I Didn’t Really Know Where Else To Put This, But Here Goes.

I’ve been at my sister’s house this afternoon, with my family, and they’ve never felt as precious to me as they do right now. A week ago last Friday, my mum phoned me to tell me that my sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer. I’d occasionally wondered how people dealt with such situations, and I guess I’m starting to understand a little better now. After the initial feeling (which is more than a little like being punched in the stomach), they just get on with things, utilise their reserves of inner strength, and carry as they did before.

She’s 44, my sister, and she told my nieces yesterday. I don’t know how much they understand about it, but it can scarcely be less than I do.  All I know is that it’s small, that they’ve caught it early, and that she’s in the best possible hands. Her family are close by, and everything (at the moment, touch wood, etc.) is in her favour. Also, she’s a stubborn old boot who doesn’t let trifling matters like illness get in her way. Her first operation is at the end of next week. We’ll see. Don’t, you know, worry about me. I’ll be fine.

If you’re a friend of mine reading this and I hadn’t told you already, don’t be offended. I’ve had just over a week to deliberate over it. I’m not much of a one for public announcements, and I’m certainly not going to be keeping this place (or any other) up to speed with any updates. Also, I have had exactly the same conversation with everyone that I have told. I’m not sure that I can have that conversation much more. All I know is that, well, I kind of wanted to tell people and didn’t really know how to. Also, I wanted to get off the chest that I love my family very much, and that my thoughts are with all of them. It’s funny, you know. I don’t think I’ve said that enough in the past. Other than that, there isn’t much more that I want to say on the subject right now.

Janet Street-Who?

I like to think that, as a rule, I’m pretty immune to people that are desperate to be looked at. I’m very good at turning the other cheek in that respect – I have no idea who won last year’s “The X Factor”, and I can only assume that this “Big Brother – Celebrity Hijack” is some sort of joke. Janet Street-Porter, however, has flown by my radar twice over the last few days or so, and her various outpourings are, I think, worthy of comment. In last Saturday’s edition of The Independent, she put together the “radical” point of view that blogs are a “waste of time”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for someone that talks enormous amounts but actually says very little, there’s very little in the above piece that actually offers very much insight other than “Janet has read a couple of bad blogs”, but all of the tell-tale signs of the out of touch old bluffer who is losing their youth and doesn’t much like it are there.

I’m kind of aware that a certain type of  journalist is always going to be scared of the blog and the blogger. They don’t understand the concept of anyone apart from themselves having a valid opinion. They consider it a threat. Janet Street-Porter almost certainly gets paid a six figure sum for writing, and suddenly there are thousands, possibly millions, of people that are doing this for nothing. They’re doing it for the love of writing. For someone like Janet, who has got used to a very comfortable lifestyle for writing with very, very little in the way of quality control going on, this is a worrying development. If people are offering a similar service to the one that she offers free of charge, she might not, in time, be able to get her shilling. She might get found out.

The good news for Janet is that, for the moment, she still has access to a national newspaper . She is, for the time being, the one holding the foghorn. She can perpetuate the myth (and it’s a myth that you only ever see in the printed media) that all blogs are dull, written by idiots, or the self-aggrandising rich. There are millions of blogs. It’s not difficult to go out and find some bad ones to prove a point that it very much benefits her to make. Saying that there are no good blogs is like saying that there is no good television or that there is no good cinema. It merely betrays ignorance on your own part.

I managed to resist the temptation to post on this subject at the weekend, but this morning Janet was on the television, shamelessly whoring her new book (which is called “Life Is Too Fucking Short” or some such) on Five’s “The Wright Stuff”. Her book promises, in the uniquely egotistical way that she would, to sort your life out and make you feel about a hundredth as brilliant about yourself as Janet evidently feels about herself. You get the feeling that Janet is going to “mature” into some sort of appalling “rocking granny”, flashing V-signs and belching “girl power” in the apparent belief that it is still 1997. Now, “The Wright Stuff” is normally a programme that I can normally tolerate and, to my surprise, I often find myself nodding my head sagely in agreement with Rick Wright, who at least takes the time to read up on most of the subjects that he is tackling and is, by extension, one of the more tolerable daytime television hosts. However, after five minutes of Janet clucking on about how great she obviously is, I switched the television off and put a DVD on instead.

You see, that’s the thing about Janet. The quacking noise that comes from her is the sound of the twentieth century. She simply isn’t prepared for a more democratic media, because she is the ultimate Big I Am. She cannot tolerate the fact that there may be better writers out there than her that are prepared to share what they do with the world for nothing other than the fact that they love doing it. Of course, you could argue quite cogently that I am jealous of her but, actually, I think that the opposite is true. She is jealous of those of us with time on our sides – those of us that understand this new, democratic media. This media which is no longer a lucrative way for the likes of Janet Street-Porter to unilaterally force their opinions down the throats of the rest of us. She doesn’t like it, and she is lashing out. Getting in her pre-meditative strikes. The rest of the world, though, isn’t bothered. Her quacking will get fainter and fainter as the years go on, until it is a very slight sound in the distance. On a good day, you’ll just about be able to hear it  and you’ll vaguely recognise the sound, but won’t quite be able to make out what it is actually is. It’ll be Janet Street-Porter. The voice of the past.

The Top Ten Television Moments of 2007 (Part Two)

Note: I am seeing this through and completing it, even though I have many other interesting things to say. Today, five through to one.

5. Heather Mills Goes Loopy On GMTV: There are many jobs that you can do in the world, and PR strikes me as being : a. One of the less useful, and b: One of the easier. Everybody (I mean everybody) knows what you have to do if you’re a celebrity that has dug themselves into a bit of a hole, so why was Heather Mills allowed on various TV programmes on what I can only assume was a “PR offensive”? And why did she say so many of the things that she did? It made for compelling television, but also sealed her reputation in the tabloid press as a hormonally unbalanced, shrieking harpy. I’m not making a comment on this particularly peculiar modern morality tale here, by the way – merely pointing out that I was a weird yet engrossing spectacle.

4. The Return Of Futurama: It’s saying something about the quality of television in 2007 that one of the highlights of the year hasn’t actually happened on the television yet, but these are desperate times. You don’t need me to tell you that the cancellation of “Futurama” in 2003 was one of Fox’s greatest crimes of the new decade (though there is plenty of time for them to set that straight). It’s all of our fault, really. Although Fox had to take it share of the blame for its cancellation, the audience had to as well. I hated “Futurama” when it first came out and made the obvious mistake of trying to compare it with “The Simpsons”, which it obviously, notably isn’t. Anyway, it’s back back back in the form of the straight-to-DVD film “Bender’s Big Break”, which is being trimmed down to four episodes to be shown on the television on Comedy Central in America in the new year and will, presumably, be shown in this country as well. It’s not without its faults – there’s a little too much human interest going on and not enough space exploration for my liking and, regardless of the reason for it, it’s somehow less fun if Bender is being someone’s bitch for most of the film – but it’s a welcome return and, with a further three of these films due to be made over the next couple of years or so, there will be plenty of scope for them to get it right.

3. The Cadbury’s Gorilla Advert: It’s pretty easy to forget this, but our lives are absolutely soaked in advertising. Watch a football match, and there are company logos everywhere. Open a web page (apart, you’ll notice, from this one) and someone will be exhorting you to buy something. Advertising is so omnipresent these days that we are starting to become immune to its charms (more on that shortly), so it is quite something when a television advertising campaign gets people talking. This is what happened with the Cadbury’s Gorilla advert, a 90 second affair which broadcast for the first time during the live final of “Big Brother” at the end of August. It’s not really worth trying to deconstruct a gorilla playing the drums to “In The Air Tonight” in order to sell chocolate, but producing something so distinctive in the middle of the current media environment is worthy of some sort of praise, I guess.

2. England vs Croatia – European Championship Qualifier: For sheer car crash quality, it was difficult to get past the BBC’s amazing coverage of the critical European Championship qualifying match between England and Croatia last month. Those of us that are anything like in the know were already aware that this England team weren’t up to thee task ahead and that getting knocked out might be the cold shower that they needed, but the BBC carried on blissfully unaware of this, tub-thumping from the commentary gantry and the studio inside Wembley stadium. As everything unravelled in front of us, the BBC’s reaction was fascinating, with John Motson drying up on air (possibly for the first time ever), croaking on the verge of tears and imploring Mark Lawrenson to “say something Mark, please“. Back in the studio after the team had been booed off the pitch by 90,000 people, the atmosphere was sombre that anyone switching on might have thought that John Terry had just dragged Prince William down from the royal box and beat him to death with his cock on the centre spot. Which, I guess, in a sense he had (albeit tenuously metaphorically). The BBC hasn’t misjudged the mood of the nation so badly since some bright spark decided that giving Jim Davidson “The Generation Game” gig was a brilliant idea.

1.  Television Companies Are Found Out Over Premium Rate Telephone Number Competitions: Two key events have changed the face of television forever. The 1990 Broadcasting Act was sold as the “liberalisation” of British television, but what it actually did was introduce voracious capitalisation to the medium. Suddenly, television had to make a profit (the pre-1990 commercial TV companies had a seemingly in-built and involuntary public service ethos). Secondly, the multimedia age happened. TV companies started appearing left, right and centre. Other media started competing for our attention. The television advertising pot started to shrink, and companies had to come up with new ways of making money. Nowadays, many programmes are designed around persuading you to part with your cash. There are some of us that think that these are competitions are pretty immoral anyway, so it comes as very little surprise that many of them were rigged. It goes to show the contempt with which television companies hold you. I mean, you can see it in the scheduling – the fact that they treat you like idiots. I don’t think that this is major surprise. The difference is that we now know that they treat you like idiots and think that they have to automatic right to nick the wallet or purse out of your pocket and help themselves, and while they will act contrite and humble until this is all forgotten, it will continue to get worse and worse. Happy new year!

The Top Ten Television Moments of 2007 (Part One)

This almost certainly gets said every year, but 2007 was officially the year in which British television ate itself. So, with no further ado, here are my top 10 television moments of the year.

10. Jeremy Kyle Gets Slated: There are few more satisfying things in life than when a long-held opinion of yours is made in public and is thoroughly debated, and so it was when a high court judge described Kyle’s twenty-first century version of the stocks as “a form of bear-baiting”. Kyle’s response to this was to broadcast a “Brasseye”-esque paedophile special, which promised to investigate what the motives behind paedophile behaviour are, but actually ended up with him shouting, “YOU RAPED YOUR SIX YEAR OLD DAUGHTER” at a sex offender while an audience whooped and hollered behind him. Insightful stuff.

9. Seven Ages Of Rock: As with football, television treats music pretty badly when it thinks that it treats it well. However, with “Seven Ages Of Rock”, the BBC managed to get some way towards tapping into the spirit of how popular music has evolved and how it has evolved so quickly. Well worth catching up on, should you get the chance.

8.  Spooks: At some point in the last couple of years, “Spooks” has become the BBC’s flagship prime time drama series. Though it does tend to cross the invisible line into the territory marked “ridiculous” at little too often, it still beats most of its competition in ratcheting up the tension. It will probably never reach the heights of Lisa Faulkner’s character having her head stuck in a deep fat fryer or Colin The Geek being executed in the woods, but it’s still a cut above anything else that the BBC1 has to offer in its evening schedule.

7.  Big Brother Race Rows: Racism is still endemic within British culture, and this was magnificently demonstrated by the BB race rows earlier this year. In “Celebrity Big Brother”, Danielle Lloyd, Jo O’Meara and Jade Goody all etched themselves into the public consciousness after strangely forgetting that the 24 hour TV show that they on was being recorded, and making some pretty vile remarks about the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. All three were eventually removed, and Shetty went on to win the competition. Channel Four’s half-witted handling of the matter whilst under the scrutiny of the world’s media should have seen them stripped of their franchise, but “Big Brother” was back in the summer with another row, when the dopey posh girl Emily was similarly hung out to dry for calling the vacuous Charley a “nigga”. Nothing, of course, gets in the way of the “Big Brother” juggernaut, but it was nice to see Four’s executives squirming.

6.  Jericho: It is now a truth universally acknowledged that American TV knocks seven bells out of British TV, and Jericho was but one example of this. A drama in which America comes under nuclear attack from the perspective of a remote mid-western town that is sufficiently removed from everywhere else to have some idea of what is going on without knowing was a masterpiece of set pieces, tautness and the fine art of slowly disseminating information to the audience through its characters. Strangely, Five (who have, with such series as “CSI” and “House”, set themselves up as the market leaders in buying in American drama) overlooked this, and it ended up hidden away on British television on ITV3. It was inexplicably cancelled at the end of its first season, but is set to return after a sustained protest by fans of the show.

The top five will follow, either later today or tomorrow.

Baker And Kelly Offline

I decided to put this up on here, rather than on the venerable “other place” because it isn’t strictly about football (insert your own jokes here).

The announcement that Danny Baker has split with Wippit amongst considerable acrimony probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to anybody. Wherever he has gone throughout his career, Baker seems to have a knack of falling out with his employers, from getting fired by the BBC for supposedly inciting listeners to violence against referees on “6-0-6″ (he said nothing of the sort) to getting the push from Talk Radio for “not talking about football enough” (arguably guilty as charged, though this is surely a matter of opinion), and to see his latest offering, a pair of podcasts, go down the tubes is no great surprise.

To say that the disappearance of his football podcasts with fellow broadcaster Danny Kelly is a disappointment to football supporters would be something of an understatement. Despite the game’s ubiquity in this country, quality football broadcasting on Britain is very thin on the ground indeed. Baker & Kelly, who arguably pioneered the format of the radio phone-in had, as previously mentioned, managed to get themselves fired twice the airwaves, and a ten week long comeback in Radio 5 was notable mostly for the way that it was shunted around the schedules. In the meantime, the medium that they had done so much for slid down the tubes, with a succession of incompetent presenters on “6-0-6″ seeming to be hell bent on proving the cliche that people that are interested in football are a bunch of morons who take it all very much too seriously.

The return of Baker & Kelly, with an accompanying web site, was like the proverbial Mannah from heaven. An appreciation society quickly sprung up on Facebook, the podcast went to the top of the download charts and all seemed rosy, until a couple of weeks ago, when the weekly show mysteriously failed to materialise. The same thing happened last week, and this time the truth came out through a message on the web site.  The show’s thousands of listeners have now been left scratching their heads, and wondering what, exactly has gone wrong.

Over the last few days, of course, there have been conflicting statements from both sides of the divide. Baker’s statement is plain, and to the point – they promised him that he would be paid, and hasn’t been so. When he complained about this, he was pointed to certain clauses in his contract. Wippit have countered that the contract was all arranged through his agents, and that what this consisted of should have been pointed out to him in the first place. It is, with any honesty, difficult to know (and we will probably never know) what exactly did happen. What we know for certain is that there will be no further podcasts from Baker for the forseeable future, and that there is a good chance that there will be no more at all.

All of this raises the interesting question of what Baker was hoping to make out of the venture. He has occasionally alluded to his relative ignorance of new technology and new media before, so is this a matter of his expectations being unrealistic in the new, some might say more democratic, media landscape? Or did Wippit make promises to him that they were never going to be able to fulfil, before falling back on small print in their contracts? For what it’s worth, I think that both sides went about it in completely the wrong way. “The All Day Breakfast Show” was launched in the summer and, within weeks, was getting at least tens of thousands of downloads per week. In September, though, Wippit started charging a subscription of £2 per week for a minimum of three shows. This brought about a considerable amount of bad publicity – no figures are available for what happened to the listening figures since then.

So, can you make any money out of podcasting? The obvious answer to that is, “probably, yes”. I don’t, however, think that people will, in massive numbers, pay for podcasts. There are big commercial players in the podcasting world now, such as the BBC, The Guardian and The Times. None of them charge to download, though, and this is telling. If anybody was going to charge to download, it would be Murdoch’s New International. The fact of the matter is that, much as I doubt whether people would pay, in great numbers for pay-per-listen radio. It’s just not a medium that people will pay money for.  The obvious answer to this is sponsorship. There is certainly plenty of money available for advertising on the internet, and being top of the Itunes download list would guarantee that there would be plenty of interest from potential sponsors. Also, the costs of podcasting should, theoretically, be low. This is why so many people do it over streaming broadcasts – the levels of infrastructure and bandwidth required are much lower. Only a small amount of the sponsors’ money would need to be spent on running the project.

Baker will, of course, be back (to a point, he hasn’t gone away, he still has a daily show on BBC London radio) – he’s too popular and feels the pull of the medium too strongly to be able to stay away from it all for long.  It is a shame that, in the current, vacuous atmosphere of football broadcasting in Britain, one of the few genuinely innovative shows has gone to the wall, and just as it seemed to be building up a head of steam, too. That said, hopefully when it does come back, it will be with tempered expectations of what can be made from it, and with a better understanding of the fact that the landscape of the media has changed forever.

If you haven’t come here from 200percent,  haven’t heard the Baker & Kelly radio shows or podcasts before and want to find out more, you can do so here and here.

Ow, My Balls!

Many of you may not be aware of the existence of a film called “Idiocracy”. It was strangled at birth by Fox, who sent it on a straight-to-video trajectory even though, with direction from Mike Judge, it is a minor act of genius. You should take the opportunity to see it if at all possible. It is a story of a man that gets accidentally gets cryogenically frozen and wakes up in 500 years’ time, finding himself to be the most intelligent man on a planet inhabited by morons. I won’t spoil it any further for you (you really should watch it for yourselves), but there is one part of the film in which one of the main characters is watching the most successful TV show of the era – a show called “Ow, My Balls!”, in which a poor unfortunate gets catapulted from one testicle-endangering situation to another with absolutely no plot whatsoever in the middle of it. It’s meant to be, of course, a satire of the dumbing-down of our media culture (though Judge actually goes further than this, suggesting that the whole of America will breed intelligence out of its gene pool altogether within 500 years), but I was reminded of it over the weekend when I happened to catch the trailer for a new movie called “Balls Of Fury”. From what I can gather (which wasn’t very much – I was attempting to gouge my eyes out with two tea spoons within about five seconds of the trailer starting), it’s some sort of comedy with elements of kung-fu thrown in (and, did I dream this or did I just have one tequila too many on Saturday night, but what the hell was Christopher Walken there dressed as Fu Manchu? Another Hollywood idol forever soiled…), but even the thirty seconds that I did manage to see seemed to indicate that this may be the single, most imbecilic film that has ever been made.

The weekend was rescued (and saying this sort of thing always surprises me) by Lindsay Lohan. We watched a lot of films on Sunday, and she inadvertently starred in a double bill in my living room, cavorting aimlessly but reasonably amusingly with Jamie Lee Curtis in “Freaky Friday”, and then bitching to brilliant effect in the effortlessly wonderful “Mean Girls”. “Freaky Friday” has taken on a strange, cult place in my head, but this place is reserved for the 1976 original, starring Barbara Allen and Jodie Foster, rather than the remake. I chanced upon the original when the remake was released in 2003 when ITV put it on in the Saturday afternoon “Television For Turning You Brain Into Mashed Potato” spot and, after about five minutes of thinking that it may be the worst film that I have ever seen, it became one of my favourites. More importantly, though, on Sunday we watched “Mean Girls” again. If you’re going to take my advice and watch “Idiocracy”, do yourselves a favour and grab a copy of “Mean Girls” while you’re about it. Any film that introduces the phrase “army of skanks” into the lexicon is obviously worthy of your attention.

In the film, Lohan’s character goes undercover to upset the top dogs in the social circle at an American school and unwittingly and becomes one of them, which eventually causes her own downfall. I couldn’t help but think that there is a small echo of Lohan’s actual life going on here. Lindsay Lohan, the former Disney girl who is pretty but relatively limited in the scope of her actual talent (she’s comfortably outshone by Jamie Lee Curtis in “Freaky Friday”, for example), seems to be marketing herself as an actress/model/dancer. Isn’t it delicious, this irony? One might think that, somewhere down the line during the months of recording that “Mean Girls” must have taken, she would have learnt something about the dangers inherent in starting to believe your own hype. Apparently not, though. She remains determined to be a “Triple Threat”, though the talk in Hollywood is that she is, at least for now, as good as unemployable. Mind you, she has probably earned enough at twenty-one years of age to never have to work again. How far into the future was “Idiocracy” set?

Unledded?

So, here’s the thing with Led Zeppelin and I. It was always a bit of a, well, private thing. When I was in my teens, my friends all liked Iron Maiden and Metallica. By the time I was in my early twenties, it was all about Nirvana or My Bloody Valentine. Somehow, the punks had won the argument. Led Zeppelin were the worst excesses of Cock Rock, the most Tolkienesque of all “The Hobbit” lovers. They made a film and stuck a twenty-eight minute long version of a song in the middle of it. They had their own jet plane, and it wasn’t a Lear Jet – it was a Boeing 737 or something. They’d had a couple of goes at reforming, first for Live Aid and then for the 40th Anniversary of Atlantic Records, and they blown it both times. They were the worst of all possible worlds – excessive, antiquated and misogynistic.

You know, if you care about such things (and, by and large, I do), these are pretty difficult arguments to counter, and this is magnified when the feelings that I have for them are so transcendental  that I can barely put them into words. They started to disappear from my MP3 players. As I’ve got older, though, I have come to care and less for what other people think of the music that I love, and Led Zeppelin have started to creep back into my life. Strangely, this seems to have been happening to a lot of other people at the same time. Everything has come to a head over the last week or so, with the reunion concert at the O2 Arena on Monday night. Would it be stretching things too far to say that this was probably the musical event of the year? The Spice Girls, currently trying to recapture their glory days on tour, would kill for the sort of publicity that Zeppelin have earned over the last couple of weeks or so. The press has been reporting people paying £5000 for pairs of tickets. The Independent gave over its culture pull-out to them on Friday night. There even was a clip of them on “Newsnight” on Tuesday night. I started to wish that I’d entered the draw for tickets myself.

How, then, did they do it? After all, this is a band that has played two shows in the last twenty-seven years, and both of them were terrible. How did they get two million applications for these tickets? Jimmy Page looks like he should auditioning for “Wizadora: The Twilight Years”, and Robert Plant has gone from looking like the Sphinx to looking like a grumpy, middle-aged lion. Well, I have a theory on this: people have stopped focussing on the bad things about Led Zeppelin and started focussing on the good things, and there are many of them. At this point, I would normally stop and draw up some sort of list, but I’m not going to do that, this time. Instead, I’ll quickly sketch out how I interpreted Led Zeppelin. First up, there’s the sheer volume of it all. Recording processes in the 1970s weren’t terribly good at expressing how loud a lot of these bands were (the feeble recording on Black Sabbath’s early albums is proof in itself of that). It did, however, come out in the BBC Sessions album, which was released a couple of years ago. Listening to these recordings brings a new depth to the band. They’re so loud that the microphones at the BBC’s Limehouse studios are just the right side of distorting.

Then, of course, there’s the drummer. Ginger Baker may have been the most technically adept drummer of the era, and Keith Moon may have set the template as the first modern “rock” drummer, but John Bonham was the man. Bonham never played a massive, over-sized drum kit. All he needed was five drums. He gave Led Zeppelin’s music the dimension of space. You find yourself occasionally almost longing for the enormous THUD of the bass drum. What Bonham knew was that playing the drums was as much about what you don’t play as what you do play. Similarly, Jimmy Page wasn’t a conventional rock guitarist. Unlike his contemporaries, he had spent years playing different styles as a session musician, and his style of playing reflected this. His solos are complex and often difficult to listen to. Although they clearly over-stepped the mark in dirges like “D’yer Mak’er” and “The Crunge”, Page plays the guitar like a man with a genuine feel for the blues – check out the subtlety of “Since I’ve Been Loving You” or the frantic slide guitar of “In My Time Of Dying”. His playing of the guitar with a violin bow may have become one of the rock cliche staples, but one always feels that such an act was driven more by the desire to make his guitar make radical, strange noises than by any sort of showmanship. Underneath all of this was John Paul Jones, more an arranger than a musician, adding layers of keyboards to songs like “No Quarter” and “Kashmir”. At least the first six Led Zeppelin albums feature him adding layers of texture to their music that no other band, whether rock or not, could manage.

Finally, they were uncompromising. Utterly. Everything they did was entirely on their own terms. They never released any singles (the only Led Zeppelin singles you could get were put out by Atlantic to put on jukeboxes and they had to fight pretty hard to get the band to agree to that), they made about two or three television appearances in twelve years, and if they wanted to release an album with three songs on one side of it, they did. Because they did so little “media”, it had a rarity value that made it precious. For years and years, the only live Led Zeppelin that you could see was “The Song Remains The Same”, their patchy film, made in 1976 but featuring live footage recorded three years before, and a handful of concert bootlegs. This has been expanded now, but to this day you can still only get a handful of DVDs of them playing live. Indeed, while Plant and Bonham were more than happy showing off on stage, Page and Jones were hardly natural showmen. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on why he may have looked more comfortable on stage by about 1973 or so, but in the couple of live shows of theirs that I’ve got from 1969 and 1970, he looks distinctly uncomfortable on stage.

Considering all of this, then, how did they get on at the 02 Arena on Monday night? All that is available at the moment is, obviously, a handful of bootlegs floating around on the net, but what I’ve seen looks impressive. “Kashmir”, a song that is spectacularly easy to get wrong live, sounded just like the record and, although they’ve dropped a couple of octaves for some of the songs (Plant’s voice is presumably not as strong as it used to be), they sound confident and assertive. They have the look about them of a band that is seeking to reclaim its place as the biggest rock band in the world. John Bonham’s unique sound is irreplaceable and Jason Bonham, his son, does his best doesn’t quite pull it off. That said, it was nice to see him playing a copy of a Ludwig Vistalite drum kit – his father’s live drum kit of choice.

The talk now is of whether they’ll tour or not. The positive reviews might just persuade them to do so. Should they release a DVD of this concert, it might well be worth getting. From a purely personal perspective, I feel vindicated. Perhaps I wasn’t wrong about them when I was a spotty fifteen year-old, after all.

Oops, I Did It Again

More to follow soon, I promise.

Oops

I’ve let this place slip again, haven’t I? I will try to keep it up to date but, damn, that football blog requires a lot of maintenance.

Anyway, so I was thinking “What should I do with this place?”, and I thought “podcasts”. I mean, I hardly expect people to keep coming back here merely to read my opinions, can I? With that in mind, there’ll be a new podcast on here every Sunday night. Perfect to put on your Ipods for that Monday morning journey to work.

One Foot In The Grave?

You know how, sometimes, you look at the newspaper stands and think to yourself, “Now, that’s a bad move – and I think that I can see what’s going to happen next”. So it was on Thursday morning, when I stopped off at the newsagents and saw that Heather Mills had been on a grand tour of daytime TV, slating the tabloid press over the amount of negative press that they have been affording her lately. The backlash was, it has to be said, fairly predictable. If there is one thing that the tabloid press, it’s people having a go at the tabloid press in the media (even if the behaviour of the tabloid press has been fairly reprehensible) so, on Thursday morning, the gloves were off. If you were an an alien that had chosen to land your ship in WH Smiths, you could have been forgiven for thinking that you had landed in 18th century Salem. As far as the tabloids were concerned, their work had been done for them – Heather Mills was a mentally unstable and witch, and should be burnt at the stake.

To an extent, Heather Mills is an exercise in how to not run your life – in terms of PR, at least. I don’t know (like everyone else) the details of what did and didn’t happen during her marriage to Paul McCartney, but her combative posture upon confirming that she wanted a divorce was an own goal. Taking such a stance against a national treasure is never going to win you many friends and, in the black vs white, good vs evil world of the tabloid papers, she had done the papers’ work for them, managing to get herself portrayed as a borderline psychotic, money-grabbing, attention-seeking harpy. In the world of the tabloid papers, everyone has to pick their side and choose who they back, and they are (and were always going to be) on McCartney’s side. What I find amazing is that someone, somewhere, failed to stop Heather from thinking that this was somehow a good idea.

Heather Mills is not going to “lose” as a result of divorcing Sir Paul McCartney, and I don’t know what the motivation behind her eccentric behaviour of the last few days is. It doesn’t matter if she doesn’t get 50% of his money – she’ll have enough to retire tomorrow and live comfortably for the rest of her life no matter what. I suspect,  though, that we haven’t heard the last of this yet.