Paramount+ have been increasingly eating into revenues and subscribers, leading to Netflix losing a million of them in the first six months of last year, its first audience decline in a decade.

To counter this the company began introducing new tiers of advertising-supported packages, as well as announcing a crackdown on so-called password sharing, a less-than popular measure amongst families seeing teenagers head off to university with barely the financial means to remain connected to their favourite shows.

At its peak, the DVD service had more than 16 million subscribers, but today the number is just 1.5 million, and all based in the US. Contrast that with the 223 million subscribers Netflix’s VOD service has globally. Given the relative numbers, winding up the DVD business will barely meet a whimper but there are still those who, 25 years on, swear by it. “When you open your mailbox, it’s still something you actually want instead of just bills,” subscriber Amanda Konkle of Savannah, Georgia, told Associated Press, having been using the platform since 2005.

Others have continued to rent DVDs from Netflix because, surprisingly, it invariably offers a greater choice of titles. Licensing conditions on the streaming service can mean that some films are available only during a particular window. 

Some subscribers even came back to Netflix’s DVD rentals during the pandemic as - incredible to think as it is - they ran out of things to watch via online platforms. Many - especially scholars of film history - have found Netflix’s vast library of vintage movies indispensable. 

That said, the company has been progressively winding down the DVD service, reducing the availability of many titles as logistics and other resources have been diverted into the main business. “Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members,” Sarandos said in a statement, “but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult.” As the company itself acknowledged in a letter to investors earlier this year, the DVD service was the "booster rocket that got streaming to a leading position".

The DVD itself is not dead yet. Much like the optical CD technology from which it was adapted by Philips, Sony and their rivals at Toshiba, people are still buying DVDs. The Salvation Army says that DVD sales have more than doubled in ten years at their charity shops, as entire collections have been donated and then snapped up on a whim. Another charity, the British Heart Foundation, said that they had sold more than 1.9 million DVDs last year through their shops. 

Like collecting rare records and books, the ‘lucky find’ is helping, as those trying to find out-of-print titles or not available on streaming services come across rarities. And as the cost-of-living crunch continues to bite, families are even ‘cord cutting’ and returning to physical forms of entertainment that cost a fraction of the monthly cost of online packages. Similarly, there are plenty of households disenfranchised from video streaming due to the fact they live in communities with poor or even non-existent broadband.

There’s no doubt that the rise of streaming has created vast gaps on living room bookshelves - mine especially. My own DVD collection now occupies a sizeable corner of a storage facility (at some stage, to be bequeathed to a charity shop). There is always the chance that DVD might go through a vinyl-style revival, much as CDs continue to sell in the era of Spotify. 

But unlike the business model for music streaming platforms - which is great for the consumer but lousy for the artist - video remains in the grip of Hollywood pricing mechanisms. While it might seem like buying a film from video on demand service is not the same as owning it, I have far less emotional attachment to the DVDs now collecting dust than my CDs (which already went through one purge, 13 years ago, when my library was more or less halved).

I’m probably just not as attached to films as music, knowing that most of what I like to watch is available to stream to my living room TV or my iPad with equal ease and none of the clutter. That said, I can’t help but echo Amanda Konkle: back in the day, when those red envelopes appeared through the front door, there was a sense of excitement not generated since by scrolling through a menu with a remote control. The early days of the Internet, eh?

WFH WTF

Readers of the London Evening Standard will have been presented this week with what appears to be the newspaper’s single-handed attempt to get Londoners back into the office.

“Remote working is killing London. Get back to the office”, the paper thundered with an editorial by Dylan Jones, the editor. In it he recounted now-familiar stories of parts of the city apparently deserted on Mondays and Fridays, of company bosses complaining of empty (and expensive premises), and everyone from restaurants to dry cleaners noting that trade was still down as a result.

“Come Friday, it’s like a bomb has dropped, with deserted streets around Moorgate, empty shops in Broadgate, the surrounding restaurants all starved of trade. And it has got to stop,” Jones opined. “Remote working is killing London. It’s killing trade, killing commerce, and killing the city’s ability to properly get back to work.”

“Speak to any shopkeeper, retailer, or news-seller, or anyone in the hospitality industry, and they will tell you the same,” he continued. “London feels like it is on its way back: commuter patterns are up, West End footfall is up, and tourists are beginning to feel as ubiquitous as they were pre-Covid. But there is still a bewildering lack of urgency among employers regarding full time in-office working. Many companies still only expect their staff to come to work three days a week - usually Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - making a mockery of the working week.”

We are, of course, talking about the post-pandemic reality (although, with Covid-19 very much on the march again, it’s debatable just how ‘post-‘ things really are). But there is also the view that if there was one good thing to come out of the disease it’s the adoption of more flexible working arrangements for those who can make use of them. It is, though, somewhat arrogantly London-centric to assume that everyone works in an office. But equally, it’s hard to fully get an objective picture of just how our cities are performing in these changed times. 

For the last four months I’ve been working on a fixed-term contract for an industry association whose headquarters is located in the City of London. I’ve been absolutely loving going into the office as often as makes sense. That, though, is the key: ‘as often as makes sense’. Go back 35 years to when I joined Sky TV, then based in the West End, and I was in the office Monday to Friday, and wearing a suit and tie every day. Indeed less than ten years ago I was going into the Paris HQ of the telecoms company I was working for every single day without giving much thought to it (largely as I was living just a handful of Métro stops away and could even walk there if the mood took me).

The Internet age changed everything. The first time I had both my own work-supplied mobile phone and laptop was in the mid-1990s, where remote connectivity was more useful for business trips with the PR agency I was working for at the time. Dial-up access, at home or in a hotel room, was a faff and frankly more novelty than necessity. But over the next couple of decades remote working progressed from something you could do if necessary (for example instead of taking a sick day, or when you needed to be at home for a plumber) to the mandated instruction it was during lockdown. 

I started at my last company a month into the first lockdown in the UK and didn’t see the inside of its headquarters until August the following year. Even the ‘Great Return’ of 2021 seemed tentative. It took months before the so-called ‘TWAT’ syndrome became a thing (people only coming into the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays). Those who went in on Mondays or Fridays were either contrarians trying to make a point, or the socially awkward, preferring the peace and quiet.

If the Standard’s campaign this week is to be believed, TWATs are still a thing. There’s no doubt that my place of work is quieter on Mondays and quieter still on Fridays , which calls into question the financial logic of renting large commercial office spaces in central London on days like that. But on Tuesdays, increasing through Wednesdays until Thursdays when it is packed, the place is genuinely buzzing with bodies. Desks need to be booked in advance and heaven help anyone needing a meeting room without reserving one first.

Along with the Victorian Pencil, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and his absurd pass-agg campaign to get civil servants back into Whitehall post-Covid (when he held the hilariously oxymoronic post of Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency), the most vocal proponents of returning to five-days-a-week in-office working have been the CEOs of large commercial banks. On my own evidence, working in the City, the pubs and bars I walk past appear to be well populated by laddish banker bros quaffing pints at various times of their stressed out days. “Coming together fosters better collaboration and teamwork, enabling us to better serve our clients,” Andrea Rossi, CEO of the City fund M&G told the Evening Standard. Banks have been the most belligerent on this issue, but in-person attendance in other sectors has suffered. “Of course I would prefer to see people, have them in the office,” top advertising industry executive Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of S4 Capital said this week. “It helps in terms of one-to-one creativity”.

Maybe the City of London, where I am currently based, is not reflective of the rest of the capital, or indeed the country. But I certainly haven’t noticed much of the reported deadening of commuter traffic into London on Mondays and Fridays. The Evening Standard kicked off its campaign this week by reporting new travel data which showed that the capital’s three main commuter railway networks – South Western, Southeastern and Thameslink – are carrying 22 million fewer passengers each month than four years ago. “We are not seeing the level of people commuting five days a week that we saw pre-Covid,” Angie Doll, chief executive at GoVia Thameslink Railway, said. “We are seeing people commute on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – and that pattern is absolutely set now. I can’t see that changing again.”

This doesn’t exactly stack up in my own experience: travelling at peak-time from south-west London, even on Mondays and Fridays you’re lucky to get a seat on the 0740 to Waterloo, and on every other day of the working week you’re packed in like sardines. Of course, train strikes make the decision on whether to work at home or not a lot more simpler for those who are able to use the option. 

South Western, one of the largest carriers of commuters from the outer suburbs and southern shires, noted to the Standard that its passenger demographic meant that more were likely to be in senior professional jobs where they could work from home should they choose to (and, I would hazard a guess, have the sort of salaries that put them further outside of London), are more likely to work in senior positions or belong to the managerial classes than other train companies. In other words, they are more likely to have the ability and authority to work from home.

“We have not given up on the weekly commute,” SWR’s customer and commercial director Peter Williams told the Standard. “But commuters are telling us that their travel patterns are fixed in the short term. But there are nuances. Younger people show more willingness to get into the office. It’s important for them to build their profile — and to socialise after work. There are also some employers who hope that at some point they’re able to coax their colleagues into the office more frequently. But with the cost of living pressures, they don’t feel that now is the right time to be insisting on that.”

Which brings us to the notion of ‘hybrid’ working. As someone who has been looking for a permanent job since March, I’ve noticed the amount of hybrid work being advertised. In fact, at one company I interviewed with, its Cambridge office was there largely for collaborative needs when required, and even those who lived locally worked from home on more days of the week than they came in.

Workplace flexibility is clearly here to stay. Many with children or caring responsibilities have found it a boon, as have those whose salaries haven’t kept up with the cost of commuting (not just the price of a return ticket, once you add in the coffees, Pret lunches and all the other ancillary costs that come from leaving the house each morning).

Personally, I love going into the office of my current employer. The work itself is so much more rewarding when you have colleagues to bounce ideas off. Waiting for an e-mail reply or a WhatsApp response is just not the same as walking across to someone’s desk and asking them something. According to research by the Office Group, some 83% of workers would prefer working from some form of company premises than working remotely full-time. 

For me, it’s partly the social interaction but also - oddly - the commute itself. For the lengthiest leg of my journey by Tube from Wimbledon into the City I get a seat for its duration with which to read or listen to podcasts. The overall travel time of an hour each way creates a buffer between home and work life. And even if parts of the commute involve dealing with other people, their headphone noise, phone conversations and sniffing, it’s still a marked improvement on not seeing anyone at all throughout the day during lockdown. 

During the pandemic I had commute envy. My wife, a teacher, was going out every day to teach the children of key workers, which made me deeply envious of her ability to get in the car and drive even just a couple of miles down the road, seeing things other than the hedge outside our living room that was my vista for 18 months. Now, I emerge from Cannon Street station to be confronted with early morning life - people heading in to their offices, going for breakfast, grabbing coffee, being out there.

I don’t have a home office or even a desk at home, so going into company premises provides me with somewhere proper to sit at, a large monitor, hot and cold running tea/coffee/WiFi/toilets and, most importantly, people, as opposed to an over-attentive cat. When lockdown first imposed WFH on the much of the workforce, there were younger members of my then-team perched on beds in flat shares or kitchen tables at their parents’ houses. I felt sorry for them, missing out on the shared office experience that I’d had from the very start of my career. 

While it is nice to go in on a Friday when the place is virtually deserted, being amongst and around busy people making whatever contribution they make to corporate life is without substitute. It’s something those younger workers have lost out on profoundly, and will continue to so if they’re still not going in regularly or even at all. Productivity is, let’s face facts, not what it is when you’re at home.

There are other disadvantages to working from home. Firstly, it’s making us fat. Or fatter. A survey conducted by the fitness app MyFitnessPal has found that Brits consume nearly 800 more calories and take 3,500 fewer steps when they work from home - a not surprising set of statistics, based on my own personal experience. 

Mental health has also taken a battering, especially for those who live alone or with vulnerabilities. In its 2022 New Future of Work Report, Microsoft revealed that, while working remotely can improve job satisfaction, it can also lead to social isolation, guilt and overcompensation. At first, there were countless articles about baking banana bread and going for a spin on the Peleton whenever the opportunity arose, but the reality was that many home workers found themselves working even longer hours. As many as 80% have reported their mental health suffering as a result of being tied to laptops all day long, with human interaction facilitated exclusively by home broadband. 

WFH has also dampened spontaneity. Research by the reservation app Ambi found that 30% of working age adults felt that the pandemic killed off having fun, and that spirit has yet to return. It said that 40% of home workers in the UK found that not being in the office all week has made them boring - either not agreeing to ad hoc drinks after work with colleagues or even getting too comfy to want to go out with their own friends.

The Teams meeting experience...

I would agree with both: on multi-window ‘virtual’ meetings, with an array of colleagues resembling the opening titles of The Brady Bunch, it’s a fair bet that some will be distracted by their mobile phones, or e-mail, social media, web browsing or some other form of partial disengagement. We’ve all done it. We all still do it.

I recognise that mine is a metropolitan view. I can’t speak for those in the regions who might be holding on to working from home for other reasons. But as a general statement, over the 37 years of my professional life, I’ve always only benefitted from being in an office. Perhaps I’ve been lucky: perhaps, working in busy, buzzy newsrooms and for the last couple of decades press offices in corporate headquarters, I’ve been able to enjoy the banter, the exchanges of ideas, the arguments and disagreements, occasional bollockings and even more occasional praise that come with face-to-face working. I couldn’t go back to being perched on my sofa, peering into a laptop camera, all the time. It was a novelty once, but it’s not and never will be where I do my best work. And that is largely down to the fact that my kind of work thrives in a social and sociable environment.