Am I A Patriot?

Would I die for king and country, or merely exercise my right to chuckle at it?

I don’t even celebrate St George’s Day, although I do remember it was the birthday of William Shakespeare, who wrote a lot about British kings. It does appear that to be a patriot means acceptance of monarchy, offering no criticism and, dangerously, either fawning over lovely Wills and his lovely wife or brushing aside any racism or worse.

The American comedian Conan O’Brien accepted the Mark Twain Prize for Humor this year and quoted the writer’s view on patriotism, to which I am drawn: ‘loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it’. Without listing Britain’s faults and various current inquiries into its people’s criminal negligence, we should be able to have a grown-up and sensible discussion about, for instance, the Royal Family or the government, who enact laws which are given royal assent.

As of 1215, thanks to Magna Carta, the monarch is not above the law, although he cannot be arrested for breaking it; whenever a criminal case is brought, it is always Rex versus, which is perhaps why Prince Harry’s recent court battles have been so crucial; this man, who could still one day be King, has followed his great-great-uncle Edward VIII in marrying an American woman and moving abroad.

Handily, and in a rather old-fashioned manner, British subjects are told to treat Harry unkindly via his wife, Meghan Sussex, who is far less lovely than his lovely wife Catherine, Princess of Wales. I was nine when Diana was killed in a car crash, but I thought the week-long mourning period was excessive; this month, on the coveted Friday night comedy slot at 6.30pm, Radio 4 aired this joke as part of the News In Haikus spot on The Naked Week: ‘Charles and Camilla/ 20 years! “More like forty-/five,” says Diana’.

Private Eye writer and the show’s host Andrew Hunter Murray noted it would be the show’s ‘last ever episode,’ but he must know that part of being patriotic is to indulge in good-natured badinage about the Royal Family, which is a soap opera that has run longer than Emmerdale, Coronation Street and Eastenders put together; almost a millennium longer, in fact.

What with new characters, babies, castles up in smoke, divorces, rogues and the fact that the monarch has the nation’s attention for nine minutes every Christmas Day, the Royals are characters and avatars rather than real people. You can visit their palaces, buy shortbread tins and, in any given week, watch TV dramas like The Crown, musicals like Six and sitcoms like The Windsors; the last of these was created by two blokes named George and Bert, which seem like pseudonyms given that King George VI was known as Bertie to his family.

Among the cast are Harry Enfield, who gives a good impression of King Charles, and Hugh Skinner as the now Prince of Wales; the latter’s CV includes a role as a soldier in the wartime drama The Wipers Times, co-written by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop. The magazine has a Court Circular column which refers to the King as Brian – as in, ‘he’s not the Messiah…’ – and formerly referred to his mum as Brenda. They had probably prepared the cover of their Coronation issue – Man In Hat Sits On Chair – back in the 1960s.

There’s satire, and there’s agitprop. In the last 40 years, songwriter Billy Bragg aka the Bard of Barking, has grown into a national treasure. He wrote A New England, which was more about love than country, and also the lost gem Take Down the Union Jack, which I taped off the radio in the early 2000s. It was from his album England, Half English, and noted that Britain is ‘really not that great…doesn’t even have a patron saint, just an economic union that’s past its sell-by date’. Discuss!

Bragg also wrote a book called The Progressive Patriot in the aftermath of the London Bombings of July 7 2005. In it, he suggested ways people on the left of the political spectrum could counteract the shouting and caterwauling of those on the right. He selects figures both musical (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon) and literary (George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling), while dropping in on historical moments in English history: Magna Carta, the Civil War and, of course, the war against Hitler.

Reviewing it for the Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead complains of ‘sub-GCSE level’ history and incoherence. Nonetheless, she does quote Bragg’s words on ‘developing a narrative’ about Englishness, perhaps looking at how Scotland and Wales see their place in this still United Kingdom; from my five years in Edinburgh, which is one of the more cosmopolitan places in the nation, I could tell Scots were proud of Rabbie Burns, the rugby team, folksongs and, clichéd though it is, whiskey, which they call the Water of Life.

I really did try to get into Sunder Katwala’s 2023 book How to be a Patriot, but it read like a think-tank study of nationalism and ‘inclusive patriotism’, with chunks of memoir thrown in. With talk of ‘shared rituals’ and the monarchy, which plenty of people want to abolish, the book just felt didactic rather than encouraging, dry rather than stirring, in opposition to those Billy Bragg songs. Katwala is good on demolishing Enoch Powell’s arguments, and how they were formed in the first place, and he has a go at tackling various topical issues within the culture which I summarise as Statues & Symbols.

And so to the 80th anniversary, technically the Oak anniversary, of Victory in Europe. When I was 12, I read the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; the former thought it ‘dulce et decorum’ to die for your country, a sentiment that was made still more stark when, at 14, I visited the trenches and battlefields where millions fought. Then there’s the celebrated football match on Christmas Day between German and English forces, and the football tournaments involving Prisoners of War at the Ruhleben camp.

In the next fortnight, I implore you to spot where people question or affirm their patriotism, using what The Sun newspaper call ‘our boys’ as cover; the tabloid papers biennially try to turn the men’s England football team into a regiment of the King’s armed forces. The Daily Telegraph used to be the newspaper for retired colonels and commanders, but with that audience shrinking they have pivoted to battles about Statues & Symbols, usually the wedge issues that exercise Fr Farage.

I imagine Private Eye will also be scanning the papers to find the most jingoistic, illogical and plain stupid thing said, done or predicted about the commemoration of an event which, in 2025, overshadows the 80 years that came after it. Last year’s winner came when Rishi Sunak, who was Prime Minister and is still MP for Richmond and Northallerton in Posh Yorkshire, left the D-Day commemoration early to give an interview to ITV; Fr Farage accused him of not being patriotic enough and not understanding ‘our culture’.

Whether Farage was referring to his class, race or heritage, it showed that one way to win votes was to play the Patriot card. And what channel does he present programmes on? The one with the Union flag in its logo. If only the King could do something about it.

The Football Novel

Alex Allison’s new book Greatest Of All Time makes him the new custodian of the football novel

My pandemic project has outlived the plague era. Since 2020 I have spent time collecting football books, and I even had one of my own published, on the FA Youth Cup, but I’m not here to plug From Kids To Champions or my book on punditry, with the neologism Banternalysis for a title.

Instead, I’m going to recommend some pieces of football fiction: stories that use the game as a pivot around which to revolve tales of the human condition. I’ve got a whole shelf of them, ranging from Keeper by Mal Peet, which will appeal to fans of the movie Field of Dreams, to John O’Farrell’s comic novel There’s Only Two David Beckhams.

Musa Okwonga and Ian Wright, who now co-present the Wrighty’s House podcast, collaborated on Striking Out, in which Wright’s cipher named Jerome mimics the England forward’s South London upbringing. UEA Creative Writing graduate and former amateur referee Ashley Hickson-Lovence gained many plaudits for Your Show, a fictionalised telling of the story of referee Uriah Rennie, whom you may remember for being the only black ref in the Premier League years. Fun fact: Rennie is now president of Hallam FC, an amateur club founded in 1860 in Sheffield.

You might know Brian Glanville as the doyen of football writers, but he would prefer to be known as a novelist. As well as his children’s book Goalkeepers Are Different, Glanville published his own set of short stories, The Man Behind the Goal. Football is one of those subjects you cannot busk: you need to have intimately researched the world, its tempos and its mores. Adrian Duncan does this in his own set of short stories, Midfield Dynamo, whose chapters are numbered by football position – 1 is followed by 2, which is followed by 6, which is followed by 5, and eventually ends with 9 – and with sections called Defence, Midfield and Up Front.

Two stories are football themed: the one that gives the collection its title, first published in the Dublin Review in Winter 2014, is told by a son about his father, who was captain of a football team made up of ‘a bunch of long-haired and moustachio’d outlaws [sic]…for an hour and a half, twenty-two young men marauded [sic] in beautiful patterns up and down the pitch, and in between the moments of skill, vision and finesse, they kicked lumps out of each other’.

The other football-themed story is named Prosinečki, after the Yugoslav/Croatian playmaker who played for both Barcelona and Real Madrid and who, fun fact, is the current manager of Montenegro’s national team. The story’s protagonist is a ‘limited but committed midfielder’ with a ‘permanently destroyed’ knee. He recalls how he admired the playmaker’s ‘brio’ and ‘re-visualize his movement…how he span away from bewildered defenders at the least likely moment’. He ‘always made the most moral decision on the ball’; no pundit ever talks like this, or notes ‘the impotent, incidental and unforgiveable beauty’ of the game.

He appreciates how ‘it is the pragmatic that serves the aesthetic – that it is only from the core of good service that any beauty can bloom’. When he weighs up the taints and honours of his career, he concludes that he is an ‘age-thickened footballer mooching around a large circle with a line through it’. The protagonist reckons that fans go to the stadium merely ‘to be among the decaying trusses that shelter our deep single-tiered stands’ to watch a club that ‘seems to exist now only out of the ghost of some habit’. When a goalkeeper gets up after being clattered into, they ‘cheer as if he were a miner being lifted from a blast’. The story first appeared in the Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly; the editor was Sally Rooney.

Greatest Of All Time is Alex Allison’s recently released tale, published by Dialogue Books. He jokes in the acknowledgements that friends ‘still maintain that the novel should be called Man On’, and then seriously dedicates it to ‘queer sportspeople, both closeted and out. We’ll be ready if and when you are’. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, Allison said that he wished to explore the players’ ‘heads and hearts’ that were often missing from the general conversation about the game. It was noted by presenter Nick Ahad that there are no out gay male footballers in the Premier League, to which Allison namechecked Justin Fashanu, whose biography is called Forbidden Forward.

In a way, the tale resets Amadeus to a Premier League football club somewhere in the North-East (yes, the one you’re thinking of). The anonymous protagonist is the only homegrown player left at the club, and under the auspices of his Italian manager nicknamed The Oracle, he has to compete for his position as centre-forward with Samson, a Rwandan-born Frenchman brought in on loan from Monaco. Samson takes our hero’s number ten shirt and then takes his breath away: ‘Before he was everyone’s,’ reads the opening sentence, given its own chapter and its own page, ‘he was mine’.

Allison, whom the dust jacket tells us is an AFC Wimbledon fan, puts us in the world of professional football, starting with a pre-season camp in the Middle East. We learn that our protagonist is only 19, that his father is his agent and that the pair started out going to games, ‘embracing an identity larger than our differences’. As a striker he has ‘the steely focus of a born predator’, which seems a little like pathetic fallacy given that his prey becomes Samson, who is praised as ‘all limb and length, as though his body were set to a beat’.

With a ‘digital self’ valued by FIFA video game at £13m, he pales in comparison with Samson, who can master one of his real-life skills in moments. Soon the pair are roommates for away games, our hero deputed to ‘look after’ his antagonist. Envy turns to self-improvement: ‘I felt myself altering my behaviour as though he were watching…exaggerated the aspects of my personality that most closely mirrored his’.

We never forget that the pair are teenagers, with faces that ‘looked misplaced among the gruff beards and hardened jaws of our teammates’. We also appreciate plenty of truisms from our narrator: ‘I would need to reprogramme myself…to perceive him as a threat’, ‘I was clout incarnate, a magnet for likes’, ‘I wanted the life of my teammates – their assured confidence, the convenience of their ordinary desires’.

There are plenty of other football similes and metaphors throughout the story: ‘Searching his name had become a muscle memory, a reflex – like taking the ball down on your chest’; ‘the turf was solid, seized up like a muscle’. There is impressive verisimilitude that grounds us in the Premier League: one player ‘can’t afford to get relegated. Not at this point in my career’; the team cannot enjoy the lobster at their Christmas party, accustomed to ‘a restricted diet of lean meats, grains and fresh vegetables’; Sky Sports presenters ‘celebrated each transfer like personal triumphs’; our hero’s salary, when compared with his dad’s, has a ‘comic book inequality’.

Another player from the Netherlands boasts how ‘Ajax are responsible for the basis of the modern game’ and a Crystal Palace fan has ‘the sincere belief that his club has the best fans in the country’. At such points, Allison is adding to the experience of the non-fanatical reader, and about the only faux pas is that a team from the North East travels down to Watford for a Boxing Day fixture, something necessary for the plot but which would never happen in the Premier League, who never set teams on too long a journey on December 26. I also loved the line from a Watford mascot: ‘This is my Christmas present, but I wanted a dog’.

Samson, meanwhile, is ‘the first player from our club for twenty-nine years to find the net ten times before February’, hitting the mark with a stunning goal against Arsenal. Mimicking the real-life Cristiano Ronaldo, a fan invades the pitch and meets Samson, her idol, while young ladies throw themselves at him at a nightclub. Samson opens up to our narrator, complaining of the racism of the English, whose fans are the only ones in the world ‘who love a tackle more than a goal’. The Frenchman tells our hero that ‘the keeper is afraid of real football’ and that ‘the world around us is so ugly, but here, with just a ball, we can make a beautiful thing’.

There is editorialising from the author about how fans are ‘a living history of their clubs…curators of an endless well of legacy and expectation and suspicion’. Notably, the prospective agent, the therapist and The Oracle are all non-English, testament to the international influence on the Premier League. One scene brings in Stonewall’s Rainbow Laces campaign to fight homophobia, which is necessary as captain Bert Kendall seems, with great dramatic irony, to be fond of queer-bashing.

There are, as with any work of fiction, crisis points where we need resolutions: our hero mulls over a new agent, and then sits down with a psychotherapist who reminds me a lot of Pippa from James Graham’s play Dear England. Hanging over the whole story is the fact that Samson is on loan from Monaco, with top European clubs interested in signing him permanently when his loan ends and he is taken from our protagonist ‘as swiftly as he had been gifted to me’.

Ross Raisin’s book A Natural offers an easy comparison to Allison’s story, because it also deals with homosexuality, in that case a little further up the British Isles in Scotland, although Raisin was born in Silsden, West Yorkshire. I’d also recommend the novelised reboot of Roy of the Rovers, an origin story which also brings in Roy’s sister Rocky to mark the interest in the women’s game, written by Tom Palmer, who is from Leeds.

But for contemporary football literature, Greatest Of All Time is pretty good.

Over 300 episodes of the Football Literary Society radio show can be found at soundcloud.com/jonny_brick.

The Perfect Pop Song

And the nominations for the perfect pop song are…

Since Easter and Passover coincide this week, and I’m off the carbs to remember the miracle of Moses and the Israelites escaping persecution in Egypt (oh is that the ironyometer exploding?), here’s a departure from the normal prosaic column, in memory of Buzzfeed and the other sites that went mad on list articles (listicles) in the late 2000s and 2010s. Now we have TikTok, which serves up 15-second dopamine hits and ruins people’s attention spans.

To that end, here are the songs in the running for my entirely subjective but also entirely objective list of Perfect Pop Songs. I’ll touch on structure, lyric, mood and timbre, and the song’s status as the ultimate piece of ear candy. All six songs are united by major keys, upwardly mobile melodies and bits of nonsense, be it titles that do not occur in the lyrics or occur too much or humorous noises made with the mouth.

All of them date from the best of all decades: the 1990s. Let’s start with two songs from 1990 itself:

Deee-lite – Groove Is In The Heart and Jellyfish – Baby’s Coming Back

Russian DJ Dmitry Brill and his wife, Ohio-born singer ‘Lady Miss’ Kier Kirby were signed to Elektra Records, who threw money behind this irresistible slice of pop, which drafts in funkmaster Bootsy Collins and Tribe Called Quest rapper Q-Tip. It means very little: the Dr Seuss book Horton Hears A Who gets a reference, while Kier rhymes ‘malicious/delicious’ and sings of a ‘succotash wish’.

Throughout it all, there’s a sampled bass lick and, with disco tambourines running underneath, all sorts of percussive vocal effects: a pop, a brrrr and some na-na-nas. Simultaneous retro and contemporary, analogue and electronic, it cannot fail to lift your mood. It is no wonder that the band emerged on the New York club scene: this is visual music built for dancing, not for headphones.

As for Jellyfish, their song was taken to the top of the UK charts by McFly after singer Tom Fletcher discovered the band and wanted to ape their psychedelic pop sound. This one is in the optimistic key of D-flat, with stand-up drummer Andy Sturmer’s boisterous voice tripping over dotted rhythms and singing of ‘dumb mistakes’ and of being a ‘beaten man’. The chorus has ‘yeah yeah’ and ‘woo-woo’ backing vocals and a new chord pattern, followed by a proper middle eight which mentions ‘wild oats’, to hook the listeners. There’s even a part where the listener can clap along to the ‘knock three times’ line. It is perhaps the only pop tune ever to set ‘I’d buy a handgun’ to West Coast harmonies.

To paraphrase DJ Mark Radcliffe: how were there 50 better songs for sale on the record racks the week it hit number 51 in Spring 1991? (A glance at OfficialCharts.com tells me Cher was number one with the glorious Shoop Shoop Song, with Chesney Hawkes descending after his One and Only smash.)

The Cardigans – Lovefool and Hanson – Mmmbop

Here are two songs from the middle of the decade, one from some Swedes and the other from a trio of Oklahoma teenagers.

Lovefool, which gained prominence in Baz Luhrmann’s take on Romeo & Juliet, kickstarted The Cardigans’ great period where they scored worldwide hits. They haven’t put out a record since 2005, perhaps because they did so well out of copyrights like this UK number two hit that was kept off the US Hot 100 entirely by a stupid rule about songs needing to be released physically to chart.

With verses in the key of A minor and a chorus that bursts into the key of A major, a discotastic bassline and hi-hat cymbals drive the song on, with various earwormy guitar sounds popping up every few bars. It is the sonic bed on which Nina Persson’s gentle complaints float: her ‘problem’, which she ‘desperately ponders’, is that she ‘can’t care about anything but you’. Her plea to be loved is desperate, and she even wants her beloved to ‘pretend that you love me’. The Swedish-English of the second verse is fun: ‘Reason will not lead to solution/ I will end up lost in confusion’. As we will see later, writing in one’s second language can lead to unorthodox choices.

When I went to see Hanson play in London a few years ago, I was impressed with their pop/rock sound, but everyone in the room knew what they were there to hear: ‘Mmmbop, ba duba dop ba, du bop ba duba dop Ba du bop, ba duba dop ba du’ is how the A-Z Lyrics website notates it. But how many casual Hanson fans know the meaning behind the verses: ‘Hold the ones who really care, in the end they’ll be the only ones there’.

So much perfect pop is a mix of happy and sad, or what I call putting vinegar in the pudding, and the blockbuster chorus rather buries the lede in this song, written by philosophers who were 11, 13 and 16 at the time. Devout Christians, the brothers have since had 16 kids between them: Isaac has three, Zac five, and Taylor seven!

The New Radicals – You Get What You Give and Britney Spears – Baby One More Time

And from the very end of the decade, two songs that were omnipresent on music television at the time.

Max Martin never needed to work again after writing the biggest song on planet Earth, which was unleashed in early 1999 and begat the Britney soap opera. Turned down by TLC, the song begins with three hooks in three seconds: the opening keyboard, the ‘baby baby’ and the ‘ha-ha-ha’ breathing. Our narrator, singing Swedish-English (‘show me how you want it to be’) and overenunciating her vowels (‘oh prettay baybay!’), is losing her mind in loneliness, ‘blinded by her lover’ and willing to do anything. Long after Max, the most successful individual pop songwriter of the last century, has stopped making music, we will always have Baby One More Time.

Like Max, Gregg Alexander can walk into a high end retailer and buy everything in the store without being recognised except by people who watched music TV in 1999. Before the first verse comes in, we’ve already had a song’s worth of ideas and grunts, oohs and woahs, climaxing with the ‘ONE! TWO!’ chant before the intro proper. The song’s first line proper, ‘wake up, kids!’, is more or less pop music summarised in three words.

The long coda, notorious for a line which crams in ‘Beck, Hanson, Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson’, is a list of words sung over straight semiquavers that mean nothing written down. ‘Don’t! Let go!’ cries Alexander’s bucket-hatted visage in the clip for a song which he co-wrote with Rick Nowels, himself a very successful pop writer best known for Heaven Is A Place On Earth; Alexander and Nowels also wrote Life Is A Rollercoaster and Lovin’ Each Day for Ronan Keating and, for Santana, The Game of Love, which originally had Tina Turner on vocals.

Alexander retreated to the writer’s room after his own brief pop stardom. I’ll be spending the next few years working on a Pop Syllabus, and I can’t wait to listen to hundreds of pop songs. These six, though, are by all objective criteria the finest.

If you want hundreds more pop songs, buy my new book Now That’s What I Call Now: A History of Pop Music in Britain, 1983-2025, available for £4.99 as an eBook or for nothing with a Kindle Unlimited subscription

Record Store Day 2025 in Watford

On April 12, the Sound of Watford will fill the town with music

You wouldn’t call Watford a musical town. It used to be known for two things: printing newspapers and making beer. Although The New European newspaper is still printed in the town, the Sun Printers building at the very bottom of Whippendell Road was converted into flats. The Benskin Brewery, just down from the High Street, is now awaiting new tenants, with the new Watford Museum soon to open as part of the Cultural Quarter beside the Town Hall and the Colosseum.

Yet Watford, a town of about 100,000 people at the very point that London stops and becomes the bit just north of the city, is associated with some of popular music’s biggest stars. Elton John, who grew up in Pinner, owned the football club and used to play benefit gigs at Vicarage Road, while his friend George Michael worked at the Regent Cinema as a teenage usher. In turn, George’s friend Geri Halliwell grew up in the town too, as did Bradley Walsh, who has also been known to sing; he will be out on tour this spring with Brian Conley, Shane Richie and Joe Pasquale in the self-mockingly named Prat Pack, singing swing and big band music with a 15-piece horn section.

We will hear a lot about this tour, with starts at the end of the month but which doesn’t come to Watford (yet), although the Milton Keynes show on May 12 is a quick hop on the train away. In the meantime, the town will entertain its folk on Record Store Day (RSD) across six venues and 25 bands or artists. This is the Sound of Watford event, which officially begins at 8am outside the LP Café on The Parade when dozens of folk queue up for an exclusive RSD release which promotes the glory of shopping for physical product.

As well as a live DJ at the Café, the other big live music venues in town, sited within a mile’s radius of one another, are hosting the two dozen Sound of Watford acts. This allows fans of live music to hop from gig to gig and sample as much music as they can. High up on my list are The Cloak of Starsky, part of the Pump House’s bill from 7-11pm; they put out four fuzzy tracks last year which sound as sweaty as the tiny rooms that would reverberate to them.

The other five acts on Saturday at the year-round cultural hub, which hosts jazz, folk and musical theatre, include Gender Crisis, Phil Matthews, Gurt and ‘industrial nu-punk duo’ Pest, the chorus of whose new single O121DO1 goes ‘scare humanity, increasing entropy’. Ellie Capocci, whose new EP is due in July, released Pretty Girls at the end of last year, which would fit on to the daytime playlist of Vibe 107.6, a local station with a Sunday night Raw Vibes show playing music by local acts.

Johnny’s Bar, which hosts regular goth nights, welcomes Seethe, Trashed, Mishikui and Skarlet Envy, who are all set pulverise the eardrums. Far more sedate are the three acts set to play The Mad Squirrel, the craft ale venue with a Watford FC mural, during the evening: The Romulus Jazz Society, The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires and Momajoja.

The last of these acts has a residency at The Castle in Harrow and released a funky four-track EP called Soul Dive last year, the best track on which is the immediate Misinformation. Meanwhile, the Rickmansworth-based duo Vampires describe themselves as ‘uneasy listening with a death mariachi vibe’, which rather distracts from how good their music is. Their 2024 release Psychedelic Soul & Trash Vol 3 falls under the genres of ‘bubblegum sci-fi/horror indie pop’, which sounds like they just picked them out of a hat. Some of the drum loops they use are recognisable: Be My Baby on Rialto, Superstition on A Long Walk Home, 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover on Season of the Witch.

Then there are six acts playing The One Crown, the olde pub which is equidistant between Watford High Street Overground station and the Mad Squirrel, opposite the street entrance to Boots. Opening band Fused are on just after 5pm, followed by Stray Fox, The Nevers, Trainwrecker, Nick Byrne and headliners Ramona Marx, all playing 30-minute sets. It will be amusing to hear the segue from Byrne’s ‘indie-folk melancholia’ into the ‘spunk band’ from Hemel Hempstead who close things out at 9pm with songs from their recent EP Splenectomy.

The LP Café will set up speakers at 11am at the Pond, the plaza at the very end of The Parade which is filled with sand or deckchairs every summer. Paul Terris from the venue is gearing up for the busiest day of the year but took a few moments to tell me his view about The Sound of Watford.

‘It picks itself,’ Paul tells me of the lineup. ‘Ninety percent of the acts are local submissions, then it's up to us to do with the acts what any good record shop does with their records: organise and curate them.

‘I take great pleasure in the scheduling and coordinating of the line up, giving each venue their own vibe that fits with the character and history of each one. We work with many of them all year round to promote new and independent acts.’

The lineup playing by the Pond includes six more acts, including The Tiles, guitarist Callaine, indie-rockers Blueshift, the quartet Safe House and the trio Them 71s, who also played outside the café on a warm day last August. The act I am most looking forward to catching, either at The Pond or anywhere else, is Harry T Pope.

Pope is a piano-playing songwriter – hmm, I know another one of those – from Croxley Green. He put out his own five-track EP A Different Kind last year, which includes the outstanding and jazzy Stay Away and the seven-minute 11:11, with strings from the Czech National Symphony Orchestra playing Pope’s arrangements. Catch him for free before you have to pay large amounts of money to see him.

Paul Terris marvels at the eclecticism of the event’s two dozen acts. ‘As big as it grows the line-up is barely scratching the surface of the populous creativity in Watford.’

Visit The LP Café on Instagram here, and for a full events listing on what’s on in Watford, visit the Watford Actually site here

Reality Remade the TV Star, and TV Stars Remade Reality

Scripted TV is in decline because reality TV has taken over the world

Big Brother returns, yet again, this week, but why do we need reality TV when TV is giving us reality?

This is not a new observation. In my lifetime, we have gone from cheering on or booing actors in dramas and soap operas – Dynasty, Dallas, Coronation Street, Brideshead Revisited – to watching people-as-brands, whose careers blend the scripted and unscripted. Look, because we have to, at Kim Kardashian, who parlayed a sextape into 20 years of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, which has made stars of her sisters, husbands, mother and stepfather.

Not for nothing has Meghan, Duchess of Sussex gone back to her day job as a TV personality, except she’s not Meghan from Suits but Meghan from The Firm. I have no intention of watching her Netflix series, or even watch it to hate it, but the fact it has been made indicates that her mere presence is enough to get it commissioned. If Netflix had any gumption, they would make her watch paint dry, with her husband and kids popping up to ask if she wants some tea.

I watch so little TV these days, because I’m a print and radio guy, but outside of comedy and late-night US talk shows, I have little interest in doing so. I always think that TV drama, or competitions like Bake Off or The Apprentice, are the water cooler of the middle classes; when people rave about Bodyguard and Bridgerton, or Stranger Things and Squid Games, they are admitting to their friends and colleagues that they take the time to watch what other people are watching.

But increasingly it seems we’re all watching the world, and its politics, rather than a scripted story with character arcs and endings all mapped out. I still think the big story in the UK today is whether Fr Farage can achieve his (financial backers’) dreams and grab control of the legislature, although I am positive the Royal Family will stick their gloves on the tiller and ease right-wing figures away from representing them in Parliament.

That’s why our Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary are barristers, and why the Chancellor is a former Bank of England employee; her deputy, Darren Jones, is a lawyer too, as are a great many members of His Majesty’s Government. Can Labour, not the natural party of power, ride the waves of populism and mistrust into the 2030s, or will the support of media barons including Lachlan Murdoch, son of nonagenarian Rupert, and Sir Paul Marshall convince people to vote against their best interests and let the lunatics take over the asylum?

When Nigel Farage was paid £1.5m by ITV (the same people screening Big Brother this year) to take part in I’m A Celebrity, he knew this would increase his chances of winning over the people of Clacton; and this came six months before he announced he stood for the seat. During the pandemic, his I’m A Celeb predecessor Matt Hancock became the fall guy precisely because, as Health Secretary, he had been so visible in the daily briefings. As for Boris Johnson, a man whose first name is Alexander and who backed leaving the European Union for selfish, political reasons, the majority of folk first saw him on Have I Got News For You, not speaking in the Chamber as MP for Henley.

If I could go back in time, I would fire Mark Burnett before he had the idea of turning a bankrupt real estate mogul into a ferocious TV star telling people they were ‘fired’. It appals me that NBC, who aired The Apprentice for many years, pay Seth Meyers to lampoon the President’s activities, although the satire remains very watchable and astute. Shows like his, and those of Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, demand a knowledge of current events much as how rabbis need to know the Torah inside out to comment upon it.

Social media enjoys polarisation and side-taking, to ‘own’ one side or the other. In a recent development, newspaper headlines have started to comment on how a think tank report can be a ‘blow’ to the Prime Minister or Chancellor, or how ministers are ‘under pressure’ when things go awry. Hang about: isn’t this how sportswriters talk about football managers? And there we have it: politics is being turned into the Premier League. And what are Bukayo Saka, Erling Haaland and Mo Salah other than TV stars who are watched by millions of people around the world?

Again, in my lifetime, English football has become a product, with Russian, American and Saudi businessmen owning the top clubs and running them as fiefdoms. Managers have become coaches, players multimillionaires, fans customers, and to what end? This year, Manchester United fans have marched against the new ownership of Jim Ratcliffe, a tax exile who voted to leave the EU, while their rivals in the East of the city are involved in another court case. The first one threatened to eject them from European competition but, happily, they were not ejected and they won the Champions League.

In recent years, the richest and best run team has won the Premier League, usually Manchester City. Liverpool will, barring an almighty collapse, win their 20th league title and their second post-1992 championship in a competition where any of the 20 teams can beat anyone else. At this point I am duty bound to remember Leicester City’s 2016 triumph, which will be marked next year in the usual way such anniversaries are marked (cf Man United winning the 1998/99 Treble, Man City winning the Premier League in 2012); only Jamie Vardy, the team’s goalscorer, is still at the club, and he might well retire this year or next.

Vardy’s wife Becky, you recall, was subject to a court case by Coleen Rooney, famous purely for being the wife of Wayne, a great footballer who has failed in the three managerial jobs (Derby, Birmingham, Plymouth) he has had since retiring. He is back on the punditry circuit alongside his former United team-mates Rio Ferdinand, Roy Keane and Gary Neville, who are paid to criticise their ex-employers (but never their old manager, Alex Ferguson); even the commentary surrounding the Premier League is monetizable.

In politics, too, there are former ministers editing magazines (Michael Gove), hosting podcasts (Rory Stewart, George Osborne) and popping up as professional agitators (Liz Truss, who was Prime Minister for seven long weeks in 2022). They write columns, accept speaking engagements and take jobs in the private sector using the knowledge they aren’t officially allowed to use for profit until two years after they leave government.

Meanwhile, the US President has become the human face of Project 2025, which is ripping up the democratic norms of a 250-year-old republic. Who could not fail to be gripped by another executive order, or a debate about capitalism, in comparison with watching Anderson Cooper present the news on CNN? What started with a group of young people on MTV’s Real World in the early 1990s has, via Big Brother, morphed into politics as reality show, with fun characters like RFK Jr and ‘Little Marco’ Rubio, who is now the US Foreign Secretary, a quite amazing piece of scriptwriting from a man who used to trade insults with TV contestants on The Apprentice.

Karaoke and the Consensus Hit

At Uncle Darryl’s 60th birthday in March, I was reminded of the power of the universal hit song

There was drink, sushi and karaoke when Uncle Darryl, my mum’s brother, turned 60 last month. In the three hours I was at the party (I ducked out at 9.15pm), at least 30 songs had been played, all of which were consensus hits: songs that everyone knows and loves, even if they say they don’t.

The hits were a mix of songs from long ago and from more recent years: Rule the World by Take That, Angels by the most successful former member of Take That, and songs not by Take That. All You Need Is Love from 1967, Bohemian Rhapsody and Dancing Queen from the mid-1970s, Livin’ on a Prayer and Summer of ’69 (never a UK Top 40 hit, actually) from the mid-1980s, Yellow and Mr Brightside from the early 2000s; all we needed for the full house was bloody Sweet Caroline.

At some point I realised that all these songs, which without exception are in major keys, were versions of Molly Malone or God Save The King: folk anthems to be sung in celebration of being alive. I remember people bellowing along to Bon Jovi at a wedding and realising that the band may have written it, but it belonged to the audience now. All those songs do: Robbie Williams has said how Angels has become ‘the world’s biggest karaoke session’, while the abovementioned Rule The World was built for the stadiums Take That were playing at the time.

I asked a black friend what sort of consensus hits soundtrack gatherings of black people who have grown up with hip-hop (Eminem, for instance, is notoriously hard to do karaoke to). She asked around and came back with Before I Let Go by Maze and Frankie Beverly, which failed to reach the top 10 of the US R&B charts but came back in a big way in 2019 thanks to Beyoncé including a version of it in her Homecoming concert movie aka Beychella. And what about in Australia? Apparently there’s a line dance for Nutbush City Limits by Tina Turner, and of course there’s the unofficial national anthem You’re The Voice by John Farnham.

Consensus hits extend to books, movies and TV too. I’ve just started listening to a podcast about How I Met Your Mother, a sitcom that ran on CBS between 2005 and 2014; I came to it after the show had finished, and appreciated the acting, writing and storylines. It also acts as a warm hug or hot toddy, full of earnestness and lessons learned.

Episodes of the How We Made Your Mother podcast, which mentions in its third episode how the show belongs to its audience, begin with superlatives and anecdotes from fans who feel comforted by the show and its characters: single guy Ted, young couple Marshall and Lily, Canadian TV host Robin and besuited bro Barney, played against type by Broadway star Neil Patrick Harris.

The show’s success coincided with the Obama administration, as did Parks and Recreation, where lovely Leslie Knope strove for positivity against the show’s antihero, Parks Director Ron Swanson. Amy Poehler, who played Leslie as an extension of herself, links that show with the Pixar movie Inside Out, which was imagineered to perfection and was a critical hit; the sequel was the world’s biggest movie of last year, even though it lost the novelty factor of the first movie, which took the novel approach of personifying emotions like Anger, Sadness and Joy.

Despicable Me, with its irritatingly adorable yellow Minions, helped Steve Carell move on from Michael Scott, the American equivalent of David Brent, and I can’t wait to watch the movies with my nephew. It’s already cued up in my mind alongside the other Pixar animations that were, and still are, consensus hits: Toy Story 1 and 3, Up, Wall-E and Coco. You know what the films are doing to you, but once your prefrontal cortex latches on to them, you are powerless to stop the tears from flowing.

Humans like stories and feeling involved in them, a literal consensus that gives such a status to these pieces of art. None has been more successful in my lifetime than the saga of the wizard boy who came of age at boarding school alongside his two best friends; almost 30 years after the first book in the heptalogy came out, Harry Potter still casts his spells upon the children and grandchildren of the book’s first readers. I suppose part of the series’ success is, like the Bible or Torah, to do with the shared nature of it, with readers of every creed and colour feeling kinship with the characters.

There’s a difference between niche causes and epochal artworks like Guernica or the Mona Lisa, which at this point in their lifetimes are seen to be seen, for a photo op, rather than to be understood. Much of the coverage of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, which I think of as a giant niche even though she has sold more records than anyone else in the last few years, focussed on how much money she took in, or how much money was added to the GDP of the city she played in, or how long the set was. Consensus isn’t about how big your appendage is, however, but how you wield it.

I always remember a review of a Kings of Leon gig which, to paraphrase, noted that the band would love not to play Sex On Fire, but they would also like to pay the man who cleans their swimming pools. The consensus hit entraps the movie studio or the performing artist, boxing them in and forcing them to do the same thing over and over again until it falls out of fashion; no Kings of Leon song has been anywhere near as successful since Sex On Fire, even if it didn’t even breach the US top 50. It means they can tour Australia and the UK, both of whose charts it topped, until the end of time.

NOW 120 is out on Friday, gathering a few dozen tracks that have been popular in recent months, and I am running over the final edits of a book that tells the story of pop music through four decades of NOW compilations. Back in 1999, they could afford to omit Genie In A Bottle, Livin’ La Vida Loca and Flying Without Wings, which are all consensus smashes, because they could include Baby One More Time, S Club Party and Tragedy by Steps. There were more chances for consensus when there were fewer opportunities to hear a song via a personal feed on TikTok.

Last month the Netflix hit Adolescence got people talking about teenage mental health, and TV shows or podcasts about scandals or evil men can become global topics of discussion. It is ironic to note that R Kelly, whose music will never again be heard in polite society, is Track One on Disc Two of NOW 44; another of his songs, the remix to Ignition, was a party staple before it very quickly wasn’t. Luckily, we have Uptown Funk, Livin’ on a Prayer and bloody Sweet Caroline.

Consensus is cross-generational, after all: this year, Baby One More Time passed a billion Spotify streams, although we didn’t sing that at Darryl’s 60th.

Now That’s What I Call Now: A History of Pop Music in Britain from 1984-present is out as an eBook later this month, but you can read original versions of the pieces at nowthatswhaticallnow.com.

Elton John, the Troubadour from Metroland

In advance of a new collaborative project with Brandi Carlile, I look out of my lounge window for inspiration

Last week I hymned Paul Gambaccini, who turns 76 a week from now (April 2). Gambo’s friend Elton John, who is two years, a week and a day older than him, is still singing and releasing music. In fact, he celebrates his 78th birthday tonight at the London Palladium, but I don’t have to go anywhere to see him; I just need to turn my chair around.

To mark Elton’s final shows at Vicarage Road back in 2022, a massive mural was done of him on the side of Watford Library: glasses, sparkles, ebullience in an image. If you look out of my lounge window, Elton stares back, like the demon eyes of Doctor TJ Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby, or Sauron.

Next Friday (April 4), Elton releases his album Who Believes In Angels, a duets project with Brandi Carlile, who is fast becoming my generation’s Joni Mitchell or, indeed, our Elton. Working with the great Bernie Taupin and producer Andrew Watt, who has already ticked off the Rolling Stones and Pearl Jam as he tries to collect the set of Rock’n’Roll Stars, the pair of them have recorded a set of songs that build on their life’s work: comforting people, including gay and marginalised ones, with their music.

The album ends with When This Old World Is Done With Me, the type of song David Bowie and Leonard Cohen were singing in their seventies; Rock Star Stares Death in the Face a whole genre in itself, led by My Way, sung by a fiftysomething Sinatra. Elton’s take on the genre ends with a brass band, and after he played it through for the first time, Brandi recalls he wept and ‘his whole body crumpled over the piano’. ‘Is it too Lion King?’ said the man who wrote the songs for The Lion King, which will help Disney+ gain subscribers for decades to come.

As we learned from his memoir, a biopic and a documentary, this is the legacy of a shy pianist who, between the demise of The Beatles and the moonwalking rise of Michael Jackson, was the world’s most popular entertainer. He headlined Wembley by himself! He topped the US singles charts multiple times!! He was camp and flamboyant in an era of three-day weeks and economic decline!!!

We will soon see Elton in the forthcoming Spinal Tap sequel, which is not his first foray into acting; indeed, he has played ‘Elton John’ most of his life. He made a cameo in sitcom Ab Fab (‘I’ve always had hair, BITCH!’) and, in the best scene of Tommy, he mimed Pinball Wizard with stadium-rock gusto wearing oversized glasses and shoes.

As the book Watford Forever makes clear, Elton replaced drugs with Watford Football Club, whose Sir Elton John Stand I sat in just the other week to watch an FA Youth Cup tie. (Can I mention I wrote a book, From Kids to Champions, about the competition?) With £1m of Elton’s money, and the expert management of Graham Taylor, Watford cantered up the Football League and finished the 1982/83 season as the second best team in England; the 1983/84 season began with games in European competition and ended at Wembley, where Elton was filmed with tears in his eyes during the FA Cup final anthem Abide With Me.

Then came the score to the movie about meerkats, warthogs and lion cubs, as well as sundry soundtracks for stage musicals that played on Broadway and in the West End: Aida, Billy Elliott, Tammy Faye and The Devil Wears Prada, the last of these currently running in the Dominion Theatre where We Will Rock You used to live. Elton’s memoir Me, in which he revealed that Bob Dylan was useless at charades, made it clear that his career is motivated by the fractured relationship between young Reginald and dad Stanley, who was played in the movie Rocketman by the same actor who had been in the Underworld movies.

When Elton topped the UK album charts with his Diamonds collection, 18 months after putting a bow on his career with a Glastonbury headline slot, it reminded people just how many hits he had had: Bennie and the Jets, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Philadelphia Freedom, Are You Ready For Love, Tiny Dancer, Crocodile Rock and, of course, I’m Still Standing, Your Song and set closer Rocket Man. The biggest selling song of all (and until the end of) time is Candle in the Wind, written in honour of Marilyn Monroe and reset to commemorate the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, whose younger son Elton is godfather to.

Then there’s the philanthropic work with his AIDS Foundation, established in 1992. He is also in the exclusive club of 65 Companions of Honour, alongside fellow melodist Paul McCartney, fellow national treasure David Attenborough and fellow gay icon Ian McKellen. Above all, though, he is father of two boys, respectively an aspiring footballer and a wannabe musician. Paul Gambaccini and I agreed that their dad had done his job correctly.

I came to Elton in the 1990s, so my first exposure to him was probably Circle of Life. Not wanting to spend £100 on a ticket to see him and his crack band play Watford’s football stadium, I took my partner and walked down to sit on a bench outside the hospital beside the ground and listen to the second half of the set. It sounded like rock’n’roll music, but there was also opera, orchestral and pop music, a combination only Elton could have brought together; this was a kid who attended the Royal Academy of Music to learn piano but loved the pre-rock chart-topper Winifred Atwell.

I do not know why he doesn’t join forces with Gambo and launch a podcast called The Rest Is Pop. Elton has hosted over 400 episodes of his Rocket Hour for Apple Music showcasing his deep love for, and encyclopaedic knowledge of, pop music. He has been known to buy multiple copies of CDs for both friends and his multiple homes dotted around the world: in Windsor, Venice, Nice and, in the USA, both Atlanta and LA. All that Lion King money has been used sensibly.

Although he is no longer jetting around the world to fulfil concert dates, Elton is looking after his legacy just as Jimmy Page is shepherding the Led Zeppelin remasters and as McCartney and Ringo Starr are still talking about their band, which broke up 55 years ago. Among Elton’s greatest achievements is that along with Led Zep and the Fabs, he is in the tiny rank of popular entertainers who gained huge success in the USA. They have since been joined by the Bee Gees, Sting, Phil Collins, Coldplay, Adele and Elton’s good friend Ed Sheeran, who have all written top tunes and sold out stadiums.

Elton is also very good at selling his material, always game for an interview; he dealt with an enthused Jack Black on Graham Norton’s show very well, and he and Brandi recently spoke to Radio 2’s Scott Mills from his Vinyl Room. ‘The song just appeared,’ Brandi sighed about her friend, a man who has been inventing melodies, which have been heard by millions, if not billions, for over 50 years. Hence why I can see him out of my window.

Always Meet Your Heroes

It’s quite disconcerting to have your hero bellow questions at you, as I found out this year

I’m on the radio on Sunday. For the third time in as many months, my voice will come out of BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. I first applied to be on the music quiz Counterpoint in 2021, and I was not chosen as one of 27 contestants for that series, or 2023’s, or 2024’s.

I was promised I would definitely be on the 2025 series, the 38th, questions for which have been set by Stephen Garner (pictured below), whose fiendish mind thinks up 67 per show, 14 of which are unused. Somehow, in 28 minutes of valuable audio real estate, 53 questions are asked in full or in part. Because it’s a music quiz, there are also clips to play; in my heat, I was given the love theme to the movie Up and three pieces of music by Wham! You can hear the show here as a podcast.

You will discover what Stephen has thought up for the three finalists on Sunday afternoon at 4.30pm, when there is no Premier League football on 5 Live. Rather humorously my two fellow finalists – Jim from Northern Ireland, and Sarah, who describes herself intersectionally as a ‘Cornish Australian Mancunian’ – are former Mastermind finalists, while in 2022 Sarah reached the Counterpoint final and won Brain of Britain. She was wearing a t-shirt of her favourite band The Divine Comedy, which was a nice conversation starter as we waited for the quiz to begin (we recorded it a month ago yesterday).

In the semi-final, I had gotten lucky when Country in the 21st Century came up as a bonus round. I was asked a septet of questions that ranged from the artist who covered Fast Car by Tracy Chapman, to which trio were ashamed that George W Bush was from Texas, to the Californian country festival that happens every April. In case you want to test your knowledge, here’s the link to the show.

The final round is on the buzzers, the same dot buttons used by Just A Minute contestants to interrupt hesitators and deviators; the show is recorded in the same BBC Radio Theatre on a stage where pretty much every great British entertainer of the past century has trodden upon. The green room in which contestants mingle and where they leave their belongings during the recording, Stephen told me, has held Joanna Lumley, Michael Palin and Sir Elton John, whom Stephen chaperoned at a recording of Paul Gambaccini’s celebration of his 40 years on the BBC.

Photo credit: Christopher Sykesud

Segue: Paul Gambaccini (pictured left) is my hero. I used to stay in on Saturday evenings, even when I could listen back to the show on the pre-Sounds iPlayer, to hear America’s Greatest Hits, a two-hour programme that played rock, country and R&B ‘then and now’. The show always ended with the number one song of the moment. It’s the first place I heard Just Dance by Lady Gaga, I Kissed a Girl by Katy Perry and Fence Post by Aaron Watson, a country artist who lamented that an executive didn’t believe he had ‘commercial appeal’.

I wrote to the man everybody calls Gambo to borrow the format for the show when I did my own version of it in 2015, and he graciously sent me a letter back giving me his blessing. I had attended that BBC celebration, which meant that Stephen called me over to the questioner’s table before the recording of the heat. Weren’t we close to the 50-year hootenanny, I asked. Yes, Paul Gambaccini from the radio told me, and that’s not all: if he, who turns 76 on April 2, held on for a few more years he would break essayist Alistair Cooke’s service record of 58 years.

In a media landscape where the BBC have to serve every possible audience in every possible way – news, current affairs, drama, music documentary, children’s programming – there is room to give Gambo a two-hour Sunday night show on Radio 2 show called The Paul Gambaccini Collection. In the first year, he has broadcast tributes to Quincy Jones and his Radio 2 colleague Johnnie Walker, and in February, either side of a Valentine’s Day special, the themes were Comic Books and songs with Happy or Sad in the title.

The critic David Hepworth once remarked that the man possessed a ‘discographic memory’, perhaps because alongside Mike Read and Jo and Tim Rice (yes, that Tim Rice), Gambo wrote the literal pop discography. That’s why they call him the Professor of Pop, which is befitting a man who studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship in the 1970s and settled in London after becoming Rolling Stone magazine’s man in Rock’n’Roll London, in a country which had just begun to put the genre on the air with Radio One in 1967.

Across half a century, in a broadcasting career which included a spot reviewing the movies on breakfast TV, Gambo has presented for every one of the main BBC networks and several commercial stations including Jazz FM, Classic FM, LBC and Greatest Hits Radio. The last of these stations is where America’s Greatest Hits now lives, broadcast from 5-7pm on Saturday afternoons. He records it in his West London home with ‘studio manager Chris Sherwood’ on hand to push the buttons as he reads the script, as I was told in the green room after the final recording.

He has published two books of essays, Masters of Rock and Track Records, based on hour-long profiles written for Radio One in the early 1980s; the Michael Jackson essay begins ‘I don’t want to talk about the llama’. Only a man used to Oxford tutorial essays could have taken on such an assignment, one which had a ‘hideous deadline pressure’, in a time before Google and digital search capabilities.

In 1996, Paul published a memoir called Love Letters, which I am duty bound to say took its name from a copyright which was a UK top ten hit for three artists: Ketty Lester (number 4, 1962); Elvis Presley (number 6, 1966); and Alison Moyet (number 4, 1987). I had to look that up, but I bet Paul would not needed to do so.

In Love Letters, Paul wrote about seven men he loved. One of them was David Carroll, who fell victim to the AIDS virus that struck down so many gay men in the 1980s: ‘We both suffered to come to terms with a sexuality that was first impossible, then inadvisable and finally a blessing’. When Gambo marked the 80th birthday of his mate Tim Rice in November 2024, he closed the programme with Anthem, written by Rice for the musical Chess, in which Carroll originated the role of The Russian, Anatoly Sergievsky.

Gambo’s achievements in broadcasting and discography rather bury the lede: a few years before he came to England, the Sexual Offences Act was passed; one of the clauses legalised homosexuality between consenting adults over 21 in private. Alongside his close friend Elton John (more on whom next week), Gambo has been a high-profile gay figure in British life; Elton might have sold millions of records, but Gambo was the one who played them on air and introduced people to Elton’s magnificent songwriting.

Who will replace Elton, or Gambo, when they are gone? Well, who can.

Journalism and The Truth

Two small words, Truth and Trust, are obsessing me in this post-whatever age

Maria Ressa’s outstanding book How To Stand Up to a Dictator was written about Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, whose daughter Sara is in the middle of being impeached as vice-president. Maria and her fellow female journalists at Rappler had to undergo the slings and digital arrows of trying to hold the powerful accountable, with troll farms and public pronouncements turning people against the truth.

Truth and its cousin, Trust, are so important in the new digital world. Jamie Susskind, a qualified barrister who is on first-name terms with the Rule of Law, has written a couple of books about this new Digital Republic, one of which was praised for its chunky bibliography; his brother Daniel, who would have been a classmate of mine had we not gone to rival schools just North of London, has received plaudits for his ‘reckoning’ on the concept of economic growth, which has fascinated him at an academic and policy level. I remember Daniel doing some magic tricks as a teenager; now, with plaudits from former Prime Ministers, he’s hoping to work some magic of a different kind.

And then there’s the USA, to which the whole world is gripped; never mind Dallas or M*A*S*H, Seinfeld or Friends, Succession or whatever this year’s hottest show is, Trump II: This Time It’s Worse is the sitcom of the ages. This series has a fun new character: a nasty billionaire with a passion for space exploration, electric cars and also autocracy.

We’re supposed to be scared and distracted, especially those of us with family in the country, and trust the media to mediate, as they have always done. It’s not particularly optimal that Fox News, assorted online gobsheets and the recently freed Steve Bannon, who invented Bannoning aka ‘flooding the zone’, are all working hard to spread the Trump message. Nor is it great that progressive voices are choosing their words carefully: it saddens me to thank that Seth Meyers is earning a living on NBC, the very same network which turned Trump from a tabloid star into a TV star with a catchphrase: ‘Make America Great Again’. I mean, ‘You’re Fired’.

What worries me greatly is the silencing of journalists and big media organisations. Why has Amazon earmarked $40m to do an Imelda Marcos-style portrait of Melania, mother of Barron Trump, a freshman at New York University? Why has Meta told its Facebook users to do their own fact-checking? Why did Reddit act to stop criticism, stating publicly that ‘debate and dissent’ is good but threats are not, of the hired goons who acted on behalf of DOGE aka the Elon department of state? Maybe the threats need to be coded or, as per Nigel Farage, asked in a jokey ‘Whhhhat’s all that about?’ manner.

If you are paid to report the truth objectively and fairly, you cannot be cowed by the people on whom you are reporting. It did not surprise me to learn that in the early years of Nazism, Hitler rapidly took measures to shut down the free and Jewish-owned press, with journalists of all stripes fleeing the country which was now hostile to Jews, communists and anyone who wasn’t Aryan enough. Are the tech bros the new Goebbelses, controlling the message and making it impossible to challenge power (whhhhat’s all that about)?

There is a reason the resignation of Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes made the news after her cartoon was spiked. Although it was foreseeable to know that painting the ultimate owner of her paper as a man in thrall to Trump, next to Mickey Mouse and Mark Zuckerberg, it still smacked of censorship, or at the very least extreme caution. Rupert Murdoch, before his company Fox News paid a gargantuan fine rather than go to court to say that they not defame Dominion voting systems, the truth of which of course is made moot by the settlement, gave another of his axioms which I have not forgotten since: ‘It’s not red or blue; it’s green’.

This means that he, as well as Musk, Zuckerberg and Farage, can change shapes and colour to suit the mood. Words don’t matter; money does. Piers Morgan congratulated Trump on his accession to the throne – sorry, the presidency – four years after flipping the bird after the Capitol riots of January 6 2021. Morgan, who has been employed variously by ITV, CNN and Talk TV, is now an independent entity and, in spite of everything, helped newspapers sell copies and TV channels gain viewers. He is also a very, very rich man, even though the commentator George Monbiot wrote in 2023 that his rise was ‘one of the abiding mysteries of public life’ (whhhhat’s all that about?).

Like Murdoch, Morgan showed his hand back in 1999 when he admitted that he sought to ‘ingratiate’ himself with ‘newspaper owners, potential newspaper owners and billionaires’. Morgan claims, in spite of a court case stating the opposite, he ‘neither hacked a phone nor told anyone to hack a phone’ while editor of the News of the World (before he was 30) and the Daily Mirror, a job he lost after publishing faked photos of Iraqi prisoners. He then headed to Britain’s Got Talent, where he was present to witness the rise of the Susan Boyle phenomenon.

Morgan turns 60 years old at the end of March, and I would genuinely love to be at that birthday party or be there when he opens his cards. Which old Fleet Street legends will pay homage to a man who in 2008 won the seventh season of the US Celebrity Apprentice, beating off his fellow Hydra team members Lennox Lewis, Gene Simmons and the guy who played Big Pussy in the Sopranos? Morgan now hosts Uncensored on his Youtube channel, free of any broadcaster or even requirements for balance; he is more Andrew Tate than Andrew Marr (whhhhat’s all that about?).

The show, sponsored by an American jewellery broker (‘get up to $15,000 in free silver’), has recently included interviews with Ukraine president Vlodymyr Zelensky and, in Riyadh, Tucker Carlson, respectively Putin’s foe and the man who was, to Morgan, ‘licking’ the Russian leader somewhere I can’t write because you might be eating. Before his fall from grace, Carlson was the top TV pundit in the USA with a nightly show on Fox News; watching clips of the interview where Morgan and Carlson met for the first time is like the celebrated Spiderman meme. Indeed, both got to question one another for their respective channels.

Both men are successful in monetising the attention of a global audience, and I do wonder if history will be kind to them. They quack like journalists, talking to people in power and communicating to an audience, but they are at heart entertainers. In a world where news is a marketplace, they are the fearless truth-tellers, and their audience trusts them.

It also helps the powerful people that voters are watching Morgan or Carlson; better them, than reading Maria Ressa on Duterte, or Carole Cadwalladr on Brexit-backing businessmen, or journalists reporting on Hitler in 1934. Ah, no; they couldn’t do that, because their employers had fled.

The fewer journalists there are, the likelier that the powerful can write history themselves, rather than be written about.

On The Plane, The Game You Cannot Lose

The latest round of ‘What? No [Player X]?!’ is upon us, as Herr Tuchel selects the first England squad for the upcoming World Cup qualifiers

Every two years, providing that the England men’s football team qualify for an international tournament, the great debate begins: who should be the next James Bond?

No, sorry, I mean: who should be the next Doctor Who?

No, again, sorry, I mean: who should be on the plane to [insert international tournament here]? It is a parlour game with no right or wrong answers, and places importance on the squad, which has been expanded from 23 to 26 players for no reason at all.

Thomas Tuchel will follow Gareth Southgate as the most loved/hated man in Britain according to how well England play across 90 minutes this spring and autumn. Oodles of newsprint will be wasted by those doing the most pointless job in England: writing about the national team. It’s pointless because any opinion counts, no matter how stupid or, indeed, racist. The USA has its many sporting franchises, and Australia has the cricket team, but really the England men’s team (not the women’s…yet) is the albatross around our neck.

Someone once wrote that, whereas Shakespeare, HRH, the NHS and the BBC are British, only the football team is separate from those of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They know their place, but England has a nation of many millions who, in 2026, will mark the diamond jubilee of the 1966 FIFA World Cup victory on home turf. Only one of the starting XI remains, Sir Geoff Hurst, while as of the time of writing in March 2025 only two other squad members are still alive. Strangely, both are wingers: Ian Callaghan, who is 83 in April, won five First Division titles with Liverpool across 20 years, and Terry Paine, who played 808 games for Southampton and will turn 86 this month.

For this reason, the 2026 World Cup in North America and Mexico assumes plenty of importance. For the first time, a German coach will lead England (barring catastrophe) to a finals that will be overlong and overshadowed, as ever, by the nastiness of the host nation’s leader and the usual blitheness of football’s governing body (‘today I feel…Trumpian’). The English FA have appointed a career coach who won the Champions League with Chelsea and has managed in France (with Paris St-Germain) and Germany, where he took over from Jürgen Klopp at both Mainz and Dortmund, and took charge of Bayern Munich in 2023/24. Rather shockingly, Bayern did not win the league that season, which meant he was relieved of his post.

Tuchel brings with him an English coach in Anthony Barry, a Scouser who came through at Everton but was released as a young pro. He went on to play for such clubs as Accrington Stanley, Yeovil Town, Chester City, Fleetwood Town and Wrexham – all hail the football pyramid! – before starting a coaching career at Wigan Athletic and moving on to work first with Chelsea and then with the Republic of Ireland and Belgium. He is apparently known for his set-piece work, so expect the focus to be as much on Barry, corners and free-kicks as on Tuchel, tactics and open play; indeed, the 2018 World Cup saw England have a great deal of joy from dead-ball situations.

That tournament included plenty of players who are still under consideration for Herr Tuchel, and thus we turn to On The Plane. Bear in mind that injuries and form can play a huge part in who makes the cut, which is why Marcus Rashford will be nowhere near the squad, in spite of regaining first-team football with Aston Villa. Trent Alexander-Arnold was a 19-year-old one-cap wonder when he went to Russia in 2018, while first-choice goalkeeper Jordan Pickford and defender Harry Maguire had only played three and five times respectively going into a tournament in which they both shone.

There is every chance that an unknown player will have three good games for his club, impress the manager during a friendly in Spring 2026 and force the manager’s hand. As it stands, there are several players who are, so to speak, clutching their tickets. They include Jude Bellingham and Declan Rice in midfield, Cole Palmer and Bukayo Saka in the wide positions and Pickford, who has now played 73 games for his country. In 2025/26 he will play in goal for Everton in their new stadium, and with any luck he will face fewer shots per game under the management of David Moyes. His understudies will be two from Nick Pope, Aaron Ramsdale, James Trafford and Dean Henderson.

Into the centre-back positions and it seems likely that Marc Guéhi and John Stones will be picked, with Ezri Konsa building on his success at Aston Villa. Joe Gomez and Levi Colwill are other options, as is Brighton captain-leader-legend Lewis Dunk. Pickford’s Everton teammate Jarrad Branthwaite made his England debut just before EURO 2024 and was on standby for the tournament.

Other provisional squad members included Jarell Quansah of Liverpool and James Maddison of Spurs. It may be that Maddison is the type of player Tuchel wants in his squad, but he is blessed with playmakers, three of them from Manchester City alone: Phil Foden, Jack Grealish and James McAtee. In any case, Bellingham will start every game and potentially captain the side.

What to do about Harry Kane, England’s record scorer and the man brought to Bavaria by Tuchel in 2023? Dominic Solanke’s absence for this month’s games will ensure Ollie Watkins or possibly Noni Madueke starts one of the two games in rotation with Kane, or with each other. Had he scored any goals off the bench this season, Eddie Nketiah of Crystal Palace would join his team-mates Henderson, Guéhi, Tyrick Mitchell and Eberechi Eze in the squad; the injury to fellow striker Jean-Philippe Mateta gives Nketiah a decent run of games. Adam Wharton, who has missed much of the season through injury, and his replacement Will Hughes are also in with a shout.

With Bukayo Saka due to be making his way back from injury, Eze or Jarrod Bowen might have the opportunity to start on the right, with Palmer on the left or perhaps through the middle. Luke Shaw, whose body is too unreliable, might miss out in favour of Rico Lewis, who will be joined by any number of players who, alongside him, won the 2023 under-21 EURO tournament. They include: goalkeeper Trafford; defenders Branthwaite, Colwill and Taylor Harwood-Bellis; midfielders Harvey Elliott, Morgan Gibbs-White, Angel Gomes, Anthony Gordon and Curtis Jones; and strikers Palmer and Madueke.

Gareth Southgate famously started his time as England manager by informing Wayne Rooney that his international career was over, and professional England-watchers will be primed to go, ‘What, no [insert player here]?’ when they report on Tuchel’s first squad for the fixtures at Wembley against Albania and Latvia. Will any of Newcastle United’s Englishmen – Pope, Gordon, Harvey Barnes, Lewis Hall, Tino Livramento or Joe Willock – make the squad?

Will Manchester United’s horrendous league position relegate Kobbie Mainoo, who is looking to leave the club, to a squad player rather than a starter? Will Alexander-Arnold, Jones and Harvey Elliott mysteriously pull out of the games so as to help Liverpool more speedily pull level with United as they search for their 20th league title, which will delight (the win) or appal (the withdrawl) Ian Callaghan?

The one to watch for the starting place is Conor Gallagher, who played under Tuchel at Chelsea in 2022/23 and now plays in Spain for Atlético Madrid alongside Kieran Trippier who, aged 34 and having won over 50 international appearances, has made himself unavailable for the World Cup qualifiers. In the midfield, England will need a quarterback in front of the defence, a playmaker behind the striker and a sweeper-upper in the middle of the pitch.

Rice and Bellingham are the starters, with Mainoo, Gallagher, Jones and Gibbs-White ready as impact players. If Arsenal’s very young Max Dowman does a Rooney and comes through at 16, following the path to the first team that his fellow teenagers Myles Lewis-Skelly and Ethan Nwaneri have followed, then he might win a seat on the plane. You can call it the Theo Walcott role of Promising Young Talent. There might not be space for him anyway, as competition is intense.

Even though it doesn’t matter, and unlike Tuchel and Barry I am not being paid millions by the English FA to do this for a living, here is my squad of 26 for The Plane to Mexico and North America, with 11 players on standby to account for loss of form or injury.

Goalkeepers: Jordan Pickford, Nick Pope, Dean Henderson

Centre-Backs: Jarrad Branthwaite, Lewis Dunk, Joe Gomez, Marc Guéhi, Ezri Konsa, John Stones

Wide Midfielders: Trent Alexander-Arnold, Jarrod Bowen, Lewis Hall, Rico Lewis, Tino Livramento, Bukayo Saka

Central Midfielders: Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden, Conor Gallagher, Morgan Gibbs-White, Angel Gomes, Curtis Jones, Kobbie Mainoo, Declan Rice

Central Forwards: Harry Kane, Cole Palmer, Ollie Watkins

On Standby: Aaron Ramsdale, Levi Colwill, Jarell Quansah, Myles Lewis-Skelly, Anthony Gordon, James McAtee, Eberechi Eze, Jack Grealish, Harvey Elliott, Dominic Solanke, Nomi Madueke

The Death of the Congregation Generation

Generation Z, aged between 15 and 30, have much to teach the world, but so do their preceding generations

It hit me as I was listening to a Radio 4 podcast which brought together Nick Robinson and David Willetts, Amol Rajan and Nadia Whittome. The Times had commissioned research into Generation Z, the tranche of Britons born between 1996 and 2011, which coincides exactly with the Labour government which helped America kill Saddam Hussein, allowed bankers to get involved with credit default swaps then rescued their industry because it was too big to fail.

Meanwhile, these kids, who are today approaching their 15th, 21st or 30th birthdays, have grown up with broadband and mobile internet, the answers to any question at the tips of their hyperactive fingers. Never has any generation of young person been more aware of the world around them, and never so prone to mis- and disinformation. There’s a reason the BBC hired Marianna Spring, a 1996 baby, to investigate this phenomenon, even as the Corporation loses audience and listener share to Netflix, TikTok and the podcast.

I started to think about the generations before Gen Z. I was born in 1988, which makes me akin to Amol Rajan (b. 1983): a Millennial, a tranche now in our late-thirties and mid-forties, perhaps looking at secondary schools for our kids and watching their parents enjoy the fruits of working hard for 50 years. Our parents are either Baby Boomers, who are children of the 1960s, or Gen X-ers, kids of the 1970s.

Respectively the Boomers, like my mum (b. 1961) and dad (b. 1958), grew up with three channels on TV and innovative pop and rock music on the BBC’s fab new pop station Radio 1; they also had to knock on their friends’ doors or ring the house phone to see if they were in, and had to go to a physical library to research their homework, which they wrote down on paper.

The Gen X-ers could at least use word processors while they watched Duran Duran and Michael Jackson music videos on MTV or, if their parents did not have cable TV, Channel 4’s groovy show The Tube, hosted by the dynamic Paula Yates. When it came to going out and having fun, while their Boomer parents headed to Northern Soul or punk clubs, the Gen X kids went to illegal raves in fields around the new M25 motorway (which, since it opened in 1986, is actually a Millennial).

Back to that discussion on Radio 4, which for all its youth-targeting is still a station most enjoyed by Boomers over 60. Labour MP Nadia Whittome, a former ‘Baby of the House’ who was elected at the age of 23 in 2019 to serve the Nottingham East constituency, was complaining about the lack of inheritance for her generation, who are on the cusp of Millennial and Gen Z. They were teenagers while the Cameron-Clegg Coalition cut back on public expenditure in a necessary but awful programme of austerity.

In 2016, there was a vote where not enough of the electorate wanted to stay within the European Union, some of whom believed the promises of sovereignty from that man in the blazer who led the UK Independence Party. In 2020, a lethal pandemic disrupted their education and forced them on to their tablets, laptops and phones even more than they were used to being on them. We now have a hyperconnected generation who are taught on tablets, which must have destroyed the photocopier market, and for whom science, technology, maths and engineering seem to outrank music, drama, and classical and foreign languages.

I gravitated towards the latter category, a humanities student who attacks questions by considering pros and cons, benefits and burdens, and tries to come down on one side of the fence. My history teacher Mr Brown, when he wasn’t delivering sermons off the top of his head that we had to capture in note form, would insist that we could not sit on the fence when arguing, for instance, if discovery was greater than development when it came to the history of medicine. I can add up and convert fractions into percentages, but I can’t use a logbook or do any form of engineering.

However, ask me to have a go at translating a passage of Virgil’s Aeneid into English and explain what’s going on, and I can still just about manage. My classical education focussed on the Golden Age of Athens – Socratic dialogues, military tactics and the dramatic innovation of a third lead character – and the Roman world of Caesars and love poetry. Catullus came up with the epigram ‘Odi et amo’ (I hate and I love), which GCSE Latin students appreciate when they aren’t looking up all the naughty words the Roman poet used.

My favourite epigram comes from my main man Marcus Tullius Cicero, about whom my classics professor at Edinburgh Dr Dominic Berry is a world expert; he literally wrote the book on Cicero, the lawyer and writer who came up with the epigram ‘O Tempora, O Mores’. This can be translated in thousands of ways: ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ is basically what it means, if we want to bring another modern poet into things.

And this neatly returns me to my argument: a 20-year-old today scrolls through TikTok the way I scrolled through Facebook or Myspace; or the way my 50-year-old cousin sat for hours watching afternoon TV; or the way my mum and dad tried to find some privacy with radio and pop music when they weren’t watching TV with their mum and dad. My grandparents, who were born between the 1920s and 1940s, came of age in a time before TV, when you had to go outside or, significantly for them, go to synagogue or youth clubs to socialise with other people.

This is what made me pause the Radio 4 discussion. My grandma Sandra is my only living grandparent, a spry and wily octogenarian who became a mum before she was 20. When she was growing up in leafy Chislehurst in Kent, she had to go up to Piccadilly to dance and mingle with men, who would mark her card and offer her a dance to the music of the day, some of which was being pioneered down the road in various Soho coffee houses and trad jazz clubs.

It was at the Pigalle that she met Malcolm, a 25-year-old from Manchester, and within a year they were married. It is more amazing that Sandra and Malcolm did not meet at the local synagogue, or because they had mutual friends; their daughter Nicky moved down from Hull to Stanmore for school, and she met Alex Brick, who was a few years her senior but was besotted by her charm, intelligence and beauty. They married, and now I’m writing this piece lamenting the decline of the Congregation Generation.

The Internet is an amazing leap in technology, but you cannot see, hear, smell, touch or taste someone you meet on there. We cannot recork the bottle or put the lid on the jar, but we can at least acknowledge the benefits of encountering someone in three dimensions. The Zennials, including my nephew Hugo (b. 2023) whose parents were on the same Philosophy course at UCL, have a chance to bring congregation back to their generation.

The Talent is the Institution Now

Ahead of my appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Counterpoint, I ponder how institutions like the BBC are now subordinate to the talent they employ

The shower is where creative people get all their best ideas, closely followed by long walks and, as per Richard Curtis, while the kettle boils. My idea was to write about the demise of the BBC, but I think I’ve cracked some sort of code about today’s media epoch.

We have known since Tim Berners-Lee unveiled the World Wide Web in 1990 that the day would come that information could not be contained in analogue forms: the book, popularised by the printing press in the fifteenth century; the album, which had its heyday in about 1984 when Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen wrapped up pop music and iconography in a rotating package that spun at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute; and the moving picture, which had been entertaining millions since before little screens could fit in one’s living room.

The story of my lifetime, perhaps even beyond the slow frog-boiling of what is now called the Climate Emergency, is the democratisation of data, be it words, music or images. The new oil barons and bankers are the tech billionaires, and also the bankers. We’re still a capitalist planet, albeit one where you can direct people to an imaginary coin and coin it in.

But what of the old world? Imagine a person who grew up with three or four TV channels, who had to make their own fun as a child or young adult. They’d head to the pub after work, put the world to rights and go home, with an evening paper tucked under their arm, and settle down on to the sofa with Coronation Street or, from 1985 onwards, its East London equivalent.

They might tune into John Peel’s Radio 1 show and hear which bands are in session and which records Peel was playing at the wrong speed tonight. On the idiot box in 1985, at the risk of turning into Peter Kay, Open All Hours was in its fourth series, while the BBC serialised Howards’ Way the same year it bought Miami Vice, famously described as ‘MTV Cops’.

This was the year of Live Aid, the global jukebox whose ruby anniversary is marked with a musical in London’s West End called Just For One Day. It was a great day for fans of Phil Collins, who could see him in person in London or Philadelphia, and on TV in both; if you were there and you were 30, you are now likely retired. Dylan Jones wrote an okay book on the event, but I hope someone does a better job of it this year.

Live Aid was the day Queen became a global treasure, when U2 became stadium rockers and when Bob Geldof swore on TV. Note the medium on which he delivered his message: television, which had made its presence known to people in the 1950s, had now come of age. Not for nothing did Bono say that his wander into the crowd, which meant the rest of his band were forced to loop an outro several times over, was a search for ‘a TV moment’. At 25, he had only known a world where TV was king/queen.

Five years later, the information superhighway would muscle in on its territory: attention. The BBC, through its TV and radio service, had a hold on British media, which is why commercial radio, ITV, Channel 4 and newspapers run by men like Rupert Murdoch always snipe from the sidelines.

Significantly, back in 1985, the institution was greater than the talent: in 1993, Radio 1 controller Matthew Bannister sacked some of that talent to freshen up the sound of the station. Dave Lee Travis, who was 48, and Simon Bates, who was 46, were replaced by young pups Mark Goodier (now 63), Steve Lamacq (who turned 60 last October) and Jo Whiley, who will be 60 on July 4. Peel, who was to music what David Attenborough was to primates, stayed.

But what were DLT and Bates, and indeed the 46-year-old Bob Harris, doing on a station aimed at young people? Bob, who would be back on the BBC within a decade doing the overnight show on Radio 2, wondered at the time if ‘the type of bands my programme was introducing’ would have ‘an outlet in radio at all’. Bob needn’t have worried, because in the new millennium radio mutated into new, playable-on-demand (POD) forms.

Back in 1993, Chris Evans was about to shake up not just breakfast radio but the entire medium, with a style that was two parts Timmy Mallett to one part Danny Baker. Evans was so successful he could afford to leave Radio 1 and buy Virgin Radio, then follow Bob back to Radio 2 and steer its Breakfast Show for several years. I was a loyal listener even though I found his patter often irritating. That’s why they invented the off switch.

But Chris was at the apex of Old and New Media. Even as podcasting grew in popularity, the big beasts of radio still had their acolytes, be they Terry Wogan, Ken Bruce and Steve Wright on Radio 2, or Nicky Campbell and Peter Allen on 5 Live. These were BBC lifers who had a home until they couldn’t talk any more. In 2024, both Steve Wright and Johnnie Walker presented their final shows weeks or days before their deaths.

The moment that changed it all was when Radiohead decided to let their fans pay whatever they liked to own their 2007 album In Rainbows. Having seen out their recording contract, they gave the album away because they knew that it was their live show that brought in the big bucks; they performed the album in a session From The Basement, uploading the videos on to the relatively new site Youtube, soon to be bought by Google.

As I was writing this piece, Your Woman by White Town was playing. Its path to UK number one was helped by regular plays by Mark Radcliffe on Radio 1; it is inconceivable that a radio DJ could, by his or her own efforts, do the same today. Radcliffe is still on the BBC, albeit for five hours a week mostly on 6 Music, the station I nickname Radio Peel for its challenging playlist and championing of alternative music. It is interesting to note that Peel died in October 2004, months before Youtube came into being. Soon enough, the site started to influence the charts and take audiences away from radio: why wait for your favourite song when it was a click away?

In January 2025, Scott Mills took over the hallowed Radio 2 Breakfast Show. Mills came into radio in the late 1990s and looked up to the best in the business; now he is one of the best, but many millions fewer are listening. This is a BBC-wide problem, and not just because of the Jimmy Savile scandal they failed to deal with.

The BBC is in trouble for many reasons, but one of the key ones is because the talent is now the institution, not the other way round. All of this is to say, I’ll be on BBC Radio 4 this Sunday at 4.30pm competing in the music quiz Counterpoint. I’m up against a former British quiz champion, so wish me luck!

How Nigel Farage Can Persuade the UK to Vote Reform

The party of rebellion needs to simultaneously appear to be the party of national interest

Nigel Farage, the German-born Dulwich College alumnus who keeps inserting himself into the national conversation, knows that he, and the people who are funding his party, need to convince the electorate at large that he is the man to grasp the levers of power. He’ll try to blame someone else if he can’t force through the agenda, but he needs to be in power, so let’s all Join the Revolt and vote Reform UK.

Look, I am under no illusions about how effective enfranchisement is not: much ado about Elon shows that if you have means to affect democracy, to bend the arc of government to your will, your lack of a vote matters more than my vote. I looked at the offerings from the main two parties in July 2024 and turned my nose up, but I did not abstain, as I did in 2019. Back then, on a wet December evening, I remembered Tory mastermind(!) Dominic Cummings and thought there was no way he and his shopping trolley – which is how he referred to the former Foreign Secretary and Mayor of London – would get Brexit done.

Nor was I particularly keen on the Labour leader, a career backbencher and ruler of Islington North, and his plan to work for the many and not the few. Labour would always take on board what the few (not the many) suggested, be they Tony Blair and his ID card plans, or corporate lobbyists looking after their own interests. The worker, for whom the party was founded to protect, always loses out to people who have money, power and influence.

Samuel Earle’s magnificent book Tory Nation told me precisely why the Conservative Party believe themselves to be the natural rulers of Britain. I’m working on a project about private schooling which, having been through it myself, is absolutely the teat on which future cattle suckle: Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Westminster et al. all help nourish and nurture the next generation of leaders, who might not be good at leading but know how to get into positions of leadership. Exhibit A: Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson, whose well-trodden path from Eton to Oxford to The Times to Parliament to City Hall to Conservative Party leader to ambushed by a cake is one I need not rehearse.

Instead, it’s all about Farage, the man who got into This Place at the eighth attempt in July 2024. I call him Father Farage, or Fr Farage, but the ‘Fr’ can stand for two other words that he is very keen not to be associated with. Is Reform UK a far-right party or just a right-leaning one? Are its politics dangerous or, as they call them, ‘common sense’? Is their TV channel, GB News, one which helps the propaganda effort as pensioners and the terminally bored watch that nice man talk about sovereignty? 4.5m people, as shown at the last election, were sold on it.

But 4.5m people won’t win you control of the legislature, which is what Farage wants. Zia Yusuf, the party treasurer, and Richard Tice, whose journalist partner is now an immigrant living in Dubai, are the other members of the triumvirate. Notice how Lee Anderson has hardly made a sound in 2025 so far, staying on message and probably helping his constituents in the deprived mining town of Ashfield. He might have benefitted from hoovering up Labour and Tory votes because he used to belong to both parties; hey, in a plural democracy, if people don’t like your principles, you can find new ones.

But what is the symbol of Fr Farage? It can’t be a red hat saying Make Britain Great Again, and it can’t be the sort of chainsaw brandished by Javier Milei, who convinced Argentina to vote him into power. We are watching Germany this Sunday – Sunday, not Thursday, because Germans are far smarter than the British – to see the results of their election, and whether the AfD party can overcome 80 years of self-flagellation to bring fascism back. Every National Socialist is dead, dying or senile, so it’s high time to return anti-immigrant sentiment to a country which has 76 AfD members of parliament.

There are several anglophone German-watchers (I bet they’ve got a word for that) who are updating UK readers on the rise of the AfD and their lesbian leader Alice Weidel. Musa Okwonga, the Old Etonian who emigrated from the UK to Berlin because we are a racist country, has been updating his social media followers on the threat of the far-right party, which is marching metaphorically upon the same city the Nazis did in the 1930s. I hope enough Germans look at the AfD and realise what they are potentially voting for, regardless of historical precedent.

After all, Britain stood up to Oswald Mosley at that time, and Farage is the closest thing Britain has had to Mosley in a century. He might not be calling his party the Union of Fascists, because that brand has been tarnished by the events of 1939-45, including 6m dead people persecuted in camps and murdered in gas chambers. But the more I read about it, the idea of populism is exercising me an awful lot: the Daily Mail were cheering on Mosley in the 1930s, and now they’re giving Farage a free pass. Why? Because they think their readers, who include the people that used to be called housewives and are now called Middle England, approve of it.

If Fr Farage can win over Middle England, he will win power. That’s why he cannot support Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who really is a nasty and contemptible bloke, and why Farage has to exclude anyone who says the loud part out loud. Farage knows he cannot be seen as racist, so he does what I call the ‘What’s All That About?’ routine. He is, in sum, Britain’s market leader in observational humour.

Can you think of another comedian who is currently leading a European nation, perhaps one who is at war with Russia and whose refugees Britain has taken in? If you’re thinking of Ukraine, who were invaded on February 24 2022, and their TV-president-turned-actual-president Zelensky, then you are correct. And which TV-host-turned-president, and friend of Fr Farage, is trying to appease Russia?

And which journalist-turned-Prime Minister was at Trump’s inauguration, in the employ of the Daily Mail because he had left a career in politics behind to make well remunerated speeches and write books for which he received seven-figure advances? It is my contention, perhaps to coincide with the paperback edition of his memoir Unleashed, that Boris Johnson will become Reform UK’s mascot.

He might not run as an MP because of, you know, the parties and the lying and the guidance that was not followed, but he will be an asset to the party as they chip away at the vote share of the Conservative Party, who rather threw the Johnson egg into their basket in order to Get Brexit Done.

Farage and Johnson will be the leaders of an Anti Elite Party that is actually funded by and operating for the elite. Let’s see if they get into power, and let’s see what they do with it. It’s a shame they can’t use ‘Britain First’ as a slogan, though.

‘Thank You, Chair’: In Praise of the Football Chairperson

Please be upstanding for the chair of the board, the unsung hero or pantomime villain of English football

Even by the standards of Watford FC, thousands of people singing ‘I don’t care about Gino! He don’t care about me!’ is unprecedented. Absent from criticism is chair Scott Duxbury, who has been almost mute in the two years since Rob Edwards was dismissed weeks after Duxbury put his name to a statement that the club would stand by their man whatever happened. Three wins in 11 games happened, and Edwards became the fourth Watford manager to be dismissed inside 12 months.

When I read David Bernstein’s book about his time as chair of Manchester City Football Club, which he loved so much he forced his rabbi to screen the FA Cup final at his barmitzvah lunch, I was quietly impressed by how he managed upwards to the owner and across to the rest of the executives. He took no fee, boarding the train up from London most weeks to chair board meetings at a club which, at the time, was a basket case short of a basket.

Normally, fans look to the owner to spend the money, to help them dream and to hire a revolutionary manager. But these are not normal times, and fans are as clued-up on boardroom machinations as they are to the recruitment drive and the tactics room. And thus, in what I think is a rare celebration of the role, I am about to enumerate some of the finest chairpersons in English football.

A few omissions to note: Newcastle chair Yasir Al-Rumayyan presides over a sovereign wealth fund, Tom Werner of Liverpool had to recant his support for the European Super League, while the taints of Todd Boehly of Chelsea and Khaldoon Al Mubarak of Manchester City outweigh their honours and financial outlay. I do not need to spell out why Joel and Avi Glazer are sub-optimal chairs of Manchester United, or David Sullivan at West Ham, where David Gold’s daughter Vanessa now holds 25% of the club.

Slightly better chairman/owners include Dragan Šolak of Southampton, Shahid Khan of Fulham and Alan Pace of Burnley. Then there’s Tony Bloom of Brighton & Hove Albion, whose boyhood club are, without doubt, having the best period in their history. Most Seagulls acknowledge the astute ownership and chairing of the man who is merely a custodian of the institution founded in 1901.

Cliff Crown of Brentford is, like Bloom, a Jewish chair, and he has overseen the club’s modern era of Premier League success in a role which used to be taken by Greg Dyke; it is no coincidence that manager Thomas Frank has lasted six years in the job. And did you read Barney Ronay’s Guardian piece about Spurs chairman Daniel Levy, which called him a peerless accountant whose arrival at the club in 2001 set in motion ‘a transformational miracle’.

Spurs may have an accountant for a chairman, but Nottingham Forest have a barrister, Nicholas Randall KC. In his professional life, he has represented two Manchester United captains (Keane and Rooney) and two former managers of Newcastle and England (Keegan and Robson), while in his spare time he deals with the incomparable Forest owner, Evangelos Marinakis.

Some names of chairpersons are familiar to Premier League watchers: Steve Parish, who owns 10% of Crystal Palace and is a much-heard media voice advocating for the protection of the lesser big clubs; Mehmet Dalman and Jeff Shi are still the respective representatives on earth at Cardiff City and Wolves for Vincent Tan and the Fosun conglomerate; plus there’s Top Srivaddhanaprabha, who became chairman of Leicester City after the death of his father Khun Vichai. James Berylson did the same for Millwall, after his beloved father John died in a car accident in 2023; continuing the bad run of fortune, 12 months later Millwall lost their Montenegrin goalkeeper Marija Sarkic to heart failure.

The Kroenkes, dad Stan and son Josh, are always in the news when Arsenal aren’t doing so well, and are seldom praised when it’s going alright. Such is the curse of chairing a Big Club. I haven’t seen much praise go to Nassef Sawiris, the chair of Aston Villa and richest man in Egypt, though I expect to see his name and that of Everton’s chair Marc Watts pop up in the next year. The latter club move into their new stadium in August under new ownership, although it will be hard to beat the late theatre impresario Bill Kenwright for glamour.

There is, however, the glitz of gridiron potentially coming to the Premier League next season; as well as chairing Leeds United, Paraag Marathe is the Executive VP of Football Operations at Leeds’ ultimate owners, the San Francisco 49ers. In recent decades, other successful men from outside football, like ex-Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls at Norwich City, and TV executive Acun Ilıcalı, who chairs Hull City in the post-Assem Allam era, after the magnate sold the club to Turkish company Acun Medya.

Coventry boasted footballer turned pundit turned chair Jimmy Hill. The Midlands side are now owned and chaired by local lad Doug King, who had to fire Mark Robins in November 2024 despite him getting the club a couple of penalty kicks to the Premier League 18 months beforehand. On taking control of the Sky Blues, King immediately upgraded the training facilities and has made noises about the club owning their home ground that they have rented for 20 years.

Down in West Bromwich, Columbia alumnus Shilen Patel is using the acumen from running his own healthcare company to pilot the Baggies back into the Premier League. Patel bought the club in 2024, a decade after dipping his toe into football waters in Bologna, who played in the 2024/25 Champions League after Juventus poached their manager Thiago Motta. Billionaire banker William Foley II, who turned 80 last Christmas, added Bournemouth to a portfolio that includes Lorient and Hibernian.

Walsall have American co-chairs in Benjamin Boycott and Leigh Pomlett, while Huddersfield owner/chair Kevin Nagle was born in Minnesota but raised in Southern California. He parlayed experience in business to a sports team portfolio that includes soccer and basketball teams in Sacramento. Charlton have Gavin Carter, himself a sports investor who worked with Charlie Methven, the Oxford-educated theology graduate who recently part-owned Sunderland.

At the moment, the Mackems chair is the billionaire owner and former aspiring football player Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, who was born in Switzerland and whose dad Robert was CEO of Adidas in the 1990s. At that time, Steve Gibson had not just rescued his beloved Middlesborough from liquidation but gave them Premier League football and an FA Cup final; Gibson will soon be marking the 40th anniversary of his significant purchase, while his nephew Ben is captain of Stoke City, who themselves are owned by the billionaire Coates family and chaired by John, son of patriarch Peter.

Sheffield United have two chairmen, Steven Rosen and Helmy Eltoukhy. The latter is a CEO who has a PhD in electrical engineering and founded two health start-ups that dealt in genomics and biotechnology; so, when he isn’t cracking the secret to life, he’s helping Chris Wilder get the red team in Yorkshire back into the top division. In spite of Harrogate Town struggling near the bottom of League Two, Irving Weaver has not had any cause to sack the manager; Irving’s son Simon is closing in on 16 years as manager, almost triple the length of Thomas Frank’s time as manager of Brentford and double the length of Pep Guardiola’s time in charge at Man City.

Meanwhile, Bristol City owner Steve Lansdown installed his son Jon as chair, while also in the Championship, data analysis expert Christian Nourry, who worked for Retexo, is chair of QPR at the age of 27. Nourry brings a youthful vigour to a club who won one of their first 16 games in the 2024/25 Championship season, then lost only three of their next 15; the side in Shepherd’s Bush, West London might well rise back to the top division after a rocky few years on and off the pitch. I wonder how odd it must be for 33-year-old club captain Steve Cook to be younger than the CEO.

Like QPR, Notts County also have data analysts for owners, in their case the Danish brothers Christoffer and Alexander Reedtz, and County are giving promotion from League Two a good go. I hope that Simon Hallett earns some credit after the team he chairs, Plymouth Argyle, overcame Liverpool in the FA Cup, even though the unexpected victory is likely to be overshadowed by the failure of Wayne Rooney as manager and possible relegation into League One.

This has also happened to Tom Wagner, the venture capitalist who chairs Birmingham City who cashed out the Rooney chips quickly. Fellow League One promotion-chasers Wrexham have a whole Disney+ series dedicated to their co-chairmen, whom you might know from other TV shows and movies. CEO Michael Williamson has a football background having worked for Inter Milan and DC United, and he replaced Fleur Robinson, who took over from her dad Ben as CEO of Burton Albion.

Burton are now chaired by Ole Jakob Strandhagen, who bizarrely works full-time at Molde in Norway and has a deputy in Tom Davidson, who co-founded the Nordic Football Group that bought the club from Ben Robinson after four years scouting the continent for a worthwhile investment opportunity. Football Ventures did the same and alighted upon Bolton Wanderers, whose chair is Sharon Brittan. Port Vale’s chair is also female, in their case the peerless Carol Shanahan, best known for providing the people of Burslem with hot meals during the pandemic and making Vale fan Robbie Williams co-club president.

Then there are the lifers, two of who are called Mark. Mark Ashton was Watford CEO in the 2000s, and via time at West Brom, Oxford United and Bristol City is now a friend of Ed Sheeran’s at Ipswich Town. Mark Palios, former chair of the English FA, has been at Tranmere Rovers for years, and the side are currently perched near the bottom of League Two. Let us not overlook Blackburn’s chair Steve Waggott, headhunted by the Venky family after working at clubs as varied as Charlton, Coventry and Southend United. Waggott told one interviewer his goal was to ‘get amongst the community to make sure the brand and the perception of the club become positive again’.

Down at AFC Wimbledon Mick Buckley takes charge of a club he supported in the 1970s by using experience gained with US broadcast networks; the vice-chair Michele Little is a Cambridge-educated chartered accountant. Bromley boy Robin Stanton-Gleaves bought his hometown club in 2019 and, thanks to his work off the pitch and the astute management of Andy Woodman on it, they became a Football League club and are holding their own this season as a comfortable mid-table League Two side.

David Wilkinson has ended up chairing the board of Luton Town, the club he has supported through its enormous highs and very low lows: Wilkinson helped to save the club in 2008 as part of the consortium, from whence they have risen from the National League to the Premier League, although they are in a second successive relegation battle only nine months after tumbling out of the top tier. Also on the Luton board is Sony Music CEO Rob Stringer, whom last year Billboard magazine named the third most powerful person in the music industry (Taylor Swift was number one).

Grant Ferguson has a quite embarrassingly successful career in media and telecoms, particularly in Asia, and was also on the board of Inter Milan when it had Indonesian ownership. He was brought in to chair Oxford United, while at Portsmouth the Eisner family hired local lad Andrew Cullen. Cullen was headhunted from the club that play in Milton Keynes after they, in turn, had swiped him from Norwich City. It’s not just players who rise up the football food chain, but the executives too.

Like Brighton, Portsmouth, Luton and Bromley, Leyton Orient are chaired by a local lad. In 2017, after some quite wretched ownership issues plunged them into the National League, they were rescued by Nigel Travis, who chaired Dunkin’ Donuts. Eight years on, Travis is seeking investment in the club so they can make the leap from League One to the Championship, with investor Sulman Ahmed providing funds acquired through his Texas-based dental company. The club hosted, and led, the champions of England, the Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City, in the FA Cup fourth round in February 2025; the defeat brought the focus on to a home game against Mansfield Town three days later, which they won 3-0.

Some Championship sides are doomed to be too good to go down and not quite good enough to go up. In the past ten seasons, Preston North End have finished between 7th and 14th, winning between 15 and 19 games each season and mostly finishing with between 61 and 64 points. Trevor Hemmings, whose horses won three Grand Nationals and who briefly owned Blackpool Tower, saved the club from liquidation in 2010; when he died in 2021 his son Craig took over ownership of the famously Proud club.

With Preston North End up for sale, there will be no shortage of investment groups bidding for the club, which back in 1889 went an entire season unbeaten and which famously boasts the great winger Tom Finney as a club hero. And what about Watford, whose chair Scott Duxbury has a direct line to club president Elton John but also to the hands-on yet barely audible owner Gino Pozzo? Should Signor Pozzo find a buyer for the club he bought for £15m in 2012, which was valued at about 15 times that a few years later, there may be a vacancy for the chair of the board, a role once taken by Graham Taylor.

So that’s a survey of football club chairs: can’t live with ’em, can’t survive without ’em.

Banternalysis, an investigation into football punditry, is available as an eBook here

Web Plantations and Today’s Digital Enslavement

A new book on Spotify by Liz Pelly makes clear how data is the new driver of wealth, but who benefits?

The writer Ted Gioia made his name through books about jazz, a genre of music that is niche but influential. Having written every possible word about every possible jazz musician, Gioia now writes on Substack as the Honest Broker, where his passion is the technology dystopia.

In a recent post, he referred to ‘the web plantation owners’, which is a magnificent summation of how the people with the money – Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos – keep the money for themselves rather than rewarding those who populate their platforms with stuff: cat videos, social commentary, hatred of women, that sort of thing.

How does the web proletariat, to continue the analogy and bring Marx back to a world of Musk, react? It becomes a village fete. Stick with me: a village fete has members of the public manning tables full of vegetables, jam and raffles. I remember, very vividly, collecting conkers for a few weeks, sticking them in a chest and bringing them along to a school fundraiser so that people could guess the number of conkers inside the chest. I think it was 501, and someone guessed 500; I was appalled, but I really should have chosen a better number.

The world’s creative people have their own chests of conkers: necklaces, music, movies and opinions are all available all the time to everyone, provided that you can find a company to act as a middleman. Etsy have done well, as have Amazon; the latter might have given people their first exposure to how big businesses can get away with having lax attitudes on tax, disobeying the laws of the land and paying relative pittance in compensation when they are rumbled.

I would love to make music for money but Spotify, which is the dominant streaming platform, is skewing the market against creative folk. Liz Pelly’s new book Mood Machine is out in the USA and is coming for UK audiences; Harper’s Bazaar magazine – note, a general publication not a music-specific one like Rolling Stone – ran a chunky extract from the book in which Liz unmasked the ‘Perfect Fit’ methodology that Spotify employ.

Because it is a data company, it has realised that it can invent music using artificial intelligence in genres like lo-fi electronica, ambient classical and Ted Gioia’s beloved jazz. If a human doesn’t make the music, and nobody cares if they did or didn’t, Spotify can collect the micropayment for every one of those streams rather than dispense them to people who populate their global jukebox with songs. Alas, it is still the best place to go for new music by major acts, and as soon as I finish this piece I will be checking out albums by Ringo Starr, Franz Ferdinand and Sondre Lerche.

Sondre who? He’s a guy from Norway who came up in 2000 as a teenager with a penchant for Burt Bacharach. I discovered his second album Two Way Monologue in 2004, which I remember streaming on MSN Music and buying on a trip to the USA that year. It was 2004 because that was the last family holiday we had as a four; it’s funny how music reminds you of key moments of your life.

I would love to decrease how often I use Spotify, which also pays Joe Rogan for the rights to his ‘just asking questions, man’ podcast, and I actually prefer Youtube, Soundcloud and Bandcamp for new music. None of those platforms existed in 2004, a time when physical CD sales were being decimated by music piracy and the digital download was in its infancy. I remember the surprise in the voice of the chap who counted down the UK Top 40 when he announced that Crazy by Gnarls Barkley was the first chart-topper not to have a physical release.

Think about that: no CD single, no cassette, no tangible product to cherish and look at. This was 2006, a time before Spotify, but you could finally purchase music without leaving your own home. In ye olden days, a music fan had to go to a shop, hope the record was in stock and then bring it back home. I still remember the thrill of Christmas hauls with six discs stacked up in the same bit of wrapping paper, bringing S Club 7, Westlife, Backstreet Boys and Nine Inch Nails (I made the last one up). Then came the gift card and the click-to-purchase, and most significantly of all the unbundling of albums. The 99-cent, or 79-pence, download changed how music was consumed.

And yet, if you are at the top of the musical tree, you can still earn lots of money. Take Ed Sheeran from Framlingham, who has used some of his many millions to help children learn the magic of music. I had a feeling he would move into philanthropy, and since he famously didn’t go to BRIT School (not that he ever mentions it, except all the time), it seemed unlikely that he was motivated to set up the kind of school that Paul McCartney is involved with at LIPA in Liverpool.

Sheeran, who remembers how music was often looked at as a ‘doss subject’, appeared at a school in Wales alongside the great Amy Wadge, who co-wrote Thinking Out Loud. I remember messaging her with a suggestion to prepare a Grammy speech months before it did indeed win Song of the Year.

Sheeran’s new Foundation aims to help children ‘feel empowered with meaningful music education’ and counter the collapse of musical education at primary and secondary level, as well as the closure of traditional music venues. ‘It gives me a sense of purpose,’ says the former cellist and current multimillionaire songwriter, who namechecks his old music teacher Mr Hanley for giving him the impetus to make music and be his own CEO, with 150 people in his employ. You know exactly why the government, which is busy physically repairing school buildings, needs to outsource this to a charity run by the man who wrote Shape of You.

At the same time, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) are involved with a new school, Shireland CBSO Academy in West Bromwich, which opened in 2023; by the time it reaches capacity in a few years’ time, there will be 900 kids benefitting from the school’s mission to put instruments in the hands of children who would not ordinarily be able to afford music lessons. I was utterly spellbound by the Guardian article which highlighted their mission, and not just because I plan to write a series of books under the Pop Syllabus banner.

Music is ‘incorporated into lessons of all subjects, not just in dedicated music classes’, and instruction comes from CBSO members. I know people who work for music services around Watford, who have enthused dozens, hundreds, thousands of kids; just imagine going to see your teacher play double bass in a Beethoven gig at Birmingham Symphony Hall. Why would you not want to do that??

I play in an amateur orchestra in Watford. In fact right now I’ve got to go and practice Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture because it’s very hard! It’s also very fun, which is rather the point of learning, appreciating and playing music. Not to enable the web plantation owner to pay his yacht mooring fee.

Arctic Monkeys, The Last Great British Rock’n’Roll Band

As the RIAA once again awards dozens of Grammy statuettes to deserving musicians, whither the rock band in the digital era?

In 1985, Live Aid was watched by millions upon millions around the world. Queen rebooted their career and U2 moved into the stadium rock bracket of performers.

Ten years later, in 1995, Oasis put out (What’s The Story) Morning Glory, an album about being young and British, and then five years on from that, in 2000, Coldplay launched themselves as heirs to U2’s messianic rock’n’roll with Parachutes, a post-millennial album which wraps its listeners in a warm embrace. It contains hit songs with the lines ‘oh no what’s this?’ and ‘look at the stars’.

In 2005, Arctic Monkeys put out I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, a UK number one smash that preceded the album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, an album about being young and British.

Those four huge anniversaries celebrated in 2025 reflect the specific cultural moment: from the rise of rock’n’roll philanthropy, which was invented by George Harrison in 1971, to three bands that mattered, two of whom are playing multiple dates at Wembley Stadium this year. As I write, Alex Turner and Matt Helders, the respective singer and drummer of Arctic Monkeys who both live in the USA, have no plans to mark the 20th anniversary of their debut album and single. The latter, one of the most exciting moments of the decade, still sounds like lightning in a jam jar.

If they are smart, they will talk to the Gallaghers about supporting Oasis in stadiums across the USA this August and September, because without Oasis’s Burnage swagger there would be no market for Sheffield scallywags muttering about Mecca dobbers and riot vans. The Monkeys gained fans through Myspace, a music discovery portal which majored on community; The Libertines, who are perhaps the last great London rock’n’roll band, did this at the very nexus of the real and virtual worlds, and it was such a shame that I was two years too young to fully fall for them. I do know people who know the band, and who have been photographed by their photographer Roger Sargent.

The Libertines are also the last great music press band, who gave good quote and did, to use a euphemism, interesting things. Peter Doherty of the band gave a sit-down interview to Kirsty Young for her interview show, and he just sounded like a bloke from West London. Twenty years ago I heard back-to-back Libertines on BBC Radio 1; now he’s popping up on the grown-up station Radio 2, the 45-year-old dad running through the Tracks of His Years with Vernon Kay, who is 50 and remembers clubbing as a teenager when Manchester was the epicentre of UK youth culture.

The Libertines reset that centre to London, after the Camden scene of the 1990s had incubated guitar rock bands; this is where I am duty bound to mention footage of a teenage Pete Doherty in the queue outside HMV Oxford Street to buy Oasis’ disastrous third album Be Here Now. No rock band will sell half a million albums again, let alone that number inside four days, because rock is a heritage genre.

I spent 6,000 words wanging on about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recently, and I observed that rock and roll is now a spirit rather than a musical genre. I predict Mariah Carey will go into the Rock Hall soon, and she is a balladeer who also helped bring hip-hop cadences into her form of black music. The Libertines might get into a British Rock Hall, but the likely entrants in 2025 will be the aforementioned Oasis and Coldplay, both of who are eligible and would ensure people pay attention to this year’s Rock Hall induction. They might also book tickets to the museum in Cleveland, the home of rock and roll.

Sheffield is a principality of rock and roll, having given the world not just Arctic Monkeys but also Jarvis Cocker, The Human League, Heaven 17 and Jon McClure aka the Reverend of the band Reverend and the Makers. Fun fact: Jon’s brother Chris is the tipsy smoker on the cover of the Monkeys’ debut album.

Then there’s national treasure Richard Hawley, whose catalogue was turned into the magnificent musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which played at the National and Gillian Lynne Theatres in London. It makes me wonder if Alex Turner’s songs will be turned into a musical, and what it would be about. It would obviously be set in Sheffield, perhaps with the children of characters from the Hawley musical.

With their Nokia mobile phones and Myspace pages, they would be chasing a great night out, scoring weed, trying not to spew all over a taxi and arguing with their parents who think they are throwing away their education to get wasted at the Leadmill on a Wednesday night in 2006.

‘Tonight there’ll be a ruckus,’ sings Turner in the first verse of the album’s opening track The View from the Afternoon. Later he consoles a Mardy Bum who has ‘got yer face on’ and hears a policeman chastise a teenage drinker as he is bundled into a riot van. We end with A Certain Romance, one of Turner’s greatest copyrights complete with a bittersweet diminished chord running throughout the song.

We open with clothing and footwear, ‘classic Reeboks or knackered Converse, or trackie bottoms tucked in socks’, before Turner sighs how ‘there in’t no romance’ in his Sheffield, with ‘kids who like to scrap with pool cues in their hands’. And this is before austerity gutted much of British life. The quotable line ‘there’s only music so that there’s new ringtones’ – a rival to ‘you’re not from New York City, you’re from Rotherham!’ – is both out of date and prescient.

The final verse at least sees Turner admit he has friends who ‘might overstep the line’ but ‘cannot get angry in the same way’. There is no resolution to an album full of pathos and pain, where record company men offer ‘stale’ stories and ‘condescending’ snarls, and ‘a scumbag’ hangs out with ‘girls of the night’ (When The Sun Goes Down).

Thank goodness for Domino Records, who have let Turner be Turner for 20 years, including allowing him and his band to only put out two studio albums in the decade since their US breakthrough AM, a fine rock album that mixed Sheffield wit and LA guitars. Four of AM’s songs have over 1bn Spotify streams, and the poet John Cooper Clarke’s pension has benefitted from the band’s cover of I Wanna Be Yours.

‘I’d met the lads after a show at the Boardwalk,’ the Bard of Salford writes in his memoir, delighted that they had read his poems for GCSE English. ‘The name of a group is important and that one is unforgettable,’ he sighs. ‘There’s a whole wide world in those two words…the North Pole is no place for the higher primates!’

The reasons why rock music has less of a pull on youth culture today is a whole other argument, but for now I will direct you to the debut album by those Arctic Monkeys, which says more to me about my life than government policy or, indeed, Wonderwall or Fix You.

Wicked as the Last of the Consensus Entertainments

In a culturally fractured world, the movie adaptation of Wicked could become the last universally enjoyed piece of art

Do you know, I got really quite emotional at the interval of Wicked, which I saw at the Apollo Victoria as a birthday treat. I’d enjoyed the film adaptation, with Cynthia Erivo sure to become what’s known in the trade as an EGOT: winning an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar (the only one she lacks) and a Tony.

She will thus ascend to the rank of other EGOTs: Shakespearean actor John Gielgud; actresses Audrey Hepburn, Viola Davis, Helen Hayes and Rita Moreno; and composers Alan Menken, Marvin Hamlisch, Robert Lopez, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Rogers, as well as Pasek & Paul, who were behind The Greatest Showman and La La Land, and the guys who wrote The Lion King together, Tim Rice and Elton John.

Angry producer Scott Rudin, film directors Mike Nichols and Mel Brooks and multigenre entertainers Whoopi Goldberg, John Legend and Jennifer Hudson are also EGOTs. The Pointless answer in the category is Jonathan Tunick, who won a Grammy in a very obscure category in 1989; a graduate of the performing arts school which inspired the movie Fame, Tunick is in his mid-eighties and has been working in musical theatre for six decades, starting with the musical adaptation of the movie The Apartment called Promises, Promises.

His CV has mostly involved orchestrating the work of his friend Stephen Sondheim, from Company to Follies to A Little Night Music, which is the one which gave us Send In The Clowns. In 2024, when Merrily We Roll Along, a lesser Sondheim work, was posthumously revived on Broadway, Tunick finally won his second Tony Award, having been nominated ten times after the 1997 win for his work on the Broadway musical Titanic. His other credits include Mel Brooks movies like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, as well as the recent live action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast.

But all this Egottery is an amuse-bouche to my argument about Wicked, a long-running Broadway show with music composed by Stephen Schwartz and a plot which is part of the Oz Universe. It has been resident in London since 2005, half of that time as a neighbour to Hamilton, which lives in the reupholstered Victoria Palace about 20 yards away.

We know how good the songs are in Wicked: Popular, Defying Gravity, I’m Not That Girl, The Wizard and I. All have timeless melodies and, crucially for the art form, they advance the plot and detail the inner lives of the characters. I do have a friend who thinks ‘bursting into song is lame’, and I agree with her up to a point; if the songs aren’t catchy enough or seem perfunctory, then they don’t grab hold me.

But during the interval, instead of buying £6 popcorn buckets, I spotted a golden thread for how to construct a piece of consensus entertainment: a book, play or movie which appeals to all four quadrants – old, young, male, female – across several generations of reader, theatregoer or cinema fanatic. Let’s start with the big Technicolor works of the late 1930s: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind.

All three looked phenomenal, had romantic heroines and sidekicks (if we count Rhett Butler as a sidekick), and involved the audience with stories of good and evil. Plus, in the first two, the songs were good to outstanding; a century on, Heigh Ho and Over The Rainbow remain some of the most popular copyrights ever written, while ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ is in the global lexicon. Gone with the Wind, adjusted for inflation, should never be deposed as the world’s most successful moving picture.

Into the postwar years and it’s Cinderella and West Side Story that remain cherished, with modern remakes and yet more plots about rags and riches. Plus the songs were good to outstanding, whether A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes in Cinderella or Somewhere in the latter. I need not detain you with the songs of two Julie Andrews vehicles released inside the same year, Summer 1964 for Mary Poppins, Spring 1965 for The Sound of Music; ditto the Lennon/McCartney movies, live shows, ballads and rockers.

Then there’s the music of both Queen, in particular Bohemian Rhapsody (1975), and ABBA, whose US number one Dancing Queen will be 50 years old in 2026. We’ve already had a Queen musical and biopic, and two ABBA musicals and an ABBAtar show which will run and run in a purpose-built arena in Stratford where, in decades to come, maybe they’ll alternate a Freddie Mercury avatar show, or an Elton John one, or an Adele one.

Then come the big two cinematic and literary universes, neither of which I have much time for, but I respect those who put great store in the stories of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. I also recognise Michael Jackson was a troubled soul and possible criminal at the same time as I recall the critic Dorian Lynskey writing that Billie Jean was uncancellable. The album Thriller, which will never be overtaken as the planet’s bestselling long-playing record, is timeless, even if it isn’t perfect.

In the middle of the 1980s, the Europeans took over Broadway: the aforementioned EGOT Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the music for Phantom of the Opera and Starlight Express, the latter occupying the Apollo Victoria in the 1990s and the Troubadour in Wembley Park today. I remember seeing Les Misérables and having little knowledge of prisoner 24601, being overcome with the force of Victor Hugo’s tale of wretchedness and pain. Bring Him Home and One Day More are a tad melodramatic but there’s a reason they have become some of the most remarkable modern melodies to hop into the hearts of millions around the world.

I’m running out of space, so I have no time to dwell on Toy Story, The Lion King, Titanic or Frozen. I’ll probably deal with Wizard Boy at a later date, but I think the stat is that only the Bible and possibly Mao’s Little Red Book have sold more copies than the seven Potters put together.

What unites all of these cultural mastodons? Love, good battling evil and, best expressed in the Wicked showstopper Defying Gravity, endurance: keeping on, fighting the good fight, keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs. People like to sit in a cinema or theatre, or on the sofa with a book in their hand, learning about how to overcome obstacles; there’s a reason Homer’s Odyssey is still read 2800 years after its composition, and it’s only partly because of the fun episodes involving witches, sirens and Cyclopes.

Odysseus was away from his wife Penelope for 20 years: ten fighting a war, ten trying to get home. Dorothy wanted to get home from Oz, Cosette sung of a ‘castle on a cloud’ and the thrust of Mary Poppins is that Mr Banks wanted to go fly a kite, which I think is a metaphor for a more innocent time before adulthood.

Wicked has endured for 20 years because it’s about as populist as consensus entertainment can get. A bit of a duff second half, though, but they’ll fix it in the movie.

Elon Musk as American Rock Star

Never mind executive orders and the weaving oratory of President Trump: the real rock’n’roll star of American government is also the country’s richest citizen

One of my favourite rock writers, David Hepworth, ended Uncommon People, his book on the passing of the rock’n’roll era, with a celebration of Marc Andreessen. Hepworth saw the venture capitalist and tech bro who, like Peter Thiel and Steve Jobs, got very rich from the cyberworld, in his case Netscape in 1995, as a sort of rock star.

To Hepworth, young fans saw the rock stars of the pre-Internet age as ‘markers of identity’, but their magnetism has weakened because music is not ‘as precious’ as it once was; in the digital era, where everything is available all the time, ‘smart young people looked on and dreamed about being tech stars…Distribution was king.’

That’d make a good tweet, actually. Which brings us, again, to Elon Musk. Like Cher or Madonna or Kanye, he goes by a mononym, and I think he is what a rock’n’roll star looks like in 2025: probably on mind-altering drugs, insomniac or worse, neurologically unhinged, and a multibillionaire through his talent for running businesses and promoting them himself. So far, so Kanye, but not even Mr West owns the means of communication and has the ear of the incoming president, and I hope to avoid much of the souring of the Trump-Musk bromance. Who will blame whom first, and for what, and what happens to the sycophants?

Here’s James O’Brien telling his million listeners on LBC about wor Elon, ‘the de facto deputy President’, on January 6 2025: ‘If you are capable of exercising epic power, it is foolish and naïve to pretend that you can ignore him’. O’Brien’s life and finances have benefitted for his time on Twitter in the 2010s, but if you don’t use what is now called X, nobody would be aware of Elon’s recent dealings into British political life, plus attacks on a government minister and the First Lord of the Treasury, Sir Keir Starmer.

Might the reason for Elon’s activity, O’Brien posits, be through reading propaganda and lies from the sort of people who used to be banned from Twitter but pay X money to express free speech? ‘He desperately wants to believe all of the posts about all foreigners being criminals,’ O’Brien says, referring to Elon’s South African upbringing at a time of apartheid. ‘He just believes the worst excesses of the sewer he has created…two-dimensional race hate.’

Elon has taken over from the objectionable genius Kanye as the world’s most obnoxious, and noxious, man (why always men?). Why doesn’t the King (in all seriousness) have a quiet word with him? Or, better, send his brother Andrew to sort him out. He’s free, and it’ll be no sweat. Journalist Marina Hyde nicknamed him Phony Stark, a wannabe Iron Man with leaden contributions to cultural and political discourse.

Yet, as with putting Michael Jackson or Kurt Cobain or Kanye on a magazine cover, Elon sells, so why would a media organisation or even the BBC not report on him? I know the start of the year is a slow news period, but to report on Elon changing his handle on X is beneath contempt.

And with MPs Jo Cox and David Amess being killed in the line of duty in the last decade, what happens to Jess Phillips, who already has a panic button in her own home having swapped a life assisting abused women to serve as MP for Birmingham Yardley so she could better change the law to help those same women. Jess, who is the Barbara Castle or (she will hate this) Margaret Thatcher of the current Parliament, deserves to get on with her mission, her vocation, without a billionaire who wants to live on Mars spewing disdain for her.

Remember Liz Truss? On about four occasions in late 2022, she had a weekly audience with the monarch, which was one of the perks of being Prime Minister. Nowadays she spends her time plugging her book on ‘saving the West’ in America, where the money is and where Joe Rogan earns millions of dollars for, essentially, just asking questions. Nobody can pin you for doing this, or for having legitimate concerns, or asking for the truth.

Truss is not, never was and never will be a rock star, and nor will Keir Starmer or any of his cabinet. Jeremy Corbyn, perversely, was turned into one, to the shame of the British Labour movement. What was his smash hit: For the Many, Not the Few (Oh Jeremy Corbyn). If Starmer had a song it would be a version of the old D:Ream song with the new title Things Can Only Get Better (But They Will Get Much Worse).

What’s in Elon’s setlist? Money Money Money by ABBA, naturally, as well as Dirty Cash (Money Talks) by Stevie V, which is enjoying a resurgence today. X by Xzibit and the DMX rap X Gon’ Give It to Ya, of course, would represent his little website that tells 200m people what he thinks at any given moment. And because you’re free to do whatever you like with impunity in Donald Trump’s America, let’s mark his space exploration fetish with I Believe I Can Fly by the disgraced crooner R Kelly, and throw in Bad Boy for Life by the accused Puff Daddy, as he was then.

I can stick these into a Spotify playlist but I refuse to share it on Facebook, on which I am no longer active. Just as Spotify treats music and music-makers like cotton and cotton-pickers, as I will outline in a few essays’ time, doesn’t our friend Elon do this for opinion, making billions of dollars from his little mood machine?

As has been noted many, many times, humans have a herd instinct and respond to external stimuli with either fight or flight. I have flown to Bluesky, which is trying desperately hard not to be the home of liberal thought but might be doomed to its siloed state, because fighting a herd of wildebeest on X is futile.

I almost punched the air when I heard music critic Chris Molanphy compare the rise of Bob Dylan to that of Taylor Swift: both pivoted from their initial musical idiom after about five years and four albums, Dylan from folk and Taylor from country; both seized the zeitgeist with their songwriting; and both were, to all intent, pop stars whose fans enjoyed, and still enjoy, what is now called a parasocial relationship with their chosen poet and songwriter. Their keenest supporters are known as ‘fanboys’ or ‘fangirls’. Ticket prices for the 2024 UK shows reached dizzying heights.

I daresay if Elon wanted to play the O2 Arena or Madison Square Garden, he could charge similar numbers. It isn’t cheap to watch a live show, yet Elon gives away his tweets for free so he can sell Tesla cars and influence public opinion on whatever matters come into his head.

I wonder what it must feel like to be a Tesla or SpaceX engineer, knowing that your boss is a contemporary rock star. He’s like a Victorian magnate or Wall Street banking scion, but with no desire to build houses or fund libraries; his tunes are bad, his lyrics worse. Let’s turn the music off and go outside for a bit.

Introducing the Quorum of Podcast Rabbis

Mostly blokes, mostly old, the Podcast Rabbi has become one of the most important public figures of the current age

Eighty years ago this month, something that tried to stop me being born was unveiled to the world. When the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps were liberated on January 27 1945, three months before Hitler shot himself dead, it was clear that such an event could never happen again. Three years later, the State of Israel was founded, and Jewish people have been safe ever since.

And then I woke up.

What I do think is worth pointing out is the rise of the secular rabbi, by which I mean an old sage, usually a white bloke, who has a pulpit in the form of a podcast. Consider this: When It Hits The Fan, a podcast about public relations hosted by David Yelland and Simon Lewis; The Rest is Politics, hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, respectively a Prime Minister’s press secretary and a former tutor to the current king’s spare; and Media Confidential, hosted by Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber, who like Yelland edited national newspapers, although in their cases for 20 and 15 years respectively (Rusbridger at the Guardian, Barber at the Financial Times), rather than the five Yelland helmed the Sun for between 1998 and 2003.

Plus The Rest Is Football, where Gary Lineker gets to call the England men’s team derogatory names because he scored 48 goals for them a very long time ago and Alan Shearer, who has 30 England goals and was once the world’s most expensive footballer, also gets to use words he cannot use even after the watershed on Match of the Day. You will notice I missed out Micah Richards, who is more a yeshiva student than a rabbi.

And let’s bung in Tom & Dom: Tom Holland and Dom Sandbrook of The Rest Is History. They’re here because they explain the past to many millions of people a week. That’s a total of ten white blokes over the age of 13, or what is known in Judaism as a minyan, a quorum that must be assembled in order to pray. Women, in many Jewish denominations, do not count, and if you look at the podcast chart of 2024 you will see hardly a woman in the top 20 most popular ones.

All hail Emily Maitlis of The News Agents, Marina Hyde of The Rest Is Entertainment, celebrity wives (to be blunt in the extreme) Abbey Clancy and Rosie Ramsey, and the token woman on the No Such Thing As A Fish team Anna Ptaszynski, who all featured in the 20 most listened-to podcasts in April-June 2024, according to Edison.

But it’s the rabbis I am more interested in, with apologies to the women who respectively broke Prince Andrew (Emily) and who has been satirising the world from her Guardian pulpit (Marina, who – fun fact – is a very posh lady whose dad is a baron and whose grandfather worked on the jet engine in the 1930s). The brother of the latter’s Rest Is Entertainment colleague Richard Osman plays bass for the band Suede, who are Britpop aristocrats.

Between them, these ten rabbis have worked alongside Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown or (satire) been in the actual employ of Rupert Murdoch. Two of the shows are hosted by the BBC, while The Rest Is Politics pair did so well that they could sell out the Royal Albert Hall, just so that Alastair Campbell could moan about Boris Johnson and finish the night with the bagpipes.

Of the five shows, I religiously listen to Media Confidential and Fanhitters, as the hosts of the latter call it; Yelland and Lewis often appear on other BBC podcasts such as the imaginatively monikered Today Podcast, which has an actual person of Indian descent, Amol Rajan, and a former BBC political editor, Nick Robinson. Now we’ve got 12 rabbis, which is a nice number; as my old English teacher David Brown used to say, 12 is the perfect number, divisible as it is by one, two, three, four, six and – oh yes! – 12 (salut M. Brown, who moved to France, if you’re reading this).

And so these rabbis transmit thoughts into microphones, which are edited for clarity and slander, and then separated to allow for ad breaks with products and services microtargeted to different listeners, or not in the case of Fanhitters thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded. Media Confidential is a podcast that promotes Prospect magazine, which Rusbridger edits (fun fact: his daughter is the crime writer Bella Mackie, who is married to Greg James, who as of this autumn will be the highest-paid BBC presenter).

Goalhanger make squillions off of their Rest Is stable, which includes more rabbis: Gordon Corera, formerly the BBC’s security reporter; William Dalrymple, a quite brilliant writer on the British Empire and the East India Company; comedian Al Murray, who has shed his Pub Landlord skin to become a renowned history writer himself; and Robert Peston, whose dad was in the House of Lords and who co-presents The Rest Is Money with Steph McGovern, who comes from the North-East where this is an actual Jewish seat of learning, the Gateshead Yeshiva. (To my knowledge, Robinson and Peston are the only fully or partly Jewish members of my Beth Din of Pod Rabbis.)

Incredibly, I have just learned that Simon Lewis is the brother of Will Lewis, who has been spoken of in great detail by Rusbridger and Barber in his current role as EiC of The Washington Post, where democracy is (allegedly) dying in darkness. No wonder I have heard nothing on Fanhitters about a quite enormous fan-hitting moment in Lewis’ own family! Hey, what’s a rabbinical court without a bit of broigus (no time to explain, look it up).

The Rest Is Politics can yammer on about the Conservative Party, but of their ultimate boss Mr Lineker I suppose they can say little. When the Match of the Day host was suspended for noting the suspiciously authoritarian language of the then home secretary (whose husband, fun fact, is Jewish), Campbell did the TV media round firing shots at ‘the creeping right-wing authoritarianism’ that forced the BBC’s hand.

The man who was forced out of his own job by the BBC 20 years ago (again, no time to explain, look it up) was thus able to launch into his pet peeve of getting one in, studs up and off the ground, on Auntie Beeb. Lineker, naturally, bided his time and chose to hand in his notice publicly, so that the 2024/25 season of Match of the Day will be his last, although he will be the lead presenter at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

If you are your own boss, you answer to yourself. But to return to the opening image of the liberation of the concentration camps: every rabbi of the last century knows how great his status is as a community and religious leader. Jewish folk don’t have to agree with every word of the Torah – in fact, debate is encouraged! – but the basic premise is that wisdom, knowledge and habits are a fine way to live a life.

It does seem as though these 12 rabbis are disseminating a message to the listener: we know what we’re talking about, so pull up a chair and listen.

Will Nigel Farage Avoid an Enoch Powell Moment?

The surging insurgents Reform UK are being led by a man who needs to be turned into a cartoon

‘You talk about him every day!’ says my partner about my obsession with Nigel Farage, who was actually born in Bonn, West Germany in 1964 before coming over to England as a very young child. He wasn’t, but why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

Reform UK, formerly known as The Brexit Party, is shaking up how politics is covered in the UK. In the July 2024 General Election, five Reform UK MPs were elected to Parliament: Lee, H, Claire, Faye and Lisa. Sorry, I mean Lee, James, Nigel, Rupert and Richard. Yes, the new boyband Right Direction are, in many ways, Britain’s hottest vocal harmony group, if by harmony you mean they all pop up on GB News, the propaganda channel which I call SovereignTV.

Reform in all but name are the former Conservative MPs Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson. My nickname for the party is Boris & Nige’s Anti Elite Party (That Are Actually Elite), in spite of Johnson not formally declaring for the start-up party.

In the USA, Donald Trump and his Project 2025 acolytes have completed a takeover of what is laughably still referred to as the Grand Old Party, the Republicans; in the UK, where we have a king and we thus can never be a republic unless something very, very funny happens, the Conservative Party are the instruments of political force. In the last century, they have pushed neoliberal policies on to the masses, among them buy-to-let home ownership, entrepreneurship and the Big Bang of financial systems.

And yet in 2025, led by a lady called Kemi, they hold just over 120 Parliamentary seats out of 650. The Labour Party hold over 400, but they are being assailed from their right side by the newspapers. But who under the age of 60 reads a newspaper in 2025? I’ll tell you: people who used to read them in 1975 and 2005.

Thus, if you run through a typical Times, Mail, Express or Telegraph, you will see news fit to print for the views, prejudices and recidivism of their constituency. These newspapers also hire magnificent journalists, who send dispatches from warzones, campaign on assisted dying, and who forced the reform of MPs’ expense accounts and register of interests declared.

Every two weeks for about four years now, I have received a satirical magazine with cartoons, parodies and also serious hard news concerning the Horizon scandal, the John Smyth pederasty, the (alleged and very well reported on) activity of the South Tees Development Corporation, and Phil Hammond MD’s chronicling of the Lucy Letby verdict and aftermath.

Private Eye (for it is it) is a bastion of integrity in a slough of despond. Editor Ian Hislop has been in his post since 1988, and the magazine has 250,000 subscribers who were made aware early of the useless, incompetent and (allegedly) criminal Paula Vennells, whose crocodile tears at the public inquiry into the Horizon scandal were oh so little, oh so late.

The magazine, and its accompanying podcast, has told me so much about the British media, and has reminded me that when a new broom comes in to sweep the detritus of the last government out of SW1, it is so easy for the new one to fall prey to scandal themselves. Witness the Lord Alli fiasco, winter fuel kerfuffle, inheritance tax squabbles and the general nonsense behind the scenes as Sue Gray (from The Report) clashed with Morgan McSweeney, a man who is helping Sir Keir Starmer set the country aright after 14 years of mismanagement.

And there, lurking to Starmer’s literal far right in the Chamber, are Right Direction: Lee Anderson, a suspended Labour councillor turned suspended Conservative MP turned Reform UK representative for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire; Rupert Lowe, former chairman of Southampton FC and MP for Great Yarmouth; and James McMurdock, who famously went to jail when he was younger for assaulting a partner but because of ‘Christian forgiveness’ was voted in to represent the people of South Basildon and East Thurrock.

Then come the big two, the Lennon/McCartney of the Anti Elite Party: Richard Tice, whose mum (allegedly) loved horses more than she loved her son, MP for Boston and Skegness; and the MP for Clacton, Love Him Or Loathe Him Nigel Farage, who was actually (not) born in Bonn, West Germany.

Private Eye have already popped him on the front page of the magazine, and the BBC’s Nick Robinson has already taken him to task, on his Political Thinking podcast in March 2024, about his repeated slights against ‘globalists’. ‘Absolute cobblers’ was Farage’s response to allegations that he is hostile, via criticism of George Soros, towards Jews: ‘Globalism is about big decisions in your life…being taken by the EU, the World Health Organisation, the United Nations, higher courts’.

And how, Robinson posited, can Farage support Donald Trump, a man who wants to eliminate ‘vermin’? ‘Never take anything Trump says literally,’ chortled the then Reform UK chairman and TV presenter, before he declared himself absolute leader. Farage spotted that communities full of people of ‘different cultures’ with ‘little in common historically or culturally’ was ‘a recipe for problems’ ripe for exploitation by (alleged) chancers and con artists.

Robinson, who also asked Farage ‘are you Islamophobic and proud of it?’, then mentioned ‘communal violence’, as if he knew that within six months the murder of three girls would precipitate what was effectively Kristallnacht on the streets of England. ‘We’ve seen Hindus against Muslims,’ the Reform UK leader offered, with a huge degree of sophistry.

Farage called Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech, the one with the ‘river Tiber foaming with much blood’, the ‘biggest mistake’ Powell ever made. Perhaps this is because Farage himself knows that he is one Enoch Powell-type oration, or TikTok video, away from ending his own career.

He also knows exactly where the line is, which is why after the Stockport riots his stance of just asking questions fanned the flames without spraying fuel all over it. Someone very smart is, or some very smart people are, advising him. Is it Steve Bannon, who sold Trump to America the first time around and, just in time for the 2025 inauguration, is a free man again after serving some time in prison?

Right Direction and their supporters such as Bannon are claiming to be friends of the Jews because it is politically expedient; watch how they play and prey on the three monotheistic religions. In fact, in the coming quadrennium – before the expected General Election in 2029 which will be a referendum on what Labour have accomplished, or failed to do so, in their five-year term – we should watch everything Farage says or does. He is, after all, employing a playbook that has worked in Italy, Argentina and the USA.

How many more weeks can the deeply objectionable Lee Anderson, who is today leading a Westminster Hall debate on (cue irony klaxon) antisocial behaviour in council housing, stick around and toxify the brand whose slogan is Join The Revolt?

For how much longer can Reform UK stay amateur at a time when 4,117,610 people chose to stick a cross on their ballot paper next to the Anti Elite Party? Today Clacton; tomorrow the North.