Woe is us, woe, woe (and for once I’m a little more serious)

I’m not a born cassandra and tend to look on the bright side of things. I’m a ‘the glass is half-full’ guy. But for some years past, and again quite keenly a few months ago, I’ve felt that the good times were drawing to a close in a far more long-term way, that the ‘good life’ many — though certainly not most —have been living could not go on for ever.

Be honest: we might all have our petty troubles, our health concerns, trouble with children, but for many of us our lives and existences are demonstrably more comfortable than they were for our parents, our grandparents and their parents. But I feel and suspect that circumstances are slowly to change and we will have little control over it.

To be fair to myself, this was not and is not some ageing gent’s pessimism, the unobtrusive side-effects of still tiny but growing cataracts, dulling the colours of the world and making it look drabber and greyer; or the product of the mind and spirit of a body subjected to growing hypertension after a lifetime of smoking and boozing, feeling ever-so-slightly off-colour all the time with the impact that has on feelings and outlook. It is just what I believe history tells us.

In 2020, the vast majority of the nine billion-odd who live on Earth do not have to fear a early death or that half of our offspring will not survive until adulthood. In the Middle Ages the average life span was an astonishingly low 32 years (a figure which takes into account, of course, the huge infant mortality — it doesn’t mean that most people were dead by 32, though they were tens and hundreds of millennia ago). In 2020 it is over double that, at 73 years (again taking into account that the vast majority of our children reach adulthood).

In many parts of the world justice is no longer arbitrary and does not depend on the whims and moods of a ruler’s place men (though I’m sure everyone reading this will be able to cite exceptions). Broadly — and there are certainly exceptions to this — the rule of law does not favour ‘the authorities’ and ‘the rulers’, and justice of some kind can be achieved.

I am most certainly generalising: notions of ‘justice’ vary widely throughout the world, and arbitrary, sudden violence is still all to common. So, yes I am certainly writing from the vantage point of a white, now retired, man who exists on a smallish, but steady state income, but who also has savings to be used if times get hard. I don’t live in a Brazilian favela, or cheek by jowl with others in a refugee camp, I am not a woman living in the far north of Pakistan, I don’t live in rural China subject to the whims of the local party boss. You get the picture.

Those are the varying details of individual lives: my point is that history is amoral, it just doesn’t care: history takes no account of race, religion, age, health, lineage or any circumstance at all. Granted that in the present coronavirus crisis here in Britain statistics show that bame (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) Brits are more likely to die from covid-19 infection (and we don’t yet know why) and males are more likely to die than females (and we don’t know why), but my general point holds, I think.

All bame Brits and all men face the same danger. The virus doesn’t decide ‘well, this chappie went to a good school and is of standing in the community whereas this one is a jobless layabout, so I’ll kill him’. All are at risk from the virus, and all are equally subject to the whim of history (or to put it a little more sensibly, the whim of events).

. . .

I suppose any age taking a look around and trying to identify contemporary evils will have an easy time of it. But ‘history’ does seem to come in ‘waves’ (if that makes sense). As always context is important. So for us folk in Western Europe the past 75 years have broadly been peaceful. Folk in the Congo, China and parts of South America would not say the same.

Yet all of us, because of the impact of government lockdown measures in response to the virus pandemic which will have severely damaged nation’s economies, pretty much every corner of the world is said to be likely to suffer from a global recession that is forecast to be not just as bad as the Great Depression in the 1930s, but ‘the worst for 300 years’.

And even if for some reason one nation’s economy is in better shape than that of others, if that nation relies on global trade, it will be equally badly hit. You might have been lucky enough to be in a position to carry on and manufacture goods and services, but if you traditional clients are screwed and unable to buy those goods and services from you, it’s all a little pointless.

. . .

Also on the horizon is the uncertainty of what China is up to. It has long been irked by the freedoms the former British colony Hong Kong was granted when it reverted to Chinese control and it has been especially irked by the resistance to its rule in Hong Kong and has taken the time while the world’s focus was elsewhere because of the virus crisis to impost new laws bringing the former British colony much closer under its control. These are being resisted.

The question is if the situation in Hong Kong did get a lot worse, if something akin to a ‘civil war’ did break out, how would the world react? And if that reaction was only half-hearted, with a series of those ineffectual ‘strong warnings’ which mean even less than the paper they are written on and ‘red lines’ which are subsequently

forgotten about (©Barack Obama viz Syria), China might then finally cross a rubicon and try to take control of Taiwan (it claims Taiwan is part of China, Taiwan disagrees).

This prospect is all the more real in that whereas previously China has insisted one of its aims is ‘peaceful reunification’ with the island, in the past months it has dropped the word ‘peaceful’ whenever that aim is repeated. That is significant.

Taiwan would most certainly put up a far bigger fight than Hong Kong if it were invaded, and has the artillery to do so, but would the West come to its defence as it has long promised? Discuss.

. . .

That last question is all the more pertinent in that for the US the ‘Trump question’ is reaching crisis point. I shan’t here repeat the recital of the man’s almost incomprehensible stupidity which you either know about or have been asleep for the past four years, but ‘the US president’ is, like it or not, pivotal to the outcome of world events of magnitude, and a the moment (hopefully only for another eight months) Trump is that president. How he would react to Chinese military action to take control of China is anyone’s guess. On paper the US has promised to defend Taiwan. Would Trump?

Trump has vacillated on so many issues that it is impossible to predict what he might do. He was friends with North Korea’s Kim Jung-un as part of some cockeyed, ill-thought out plan to get Kim to get rid of his nuclear arsenal. Then he wasn’t. In 2015 China’s Xi Jinping visited the US (still under President Barack Obama), but when Trump took office relations between the US and China, not very good even then, worsened considerably.

Trump imposed trade restrictions and tariffs but his actions were not underpinned by any discernible strategy. Trump seems to rely on his bowel movements for inspiration and strategy on what to do next rather than rational thought. So how would he react if China did move on Hong Kong or Taiwain? Who knows.

One line of reasoning is that China is too concerned with keeping up trade with the rest of the world to risk damaging its trading relations. After the coronavirus outbreak in China, the ruling Communist Party became a little more unpopular with ‘the people’, and it knows that it must keep up living standards for the vast majority for its own sake.

A slump in trade and sales of its goods to the rest of the world could see a recession in China and a decline in those living standards, and even more unhappy people. As a rule, folk aren’t a much concerned with airy-fairy notions such as ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom of speech’ as with how full their stomach is. The emptier the stomach, the more concerned they become with airy-fairy notions.

On the other hand if, as we are told we are all in for the mother of all recessions, that, too, will hit China badly and Xi Jinping might reason that as times are bad, now might be a good time to invade Taiwan. That would, at least, work according to the principle that if a ruler has internal trouble, creating external trouble for his nation abroad is a good way uniting the nation and deflecting attention from domestic problems

Another line of reasoning is that while the ‘free world’ is concerned with the virus crisis and while the US gets ever more divided by the antics — there can be no other word — of an unstable president, now might be the best time to do the unthinkable: attempt to take over Hong Kong or, more to the point, Taiwan. This would not be, or even mainly be, to get control of those two islands, it would to underline so that there is no doubt on the matter that China is now the dominated world superpower. And that, Xi Jinping might believe, is worth the risk.

He, though, has problems of his own. We can’t know too much of what is going on in China but he does seem to have a great deal of internal Communist Party opposition. A few years ago he finagled himself into becoming more or less president for life. That has not gone down with many in his party (especially, I should think, those few slightly younger ones who would have been in a position to take over as party chairman when he retired. Well, dear hearts, choke on it: now he ain’t).

. . .

In the US things seem to be going from bad to worse for ‘The Donald’: after being caught out time and again spouting complete nonsense about how to tackle the coronavirus and insisting things were getting better when it was obvious to the rest of the US that they simply were not, he now has rioting and looting in more than 40 cities to deal with. And is dealing with it unbelievably badly. I mean if one were to sit down and work out how not to handle the situation, you couldn’t come out with a worse way than Trump’s.

The situation is complex. Many of the demonstrators are peaceful, protesting over what seems likely to have been, at best, the wilful homicide of a black man called George Floyd. Many demonstrators are not peaceful because they are so angry and so frustrated at how they and their fellow black Americans are treated day in, day out. It is also likely that there are several agitators in play, acting for their own particular reasons. And, bizarrely, it is even

possible that some of those agitators are undercover white supremacists who have long wanted a ‘race war’ in the US to get rid of all black and who feel now is the time to exacerbate the situation and start one. This morning’s papers carry a report that Twitter has closed down an allegedly ANTIFA account calling for violence when it discovered it was a fake account set up by a white supremacist group.

At the time of writing, just after 10.10 GMT + 1 on Tuesday, June 3, 2020, what will happen is all up in the air. Most likely the situation will peter out as have previous such violent protests over the murder of black folk by police (for the record Arthur McDuffie in 1979, Rodney King - 1992, Timothy Thomas - 2001, Michael Brown - 2014, Eric Garner - 2014, Freddie Gray - 2015, Keith Scott - 2016). But the anger and frustration will remain. And so, it would seem, will such police action. I must be fair: there will be any number of white US police officers are who good, honest men and women who would not discriminate against blacks. But we all know just a minority can do real harm and real harm is what it seems a minority in the US want.

Trump is worse than useless in handling the situation, just as he is worse than useless at handling the covid-19 crisis.

. . .

As for ‘the future’ it is always impossible to tell what ‘history’ has in store for us. But it is not looking good, for very tangible reasons. Once the virus pandemic has died down and if there is a second wave, once that, too, has died down, there is the economic fallout to deal with. And that will certainly involved unemployment on a scale unknown for decades and all that entails.

Happy Easter!

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 10 Blow By Blow by Jeff Beck

It would be dishonest of me to claim ‘I’m a Jeff Beck fan’ because I’ve only heard (checking his discography on Wikipedia) a lot less than half of his released recordings. And I’ve only ever bought four of his albums, and I really didn’t like one of them. Beck, Bogert & Appice were billed at the time as — it was all the rage for a while and most of us believed the bullshit — ‘a supergroup’. They released only two albums before disbanding.

I bought the first Beck, Bogert & Appice, and soon wished I hadn’t. It was curiously dull, and just now listening to the tracks on Spotify I can report that it’s still curiously dull. It seems I’m not the only one to think that because the band’s Wiki entry does claim the record baffled and disappointed fans because it didn’t capture the force and verve of their live performances. But, well, that was bugger all good to me.

All I knew was that the bloody record I had bought was curiously dull. It still is. Whether its follow-up, a live album, was any better I don’t know because on the strength of the debut album — their only studio album — I couldn’t be arsed to find out.

I first got to know Jeff Beck not with his work with The Yardbirds — I would be hard pushed to say what he did with that band and can’t even remember consciously listening to them — but from his singles Hi-ho Silver Lining and Beck’s Bolero.

Both were blasted out on Dundee University’s students’ union jukebox with monotonous regularity, along with Something In the Air by Thunderclap Newman, Say A Little Prayer by Aretha Franklin, In The Summertime by Mungo Jerry and several more. With such enforced repeated listening every last song on that jukebox except for Say A Little Prayer strayed very close to becoming bloody irritating, and Beck’s two tunes, which are really nothing special at all and verge on ‘novelty records’, were no exception.

Then at one point I heard Truth, the first album by The Jeff Group and liked it a lot and bought it. The line-up on that album and Beck-Ola, it’s follow-up, had Rod Stewart on vocals (never a bad thing) and Ronnie Wood on bass. It is still worth listening to, though Beck-Ola isn’t really that good, and so I didn’t bother with the final two albums.

Then came the band Beck, Bogert & Appice and their album of the same name, and why I bothered buying that, though I did, I really can’t think. More to the point after the disappointment of Beck-Ola and the ‘supergroup’ album, I can’t for the life of me think why I went on to buy Blow By Blow (today’s featured album) and it’s follow-up Wired (just as good). But I did, and I’m very glad I did.

To this day both stand out in my mind, and I can’t even — thank the Lord — trace a hint of kinship with the music on them and the close-on ( for me) dross of the ‘supergroup’ album. I mean it takes a certain gift to make Stevie Wonder’s song Superstition boring, but BB and A managed it.

Like all the other albums I’ve so far featured, Blow By Blow (and Wired, for that matter) doesn’t have one duff track. To ‘modern ears’, the funky clavinet (played by an uncredited Stevie Wonder) might date it a little, but hey-ho, any more complaints?

The track you can hear here, Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers, was written by Stevie Wonder and to my ears is beautiful. Beck had and has such total control over his guitar and playing that, like most such gifted players, he makes it sound easy. Easy? Try it.

Why I didn’t bother to check out any of his work after Wired I really don’t know, and I can’t even offer a plausible explanation. I did, though, once go to see Beck play live, but in the event I dind’t hear or see much of him at all. About 30 seconds, in fact.

It was early 1974 and the gig was in Edinburgh somewhere or other, in cinema or a former cinema* next to or behind which was a cemetery (which comes into the story). I was living in Dundee at the time, and I and my then girlfriend Shelagh hitched down to see Beck.

Before we went in we, as one does, had a couple of cans of McEwan’s extra strong lager each and a couple of spliffs (and, sssh, don’t tell my children who both think I’m a saint). Suitably high, we then went into the gig. Beck and his band were already playing and all I can remember his going up to the first floor balcony (presumably where our seats were) and then opening the door from the corridor to the balcony and being hit — quite literally (©P Bailey) — by a super, super-thick wall of sound. It was physical. Ever stuck your hand out of a car window travelling at more than 30mph and ‘feeling’ the ‘body’ of air? It was like that. It almost took an effort to push through it on to our seats.

Whether the booze and dope magnified the sensation I don’t know, but with a few short minutes (No! ©T Potter. A minute is a minute is a minute!) I felt very, very ill and ran outside to the cemetery where I spent next hour or so throwing up. No comment on Beck’s playing, of course.

*NB Courtesy of the net and how any number of nerds will record for posterity any amount of shite, I can report that the gig was by the ‘supergroup’, Beck, Bogert & Appice, and it was at the Caley Picture House, Lothian Rd., Edinburgh, on January 29, 1974 (a Tuesday, apparently and the Caley Picture House is now a Wetherspoons. Well, what isn’t these days?). The gig was recorded and released as a live two-CD set called The Last Live In Scotland 1974.

And if you listen very carefully to the first track, you can hear me puking violently in the next-door cemetery. Well!

And that is it, people. I hope you enjoyed my choices.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 9 Chimeradour by Jeff Lang

I like to claim ‘I like all music’, but that’s not really true. I draw the line at schmaltzy shite, ‘show toons’ and some classical music. That last would include the Bruckner I have so far heard and almost all of Wagner.

I can’t remember who said ‘A little Wagner goes a very long way’, but someone should if it hasn’t yet been said officially. Other gibes I like are one by Thomas Beecham — that’s right, of the cold and ’flu remedy Beecham’s though he decided on a different course in life — who observed that ‘Wagner has his moments, about one every 15 minutes’. And even Jim Naughtie (formerly of Radio 4’s Today) a keen Wagner fan once admitted that ‘you listen to 20 minutes of Wagner’s music, look at your watch and realise the piece started only five minutes ago’.

But enough bile.

I also thought I didn’t like folk and country music. My ears were eventually opened a little to the attractions of some country music by my guitar tutor; and once I realised there’s more to folk — a lot more as it happens — than all that finger-in-the-ear wailing about the past by Britain’s folk revivalists (who now insist we call it ‘roots’), I got to like much of it. A great deal of the folk I like comes from abroad and British folk is still a sore point for me, though I have mellowed.

But even then, when I was invited to go to a gig by the Australian ‘folkie’ Jeff Lang, I took some persuading. Actually, Lang who describes his music as ‘punk folk’ is about as far from the finger-in-the-ear wailing revivalist ‘roots’ crowd in their shapeless drab sweaters and straggly beards as you can get. And thank the Lord for that. And thank the Lord that I was finally persauded.

For many years commuting back home to Cornwall from London on a Wednesday night, I stopped off at a pub in the Somerset village of South Petherton to watch Champions League football, drink a glass of red or ten and smoke a few La Paz. And as you do, I got to know several folk there, one of whom was Paul.

Paul was a social worker in his early 60s who and a Labour supporter. I am unaligned politically (and prefer it that way because I like to be able to speak my mind and don’t like being obliged to talk shite and defend ‘my party right or wrong’) and pretty much in ‘the centre’, but it soon became apparent that I was to the left of Labour-supporting Paul. But that is another irrelevant detail.

Paul professed to be a fan of folk music and one day asked whether I might like to go to a Jeff Lang concert at the well-known Half-Moon, in Putney, West London. Don’t worry about the folk angle, he said, he’s a great guitarist. The gig was on a Wednesday night when I usually drove home, so the plan was that Paul would make his way to London and we would meet in Putney, and afterwards drive back out West and I would drop him of at South Petherton.

For the gig we were joined by another friend who likes music, and I’m so glad I went. Lang really is a one-off. Back in Australia he has his own band, but for his (I think) annual tour of Europe he performs on his own.

Well, I say ‘on his own’, but he uses an array of gadgets, mainly loopers, to produce a sound that really must be heard to be believed. Put baldly like that your heart might sink, but Lang is certainly not a slave to electronic gadgetry, but makes it work for him. The music and what he can produce comes first. And he is some guitarist. Quite apart from that he writes and sings some very interesting songs indeed and has a great voice.

The track here is one of my favourites from the album I am featuring, Chimeradour. But I particularly like the sinister quality he gets into the song and the sense of dread felt by a young lad who is not too sure what is going on and fears the worst. The other songs on the album are equally as good. Lang is worth checking out.

PS I wrote about Jeff Lang in this blog at the time.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 8 Amandala by Dave Fiuczynski

I came across Dave Fiuczynski by chance but I’m bloody glad I did. For once this might be touted as an album which, if it didn’t exactly change my life, did set me off on a new path and getting to know other performers and their music, simply by googling Fiuczynski’s sidemen and seeing what they were up to and who they played with.

OK, doing that still leaves you within quite a narrow field, but there is still good stuff to get to know.

I came across Fiuczynski quite by accident. When iPods were just getting going and becoming all the rage but commanding very high prices (as all Apple products do and were being bought by folk who work on the principle that if you’re being charged through the nose, it must be good! Er, not necessarily, sunshine, but that’s for another time) I got interested. What all my music in a small gadget like that and I can carry it all around? Bloody hell!

Well, after the hell of tape spooling out of your Sony Walkman (or it’s cheapo Saisho rip-off) once too often, it was a godsend. The downside was the price: I’m not one of those dicks who will pay £100 for a £5 pencil just because it’s good a sodding white apple printed on it. (The same is true of T shirts: three for £8 from Asda is good enough for me rather than one for £40 which is identical except for a tiny Ralph Lauren logo of a polo player on the upper left which informs your idiot peers that like them you have more money than sense.)

One day I was in North Devon on a National Trust ‘working holiday’ (i.e. you do hard work for nowt but earn the gratitude of the nation) for a travel piece for the Mail, when on the mini bus back to where we were staying I noticed one of the other guys wearing which led into a small gadget like an oversized USB stick. What’s that, I asked him. An MP3 player he told me. And that’s when discovered how you can listen to music on the go without taking out a mortgage because Apple are such shysters.

The first one I bought — and this was at least 20 years ago — was not very sophisticated, had little memory, and a bugger to use: lose your way in the various menus and you were there till next Christmas trying to get back out. Oh, you could change the ‘colour of the display’ but was that worth it? Yet it did the job and bonus was it came with a voucher to download several tracks for free.

I looked up jazz tracks and among them saw the name the guitarist Dave Fiuczynski. It was one of the ones I downloaded and I liked it. In fact, on the strength of it I decided to buy one of his CDs — and Amandala was the one I chance upon, chosen pretty much at random.

Ironically, though the music he produces as a rule was absolutely nothing like the track of conventional jazz I had downloaded with my voucher (and nothing by Fiuczynski I have since heard — I’ve bought about five more of his albums — is remotely like that track). But I loved it. In an odd sort of way it was music of a kind I’d been waiting for all my life.

Furthermore, if I was a better guitarist and formed a band, Fiuczynski’s music is exactly the kind of music I should like to play. Admittedly, it is marmite, but then you can’t win ’em all. If you like this, check out his other stuff, it’s just as good.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 7 Purple Rain by Prince

One morning, at about 7.30pm, at 45 Milner Road in Kings Heath, Birmingham, in the early 1980s I was woken by my clock radio to a song which grabbed me immediately.

Just as when in that station cafe in Rho I had heard the song Superstition from Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book, I distinctly remember thinking: what IS this? Who IS this? Got to find out!

The song was When Doves Cry, and that memory is still as strong and powerful as though it happened yesterday. I can even still see the clock radio to the right of my bed.

The trouble is — as I have just found out while checking up on dates — its complete bollocks. My fond memory of first hearing When Doves Cry is what we bores call — and IF your luck is out will pontificate on at length — ‘a false memory’. It isn’t a memory. It couldn’t have happened. It is something I have made up.

In that memory (though this is not part of it, but what I deduce from my memory and my life at the time) I get up and go to work as usual in Colmore Circus at the Birmingham Evening Mail, no doubt that fabulous song still ringing in my ears, not to be forgotten for the rest of the day.

But it couldn’t have happened: in November 1982 I had left the Evening Mail and landed job (the most boring job in the world) on Power News, the staff newspaper of the then Central Electricity Generating Board.

When Doves Cry wasn’t released for another 20 months in July 1984. And by then I was living at 33, Norlan Drive, Kings Heath, Birmingham, after shacking up with girlfriend in Oxford Road, Moseley, Birmingham for a year. Where I certainly wasn’t — because I could not have been — when When Doves Cry was released was in Milner Road.

The memory is strong, still strong, but you can’t argue with time and the calendar,and quite why I created such a detailed false memory I don’t know and can’t guess.

Ah, the beauty and innocence of totally unnecessary detail. It features a lot in those long-winded, Pulitzer Prize-winning pieces upmarket US magazines are so fond of printing:

‘It was just after 5.45 on a dark and snowy Montana morning. The winged peskies nesting in the pines outside his cabin were still silent. He calmly slid two slugs into the stock of his favourite .85 404 Dietrich-Wurlitzer. He could taste that second Java blend cup of arabica which jacked him up every day. He lit up his third Philip Morris. He had just one thing on his mind: murder.’

You know the kind of thing. No doubt the taps in the bathroom of the Oxford Road bedsit were from the special B&Q Windsor range which even then were hard to find and thus had a certain cachet, but almost 30 years on, there’s no way I can check (and I feel even less inclined to do so than you feel inclined to hear all about it).

Anyhow.

That song was the first Prince song I heard, and I’ve been a fan ever since. It was from the album Purple Rain which features today, but is not the song I’m featuring. As I’ve said before about the other albums, there is not a single week track on Purple Rain, but Darling Nikki stands out and it’s the one you can hear here. Oddly it’s almost a musical hall song (if you get what I mean).

Purple Rain was the first album I bought, except I didn’t buy it as an album but as a cassette. I went on to buy many more Prince albums, although certainly not all of them. Those who don’t know Prince might think that he was just another funk merchant, but he actually produced music in many other genre, or used some of their characteristics.

There’s not much to say about Prince which hasn’t been said a million times before, so I won’t. Not all of his songs grab me as much as others do, but Prince a ‘just average’ is always streets ahead of most other people ‘being good’. He really was a one-off.

One last point I will make, merely because I haven’t yet heard it remarked about Prince pretty much ever, is that he had a great sense of humour. It was quiet an unobtrusive but it was there. And you get the feeling that however seriously he took his work and art — he must have been a perfectionist — you never get the feeling he took himself too seriously. And that is quite rare in folk at his level.

One finally irony of Prince’s life (and death) is that he didn’t ‘do’ drugs like pretty much the rest of the music industry (many of whom make a fetish out of it like that dickhead Lou Reed). ‘What you putting up your nose / is that where all your money goes’ he sings in Pop Life.

Yet he became addicted to the painkiller Vicodin which he had started taking because all the trolloping around on stage in platform soles had done his hips in. And according to a the Minnesota justice system he inadvertently been taking counterfeit Vicodin that was laced with fentanyl.

One of the greats. I like to think he’s now somewhere in the beyond chewing the fat with Mozart. Who knows?

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 6 Innervisions by Stevie Wonder

I’m sure like me everyone reading this can recount several instances in their life which they, for one reason or another, believe they will never forget. These moments don’t necessarily have to involve deep emotion, like the death of a close relative or friend or when you first met the woman or man who became a love like no other for several years. I could tell you about several moments which oddly stick out in my memory for no very good reason at all.

As for turning points in life, well I tend to take those with a pinch of salt. They are more the stuff of novels and cheap films and TV documentaries than anything you and I might be familiar with. But I do have one memory which does not exactly signify ‘a turning point’ but which did set part of me — the ‘musical’ side of me, if you like — on a new and more welcome path.

After graduating in July 1972, I worked at Thames Carpet Cleaners in Henley-on-Thames (though my duties were strictly helping unloading and loading the vans and helping to fold cleaned carpets) for several months before I spotted an ad in the Daily Telegraph for English teachers in Italy. I applied and the following January was off to Milan where I lived for the next five months.

The guy I worked for, a New Zealander called Russell Rob, was something of a shyster. Not directly, mind, but oddly he told lies when lies were just not necessary, though, as I discovered, also when they were. He told me, for example that his ‘language school’ in Italy employed several people, some in Milan, more in Rome. But it wasn’t true: I was his only ’staff’.

More seriously, he also tried to diddle me out of a substantial sum of money my father had lent me (to pay for three months deposit on a flat and three months rent in advance). Because it was almost for me to open a bank account — Italian bureaucracy was a nightmare and, I gather, still is — my father had transferred the money to his bank account. Finally, I found a room in a flat and no longer needed the money and wanted to pay it back to my dad as soon as possible.

But would Russell Robb cough it up? Would he fuck. And he came out with all kinds of excuses and lies to put it off. One lie involved the ‘sudden death’ in a scooter crash of a friend, so we would have to cancel a planned trip to Geneva (where is account was) to get the money. After too much shilly-shallying, I had said I would go with him to Geneva even though he insisted we would have to go by the super-duper bullet train (or something) which only had first class (and so would cost a bomb). Fair enough, I said. The following day ‘his friend died in the scooter crash’.

Actually, there then did come one of those turning points in life about which above I’ve been a bit snooty and dismissive: finally I knew I had to bring matters to a head. So at one meeting I asked him directly (with these exact words): ‘When do I get my father’s fucking money?’

The thing is that up till then, in the 22 years of my life so far, I had thought of myself as essentially rather timid and someone who disliked confrontation. Really? Suddenly — and with pleasure — I realised that just wasn’t true: confrontation? Bring it on! And I did get my — or rather my dad’s money — within days after months of faffing around.

What’s that got to do with Stevie Wonder’s album Innervisions? I’ll be honest: nothing at all. But I so rarely get to tell that tale, a tale, moreover, in which I shine.

Some of the people I taught were Italians who worked for Honeywell in Rho, about 12 miles north-west of Milan, so I took a suburban train out there for the lessons. And one day, on my way back to Milan, I was in the station cafe waiting for my train when a track came on the jukebox (remember them?).

From the very first bar it electrified me. I distinctly remember thinking: THIS is the kind of music I want to listen to from now on, not all that on-the-beat, four/four heads-down rock crap which was then making a comeback. OK, there was other ‘white’ music around but you take my point. The heady days of innovation were past and what with oil crises and industrial unrest it was back to basics in many ways. It was quite noticeable.

The track was Superstition by Stevie Wonder. ‘Little Stevie Wonder’ of the catchy tunes such us Uptight (Everything Is Alright) had grown up.

Now that track is on another album, Talking Book. The album I am featuring here was the first I bought by Stevie Wonder and still my favourite, Innervisions, its follow-up. I didn’t buy it immediately after hearing Superstition, not for another 12 months, in fact, when it was his latest and most talked about. But I loved every track, which, as with all the other albums I am featuring, hit the spot.

Talking Book and the follow-ups to Innervisions, Fulfullingness First Finale (not the cleverest title I’ve come across) and Songs In The Key Of Life, also have many great tracks (though to this day I’m not as enthused by Isn’t She Lovely as most) and I like many just as much as those on Innervisions, but I’d bought Innervisions first and it still has top spot. And of the tracks on Innervisions He’s Misstra Know-It-All, the one you can hear, stands out.

Then what happened to Stevland Hardaway Morris? Well, who knows? I either bought or simple somewhere heard The Secret Life Of Plants and was baffled and unimpressed: the music was so ordinary. And, as the man sings, the thrill had gone.

I just didn’t bother checking out any of the albums that came later and don’t regret it: the fact that those five early 1970s albums (before Talking Book came Music Of My Mind, not brilliant, but good in parts) are now referred to as from the ‘classic period’ and those that came afterward as ‘the commercial period’ should tells us a lot. It was during the ‘commercial period’ that we got the oddly bloodless Boogie On Reggae Woman and that complete shit abomination of a song Ebony And Ivory (which, to be fair, has more of Paul McCartney’s schmaltzy fingerprints on it than Stevie Wonder’s lyricism).

Since then Mr Wonder, Little Stevie Wonder as was seems to have done very little. Oh, well.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 5 Symphonies No 40 and No 41 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

With this entry of my ten albums, and I must admit this is a bit of a rule-breaker (if there are any rules): I don’t know what the album was, and all I know of it is that it had Mozarts’ Symphony No 40 on one side and his Symphony No 41 on the other. There will certainly have been several vinyl LPs with featuring both of these symphonies, and there are certainly many CDs featuring them and others.

I had my copy of an album with both symphonies in my last year at school (1967/68), but yet again I can’t remember why or when I bought it. And I can’t even remember why I bought this particular one.

Like all teenagers I listened to Radio 1 etc and I can’t remember when I first consciously listened to classical music (or ‘serious music’ as some chose to call it, telling us more about themselves than about music).

My mother liked classical music a lot, but I can’t remember many instances of her playing records (except I remember her once playing Schubert’s Trout Quintet when I was about seven or eight.) My father never listened to music, ever. (There is a quotation, variously attributed to Ulysses S Grant, Abraham Lincoln and W S Gilbert, but no one knows where it originated, that ‘he knew only two tunes: Yankee Doodle Dandy and all the tunes that weren’t Yankee Doodle Dandy’. That was my dear old dad. If he were tone deaf I wouldn’t be at all surprised.)

I love all kinds of music and make no distinction between the different kinds. At the end of the day music is just sound, organised and arranged and produced in a million different ways. It can be complex or not, it can be ‘sophisticated’ or not. And there is some I am not as much attracted to as other, but I refuse to accept, for example, that ‘jazz isn’t really as good as classical music’ which just for sheer nonsense — which jazz? which classical music? — is painful, quite apart from the snobbery intrinsic in that statement.

Some music is more complex than other music — Louie, Louie by The Kingsmen compared with a late Beethoven quartet — but it is certainly not ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Is a boiled egg ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than blanquette de veau served with green beans and pommes lyonnaise? Of course not.

Those two symphonies were pretty much the first two pieces of classical music I heard and got to know and — if this doesn’t sound too fey — got to love. In my last year at school I had one of the ‘sleeping studies’, a sparse 6ft by 10ft cell (small but, ah, it was home) where I played those two symphonies over and over again and over again on my Dansette, to the point where, as I said about Aja, that you know a piece so well you anticipate with pleasure what’s coming next and when it comes the pleasure is all the greater.

To adapt the phrase, ‘familiarity breeds content’. When one finished, I played the other. When that finished I played the first again.

The very first piece of classical music I heard, and then only the first few bars, was Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Don Ameche had a ‘pop concert’ on AFN (American Forces Radio) at 3pm, and I used to listen to it every afternoon doing my homework. This was in Berlin where school was six days a week from 8.30am to 1pm. But I never got to hear the whole concerto until many years later. And to this day I cannot abide any snobbery about Tchaikovsky as does exist. (There is a great Frasier joke between Niles and Frasier, when Frasier reminds Niles that he once enjoyed listening to Tchiakovsky: ‘Good Lord,’ says Niles, ‘was I really once that young?’)

Those two Mozart symphonies sparked my interest in classical music (which I’m pretty sure would have developed anyway, whether through these two pieces or others) and it has expanded ever since.

Sadly, I know very little about music itself and would love to know far more. I can think up simple — very simple — tunes and, courtesy of Cubase, arrange them. But that is less than zilch compared to what went on in the minds of Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Debussy, Ravel blah blah and how they could ‘visualise’ whole pieces (I think — subs please check).

I don’t have a favourite of these two symphonies, but here I’m posting No 41 (known as the Jupiter, although I can’t tell you why) because it was Mozart’s last. The slow second movement is exquisite (it really is, just listen to it and don’t think less of me for daring to be so Radio 3 in public), and the last movement quite extraordinary, grand and at once wistful but at the same time joyful. Again, if you listen to it you might know what I mean.

I have not idea where that vinyl album ended up, but when I came to get a CD of it to add to my then iPod I understood what it folk mean when they distinguish between performances.

I went on Amazon and chose, pretty much at random, a CD with both symphonies on them. But when I played the opening of No 40, I was oddly disappointed. I used to like this? Then I realised what the trouble was: as played on that CD the first movement was (for my tastes at least) far, far too slow and it dragged horribly.

So I bought another version, and that was far more satisfactory and is the one I listen to these days. You learn a little every day. (If you find that interesting, there’s a great Radio 3 programme on Saturday mornings called Building A Library where different recordings of a piece are examined and analysed, and it really is an ear-opener.)

So it really is worth checking out different versions of pieces by different bands and conductors. Now go on You Tube and listen to both symphonies. If you are not familiar with them you won’t regret it, I promise.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 4 Tutu by Miles Davis

I understand there are parts of middle-class, pretentious Britain where it is de rigueur to ‘just love’ Miles Davis, even if you know nothing about jazz and have heard even less. Miles Davis is the jazzer everyone has heard of and feels they should love (and it helps that he has an impeccably middle-class name, Miles — could anyone in Alderley Edge or Esher really warm to Kev Davis?)

Other possible candidates favoured by jazz lovers who never actually listen to jazz (though ‘Miles’ is always streets ahead) are possibly John Coltrane and Charlie Parker (because they’ve seen the Clint Eastwood film. Oh, and if they start referring to Parker as ‘Bird’ move on just as fast as you can).

As for Miles Davis, who doesn’t ‘just love Miles’? Well, I like some, if not most, of the music I have heard (and I most certainly haven’t heard it all). But he doesn’t always get a pass from me. What makes Miles Davis interesting (apart from the music we like) is that he always moved on (like Dylan) and pleased no one but himself (like Dylan). And that didn’t always go down well or, as far as I’m concerned, have happy results.

He was said to have been a difficult character, but I don’t blame him: he was a very gifted and very proud man who just happened to have been born black. And he did not just resent, but hated, how he, as a black man, and other blacks were treated in America.

The real irony of that is — as though there were only one irony — if it weren’t for the descendants of the blacks the country imported and enslaved for centuries, America wouldn’t have a single bloody note of jazz music. It’s young folk would be jigging about to whatever bastardisation of German oompah-pah music and Scandinavian folk songs had evolved in cosy snow-bound taverns. Certainly such music might have been catchy, but I really wouldn’t bank on it. And exactly what drug would they have taken? Hot chocolate? Lemonade (pepped up with a little extra sugar)?

Davis took nothing lying down, so when he objected and stood up for himself, he was ‘being difficult’. (Actually, he could also be a bit of a bugger with fellow black musician but . . .). And he had ideas which he put into action, only to move on when the rest of the jazz herd caught up. That didn’t always make him popular.

The Miles Davis music which does less for me than a bad wank is on Bitches Brew, and other music he produced at the time. He had always listened to all kinds of contemporary music, not just jazz, and decided on an early experiment in what became known as ‘jazz-rock fusion’. And, to my mind it didn’t come off.

Bitches Brew was an album cobbled together from several recorded jam sessions and that’s all it sounds like. To my ears it’s a mess and not at all interesting. Not being a gifted guitar player, I’ve been part of too many loose and noisy jam sessions (usually jamming against recordings of myself) and its rarely of interest to anyone except those who took part and are tone deaf to boot.

Bitches Brew didn’t please the critics and outraged the purists, who were delighted to start another futile round of But Is It Jazz? To that the only sane answer is: who cares?

So fast forward to today’s featured album, Tutu, which for me is the Good Twin to Bitches Brew Evil Twin: they have a few things in common, not least trying something different, but not much else. For one thing, unlike Bitches Brew, Tutu is immensely engaging and interesting. Like Steely Dan’s Aja, there always seems something new and interesting to spot on each track you hear.

Tutu also outraged the purists (who like to be outraged at least twice a week and were again delighted with another round of Is It Jazz?) and they were particularly irritated that much of the drumming was programmed and the prominence of synthesisers used in producing the music. They said it as just a poor imitation of the electronic music increasingly being produced at the time.

Apparently Tutu started life as an intended collaboration with Prince, but that came to nothing, and Davis turned to New York bassist and multi-instrumentalist Marcus Miller who not only played but programmed and produced the album.

They made a follow-up album, Amanda, which is just as good, but I heard Tutu first and its tracks stick in my mind most. Ever suddenly out of the blue remember a melody or tune you decide you want to hear again there and then? Well, for me Tutu is full of them.

I just love it, and that it’s by ‘Miles’ should do my middle-class credentials a much-needed power of good (as they have been flagging a little of late).

The track you can hear is Don’t Lose Your Mind. They’re all as good as each other, but this one always sticks with me just that little bit more, mainly because in my young anguished years (©All teens everywhere) it was something I feared might be happening to me. I don’t suppose the cannabis and LSD helped much.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 3 Blood On The Tracks by Bob Dylan

In 1968 when I was released from boarding school, I somehow scraped into university. It’s wondrous what two A-level poor Es (in chemistry and biology) and an — in many ways a spurious — A (in German) can achieve, though not quite as wondrous as I once thought: after not even finding a place through the clearing system, I heard somewhere it was worth simply writing to universities asking for a place.

I did just that and almost by return was offered three places (by Liverpool, Bradford and Dundee) with no questions asked, and an interview (Kings College, London, which predictably my 18-year-old self screwed up) who were a little more circumspect. It helped that unfilled places didn’t earn universities government money, so to get the full whack of public gelt all places had to be and were filled, one by me. I accepted Dundee’s offer merely because it was the first to arrive.

Nominally, I was there to study philosophy (which I did eventually, though the first year consisted of studying five subjects). Actually, I was there to — in no particular order — grow my hair as long as possible, smoke dope (which in those days was still cannabis not heroin) and lose my cherry. Did I succeed? I wonder.

Folk of my age will remember that the later years of the 1960s (the fabled ‘Sixties’ didn’t really start until 1964) did have a feel of innovation about them, especially in music, but by 1968, Bob Dylan, one of the early innovations, was already a fixture of the music scene with eight albums under his belt and — quite typically — several changes of direction.

What I like about Dylan (and Miles Davis) is that they never choose (or chose in Davis’s case) to stand still and bask in it all. They please themselves first and foremost, and move on in whatever direction they want to, and if the public comes with them, so much the better.

By 1968 Dylan the ‘folk singer’ and ‘the voice of protest/a generation’ — and, to my mind as honest as they day is long so he was never comfortable with that label and never played up to it — had ditched acoustic folk for electric guitars (which he never played at all well). Then, with Blonde On Blonde again changed direction, and soon once more with John Wesley Harding. His career then slightly went on hold until he brought out the album I am featuring today and his career took off again. That pattern has recurred again and again in his life.

Blood On The Tracks is another of those rare albums which are, in their own way and context, almost perfect. There is, though, an extraordinary bum note on one song: it’s 30 seconds into Meet Me In The Morning, and inexplicably it was left it. I can’t for the life of me think it wasn’t noticed at the time if I noticed it, but as this was still late 1974, recording was all on tape, correcting such mistakes was not easy and Dylan (who acted as his own producer) might have thought ‘what the hell’. Who knows? Who cares?

I can’t for the life of me remember how or when I first heard Blood On The Tracks or when I bought it, but I did buy it and have loved it ever since.

There is something obscurely different about this album, and while ‘researching’ on the net for this short blurb, I read that just before beginning to write the songs for what became Blood On The Tracks, Dylan had been taking art lessons and says his art tutor helped him towards a ‘new understanding of time’ which are reflected in the songs. Well, I don’t quite know how, so I can’t help you out on that score, but on, for example, Tangled Up In Blue, the ‘sequence’ of what happens does stand out. Maybe that’s what he means.

The track I have chosen to highlight is not that one, though (and Tangled Up In Blue is usually the one played on the radio if one is ever played), and it has been difficult to pick one out. But I have plumped for Shelter From The Storm which is a beautiful song (Cassandra Wilson does a lovely version, and Manfred Mann’s Earthbound do a god-awful ponderous version).

Shelter From The Storm reminds me of the woman I’ve always loved but who I’ve never met and of experiences I’ve never had. Odd, but true. But then I suppose that’s what makes a good song.

Dylan might not have had the best voice (but like Ray Davies’s and Donald Fagen’s voices I love it), but here he is right on top of his game, and his voice and singing weren’t to got to pot for many more years. Yet despite of late his voice going to pot, even the past few albums are, if you like Dylan, and I do, better than a lot of what is being put out. OK, if you are into Ed Sheeran and Billie Eilish, you’ll be thinking ‘the hell they are’, but . . .

Incidentally, my theory about why he took so long to acknowledge and accept the ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’ is that he thought being awarded that particular prize was simply ludicrous (as do I). Dylan has never made any bones about the fact that at heart he is ‘a song and dance man’, and there’s bugger all wrong with that. So why the ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’? Yes, he does write great lyrics, but dragging ‘literature’ into it is more than bizarre. As a rule lyrics never hold up out of context, even the best.

The Nobel Prize, I believe, is simply another instance of ‘the Establishment’ trying their old trick of neutralising ‘the opposition’ and looking cool into the bargain. And I don’t doubt Dylan thought the same (just listen to Day Of The Locusts from New Morning, all about his discomfort about getting an honorary degree from Princeton and it’s not complimentary). But what was he to do? A hell of a quandary.

Turning it down would look terrible: ‘Dylan thinks he’s too good for Nobel Prize’ the headlines might read and who would want that. Accepting it — and he most probably didn’t want to — also went against the grain. So he bided his time and, on balance, realised accepting it was what he would have to do, like it or not.

He finally did so, but typically in his own sweet time, in a letter written some time later; and he did not attend a bunfight in Stockholm with loads of toffs of every stripe wanting in on the act. That’s why I like Dylan over and above all his music and songs and (his extraordinary gift for turning a horribly banal and corny rhyme into a telling lyric). Truly a one-off.

Ten of my favourite albums over the past . . . years (in no particular order). No 2 Aja by Steely Dan

Here is the second album of the ten I’ve been asked to nominate that stands out for me. It will come as no surprise to some of my friends: it’s a Steely Dan album, and it’s Aja.

I was a latecomer to Steely Dan because of an odd, almost inverted, snobbery I suffer from: when Steely Dan were new and all the rage in the mid-1970s, I ignored them because they were new and all the rage. I hate being part of a crowd. But a chance purchase a few years later in the Ebbw Vale, South Wales, branch of the then Forbuoys (whatever the then current chain was called) got me hooked.

This was BCD (before CDs), and like many such stores there was a ‘going cheap’ bin of goods by the counter full of LPs and cassettes they just couldn’t shift for love or money. (It’s only just occurred to me: why would a newsagent chain selling fags, sweets, paper and stationery be selling LPs and cassettes? But they were.) They were being flogged off for just 5op each — 5op! This was in 1977/8 and that 50p is now the equivalent of £2.55, but it was still remarkably cheap.

I sifted through the bin and came across a copy of Aja. I don’t even remember consciously realising it was by Steely Dan — the name doesn’t appear on the sleeve — and thinking ‘ah, Steely Dan, OK, maybe they are worth a listen’. It was the sleeve I liked. It’s a great sleeve.

I took it home over the moor between Gwent and Powys to where I lived in Crickhowell (I was a reporter on the South Wales Argus working out of the Ebbw Vale office and Crickhowell was nicer than Ebbw Vale. Still is) and played it — and played it, and played it, and played it. And then I played it a few more times.

If you know it, and you probably do, it’s one of those rare albums where the featured band hit the top every time with every song. And being Steely Dan, the melodies, orchestration, playing and lyrics are that much more complex, so that every listen seems to reveal little nuggets you somehow previously missed. Then you get to the point where you know the tune so well, you start looking forward with pleasure to ‘where that lead solo comes in’ and ‘where there’s that subtle synth in the background you can hardly hear’.

By then I already liked soul and funk a lot more than boring old on-the-beat four/four rock, and this was a further step towards my appreciation of jazz. But Aja is not jazz and it’s not rock. Some might call it jazz-rock, but even that label is a threadbare description of the music on Aja. And Steely Dan’s music was also far more successful than the many attempts of ‘jazz-rock fusion’ in the 1970s which, to me ears (of what I heard) were usually just a forced marriage of jazz and rock which, like most forced marriages, was not a happy one. Steely Dan’s music, though, was organic: it wasn’t ‘this’ or ‘that’, it was itself and unmistakeable.

On the strength of Aja, I went on to buy, in no particular order, the rest of Steely Dan’s albums, and they are all very good and I listen to them a lot and like them all, but none quite gets to me like Aja. Aja rules supreme.

I particularly liked Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s lyrics and their sardonic take on life and ‘cool’ cynicism. So when a year or so later and by now a reporter working in Newcastle I heard they were to be interviewed on Radio 1, I tuned in. Silly me. It is never pleasant to discover your gods have feet of clay.

All I heard were two smart arse, clever-clever fuckwit Noo Yorkers, being obscure, making in-jokes and generally persuading me they were prime candidates for their own cynical mockery (‘Showbiz kids making movies ’bout themselves / they don’t give a fuck about anybody else’ — well, not quite but Fagen and Becker were getting dangerously close).

But that doesn’t matter. It never matters. The music is the music is the music. Only the music matters. Would the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony be any the less glorious if you discovered he habitually picked his nose? Of course not.

So here it is the album Aja, and the track I have chosen to play is the title track, Aja. That’s not because it is any better — all the tracks are equally good — but because it is longer and the arrangement is a little more complex and shows just how Fagen and Becker took care over every last, tiny, tiny detail. Shame they came across in that radio interview as smart arse wankers.

A few years ago I finally got to see Steely Dan live at Wembley Arena and as if to remind me that they weren’t half as cool as I had thought until that radio interview, Walter Becker kicked off with that hoary old cliche ‘Hello, London! We love your fish and chips!’ Oh, for fuck’s sake. Give me a break!

A little later Fagen asked for requests and I — quite prominent in about the fourth row from the stage — shouted back ‘Play Hotel California’. Fagen, oh so cool Noo Yorker Donald Fagen, by then I’m sure a revered darling of the Noo York art scene*, was not amused. Fuckwit.

(*I hope to Christ I never become respectable.)