Gerry Rafferty RIP

Gerry Rafferty's 1978 album City to City (which includes Baker Street) has an extremely evocative sound for me, especially side 1. My dad had the LP and when we had barbecues in the yard at our house in Pompey, under the slate grey skies of an early 80s English summer, we used to stick the record player speakers out the living room window and play it over and over. I used to insist on that Rafferty, a Buddy Holly Best of and the Beatles' 20 Greatest Hits.

The opening track, The Ark, will forever be my 'barbecue music'.

The Joshua Tree

I caught a bit of a Sky Arts Classic Albums documentary about the making of U2’s The Joshua Tree the other night. It was nicely done and Bono even said some interesting things.

I’m not sure that The Joshua Tree is in the very top rank of great albums but it has probably the best opening Crash Bang Wallop I can think of.

When that lovely understated jingle-jangle outro of track three fades out, weirdo fourth track Bullet the Blue Sky more-or-less says: “Ok, that was what you bought it for, you can turn this album off now if you want.”

Overfamiliarity with Where the Streets Have No Name (crash), I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (bang) and - the wallop - With or Without You has dulled the structural strangeness of those songs, but there’s none better for howling in strained falsetto, the nostalgic tears bulging in their ducts, as one drives one’s Ford through the frosted fields and thin sunshine of this bleak, ageing planet.

The Alphabet of Nations

In the American Exceptionalism post below, Ian Wolcott remarks that there are "shockingly few country names beginning with the letter X."

This is true, although They Might Be Giants came up with an ingenious solution for their song 'The Alphabet of Nations'...

Warwick Avenue

When I get to Warwick Avenue, meet me by the entrance of the tube. (Avoid the District, there’s problems on the line.) I’ve built a machine that will blow, as it were, your mind. When you get to Warwick Avenue bring safety goggles, and a tube of superglue. We’re doing everything we said but then did not: it’s quite absurd that you only get one shot.

We’re going back by reversing Time, baby. There’ll be fewer Starbucks and no ITV 2. We’ll get a grip on it this time, baby, almost exactly like we didn't do. And all we have to do... is ride the Bakerloo.

Then when we get to Warwick Avenue, we’ll emerge in 1992. We’ll live it again, the whole way through; only this time around we’ll have a clue.

Libertines

Yesterday I posted on the Dabblerish elements of the band The Libertines. Up the Bracket is one of my favourite albums and though their second one was patchy to say the least it did contain some excellent tunes, including 'Can't Stand Me Now' - an unusual song in that it is a bromantic duet. I can't think of many others... perhaps the Oasis track 'Acquiesce'?

Ringo

Nige posts a Happy Birthday to Ringo, who has just turned 70.

People only notice that Ringo wasn't a musical genius because, rather unfairly, all of his bandmates were. It's not normally required of drummers to even be name-able, let alone mono-monikers (yes Ringo is up there with Madonna, Elvis, Jesus, Diana, Britney and Stalin).

But Ringo got it, ie. he was very good at being a Beatle. I always enjoy those interviews where Ringo just says something very very odd, and you get the feeling that possibly even the other Beatles don't get the in-joke.

If you ever get bored come knock on my door

Gaw rightly remarks on the child-and-parent-pleasing musical stylings of They Might Be Giants, whose album/DVD Here Come the 1-2-3s has held the number one spot in the Brit household for some 10 consecutive months now. Every tune is an ear-python and lyrics include "Everybody at the party is a multi-sided polygon" and "The definition of zero is the mathematical value between positive and negative values". I firmly believe that you should frequently talk way over the heads of infants and striplings; it gives them something to aspire to.

Here Come the 1-2-3s also includes this, which is the most beautiful song ever written about noisy neighbours. Possibly the most beautiful song written about anything.

Plagiarism

I was reminded the other day that back in the mid 1990s Oasis were successfully sued for half a million dollars by The New Seekers, because the track Shakermaker nicked the melody from I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing. This was a pretty arbitary ruling - after all, they might just as well have been sued by the Beatles too, since Shakermaker put the melody of I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing over the instrumentation of the track Flying.

It was arbitrary also because, consciously or otherwise, musicians constantly copy each other. I'm thinking of become a musical plagiarism lawyer because I notice this all the time; perhaps you do too.

For example, to take a couple of random ones I have noted recently from listening to the radio, the Keane song Somewhere Only We Know...



...sounds just like Brompton Oratory by Nick Cave...



...and The Lightning Seeds' track All I Want...



...is basically a soft version of Get Off of My Cloud.




Come to think of it, I rather wish I could stop noticing these things; they get in the way of just getting on with one's business in a sensible manner.

A Man’s Gotta Do A Dirty Job Sometimes

Jon Hotten, fellow founding member of the Steve Bruce Literary Appreciation Society, has suggested that there’s a one-way ticket to Easy Street to be had if you can only write a song like The Best a Man Can Get, or the Baywatch theme I’m Always Here, or St Elmo’s Fire. In other words, a rockin’ soundtrack to an 80s Brat Pack movie that will subsequently be used in a razor ad and played endlessly on American commercial radio for the benefit of men who drink Budweiser.

This strikes me as being extremely plausible; and luckily the whole thing came to me, fully-formed, in the shower this morning. What do you think? To achieve the full effect you should clench both fists and sing it as loud as you can through your best constipation face.


A Man’s Gotta Do A Dirty Job Sometimes

Down at the docks I work all day dockin’
Dockin’ all through the day
But at night you know I’m gonna be rockin’
Rockin’ the night away (yeah)

All day long my ripped muscles are achin’
And my shirt it is so tight
But tonight you know I’m gonna be makin’
Makin’ love to you through the night (yeah!)

Bridge
Oh yeah it’s tough on that jetty
My denim shirt might get kinda sweaty
But a man’s gotta be what a man’s gotta be…

Chorus
A man’s gotta do a dirty job sometimes
Like only a man can do
Oh yeah but a man needs a wooooman
And baby I need yoo-ou!
Together we can climb that hillock
They’re never gonna stop us now
And we’re gonna swim that ocean
We’ll make it through somehow… YEAH!


The bossman will try a-breakin’ me down now
Under a blazin’ sky
But like an eagle that’s white and brown now
I’m gonna be soarin’ so high (yeah!)

Bridge
Cos I’m a man, oh yes I am, baby,
Oh yeah and it’s tough sometimes maybe
But a man’s gotta be what a man’s gotta be…

CHORUS

MIDDLE EIGHT (stolen from Going Home, the theme to Local Hero by Dire Straits)

Bridge
Oh yeah I’m gonna break on thru now
And there’s nothing that we can’t do now
Cos I got me and baby I also got you

CHORUS

REPEAT VERSE 1

CHORUS x 6

A dirty job, a dirty job baby!
Only a man, oh yeah a man can it do!
When the going gets tough now, and when that sea is rough now
Oh yeah when shove comes to push now
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush now
A stitch in time saves nine,
cos I’m gonna be crossin’ that line
To do a dirty job
A dirty job baby
A man’s gotta do it
A dirty job...

FADE

Weller and Waits

I don’t know what Paul Weller is taking these days but his new album Wake Up the Nation is nuts. Lots of two-minute 'songs', most of them chopped up into 20 second ADHD bursts of frantic drums, clanging and mad piano, over which Weller hollers catchily in Bowie Cockney ("Waiyke up the Naiytion" etc). It's definitely music of semiotic flexibility for a steady-state, sustainably-aware post-carbon economy. Anyway, great to see him discover his artistic mojo in middle age, after some years of dull stuff.

At this rate Weller will be Britain’s answer to Tom Waits. Arguably, Wake up the Nation is even more inventive than Waits’ great Island records which, wild and wonderful as they are, basically consist of five types of song used in rotation, namely the Rumbler, the Ballad, the Jerkin’ Jalopy, the Drunken Waltz and the Dirge.

Supergrass

Is there a word for the little trick of the trade played by headline rock bands whereby they ensure their support acts are short in stature, have the volume at about 7 and are lit by a couple of 60-watt bulbs, so that when the main men finally come striding onto the stage they are dazzling, deafening giants by contrast? Supergrass had perfected this art by 2008, when they utterly blew away some sweet wee Scottish tunesmiths called Sergeant at Bristol Academy. In an idle reckoning recently, Mrs Brit and I were forced to agree, somewhat to our surprise, that Supergrass in 2008 was probably the most enjoyable gig either of us had ever attended. They were absolutely ace from start to finish, and very, very loud.

Anyway, Supergrass have split up after 17 years. I have only good things to say about them. Probably immortalised by Alright but they outlasted the Britpop boom and in their steady inevitable decline from Coolness they made six great albums, all of which I’m often in the mood to play, plus a shedload of fun and often dumb singles. They managed longevity without angle or tribe, they have pushed no boundaries nor taken their music into exciting new territories (ie. been blown on the fickle winds of fashion), they have changed nobody’s life with their attitude; they’ve just made a lot of really good songs. For these reasons they used to have the tag ‘everyone’s second favourite band’. That’s fine: pop music is what Britain does best and Supergrass did it as well as anyone and for much longer than most. I could have chosen from at least a dozen brilliant dumb singles but this one has the best video…

Malcolm McLaren RIP

Played Never Mind the Bollocks on the way to work this morning as a tribute. What an awesome album it is. I bought it when I was at school, during my Marxist-Anarchist-Bolshevist-Nihilist phase. Playing God Save the Queen as loud as my tinny speakers could manage with my bedroom window open was about the biggest danger I posed to bourgeois western capitalism, but it got me through.

Sacred music

Simon Russell Beale’s excellent BBC 4 series Sacred Music concluded last night with John Tavener, a composer whose intimidating, anachronistic religiosity reminds me of Geoffrey Hill’s. Makes you doubt your Doubts. It was nice to watch a whole programme about religion without Richard Dawkins appearing to state the bleedin’ obvious.

Sacred music is about humans, hope and hopelessness; God is the justification. In Dawkins’ and Bjorn from Abba's post-religious world, where middle distance-gazing professionals gather in conference centres to discuss painless suicide techniques, and where reclining in First Class on the Eurostar we eat Asian Fusion food from recyclable boxes and tap secret, bleak poems into our Apple notebooks et cetera, I Know That My Redeemer Liveth will still make perfect sense. More sense, if anything – the poignancy will verge on unbearable. Happy Easter!

If Man is five

If Man is five, then the Devil is six. And if the Devil is six, then God is seven.

This much is given to us directly in the text. But what are four, three, two and one?

“The Baldwin brothers, in that order!” some wag might quip. Ignore him, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This is a serious question and scholars have long debated it. Ignore them too, because the answer is that the Monkey is four, the Horse is three, the Chicken is two and one is the Dungeness Crab.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, John Portsmouth Football Club Westwood is eight.

On albums and filler

In one of his occasional bursts of iconoclasm (previous targets have included Roald Dahl, who never did me any harm, and Dylan Thomas), the great Nige slates the Floyd for their preciousness about single-track downloads, and for their concept albums. Nige mentions in particular Dark Side of the Moon but I can’t agree with him on that one – Dark Side of the Moon, like the movie Casablanca, is surely one of those self-justifying cultural artefacts for which, by various flukes and inspirations, everything came together and it just works. Besides, the ‘concept’ is pretty loose compared to the more overt ones in later Rog Waters-led records such as Animals, which doesn’t make a lick of sense, and The Wall, which is, alas, in retrospect, a load of whiny old twaddle. In fact, downloading the handful of good tracks strikes me as being the only sensible approach to The Wall.

But leaving aside the badness or otherwise of concept albums, nonetheless I can’t help feeling regret at the threat of the iTunes culture to straightforward album albums. All music lovers prefer proper albums to compilations because they appreciate the LP as the unit in which musicians serve up their artistic efforts at particular stages in their careers. This is why, for example, Astral Weeks is better than The Best of Van Morrison. Of course, Astral Weeks is one those rare and cherished records devoid of filler, but the aficionado’s preference also applies to albums of uneven quality, these naturally being the vast majority. When one has spent a good deal of one’s spotty, repulsive youth hunched in one’s bedroom with headphones and lyric booklets, one becomes highly attuned to the art - which has survived the two-side format of vinyl and cassette and still exists in CD releases - of album sequencing, ie. tucking away the crap.

There are various approaches to dealing with album filler. There is the frontloader with all the best bits coming crash bang wallop at the start of Side 1. Nevermind, Funhouse, Gold by Ryan Adams and REM’s latest, Accelerate, to pick just a few off the top of my head, all follow this format and it does have advantages for the listener – there is absolutely no reason at all to listen to the second half of the Killers’ debut Hot Fuss, for example, which saves messing about. The backloader is a rarer but not unknown gambit (Magical Mystery Tour, Bringing it all Back Home, Ocean Rain by Echo and the Bunnymen), the middleloader rarer still (Exile on Main St, Trompe Le Monde) and is probably usually accidental.

But most albums are much more calculating in their filler-placement, and follow a familiar sequencing method with the strongest songs opening (lead and follow-up single perhaps), track three an anthemic slowie and all the filler in the lower-middle order but interrupted by the third single to throw the listener a bone, a bit like having Shahid Afridi coming in to bat at number 8. The closing track will be an Epic or a memorable Incongruity (a slow song on a fast album for example). A variation is the use of a murky or quirky opener, with the lead single at track 2. Practically all Britpop albums followed this sequence, so we could call it the Morning Glory, or the Stanley Road or perhaps the Dog Man Star method.

To my mind it’s just plain wrong that the kids of today don’t have to work their way stoically through the filler and can instead gorge themselves on the sweetmeats alone. You need some rough with your smooth; this is why we must lace our Christmas dinner with sprouts. Mind you, a friend of mine did tell me about a friend of his who so loathed one particular track on an LP (Judas Priest or Saxon or similar) that he took a nail and (can this really work?) carefully carved a groove in the vinyl so that the needle would pass directly through it and on to the next number: I don’t want to listen to this song… EVER.

Paul McCartney's brain

What must it have been like, I wondered recently, to have had Paul McCartney’s brain in the 1960s? Every few days you’d wake up, perhaps sit at a piano, waggle your head a bit, say ‘Wa-hey!’ and your brain would produce a tune for you. Sometimes it might be something like Rocky Raccoon or Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, but then on other days it might be something like Yesterday or Let it Be.

Being a music lover devoid of musical talent, I have always regarded with awe and jealousy those rare people who can write memorable melodies. Not just Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson or Mozart or Handel, but anyone who can pen something everyone can whistle. Like the great atheist Bjorn from Abba. Or Noel Gallagher. Or even Pete Waterman, why not. It seems a mysterious witchcraft: the ability to arrange a limited number of notes in a particular, original sequence and rhythm so that hearers can easily and with pleasure repeat that sequence whenever they wish (or sometimes, with great irritation when they don’t wish).

Clearly it is an innate gift afforded to very few. Ringo Starr in some amusing interview told how he would try to write songs but when he presented them to the rest of the Beatles they would inform him that he had unintentionally ripped off a popular tune of the day, and he would say “Oh yeah.”

We can confidently and unhesitatingly dismiss the ‘Outliers’ theory of that audacious charlatan and peddler of the obvious or empty Malcolm Gladwell, whereby he posits that the Beatles’ genius can be explained by the 10,000 hours of practice they had in Hamburg nightclubs. This is clearly nonsense.

First, there are countless thousands of jobbing musicians who put in the hours but never write a Penny Lane or indeed a tune a tenth as good as the most innocuous Beatles album track.

Second, the gift nearly always declines with years rather than improving.eg. Paul McCartney’s brain in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Generally speaking most bands’ debut albums contain their best tunes, and those artists with longevity (Dylan, Springsteen, Waits, Cave etc) rely on other qualities in their later years, ie. songcraft. Noel Gallagher had never even been in a band when his Muse provided him with all the melodies for the first two Oasis albums. It deserted him immediately afterwards, well before he had put in the 10,000 hours.

Third, Malcolm Gladwell has very silly hair.

Q.E.D.

Ticket to Ride

So I bought myself this little beauty – the complete remastered stereo Beatles box set – which, you may recall, I coveted here. A not inconsiderable financial outlay but what the hell, life is short, and so far it has been more than justified as the quality is a vast improvement on the old CDs in terms of depth and immediacy of sound.

I’m working my way through the albums in chronological order and having now completed Revolver which, closing as it does with the milestone freakery of Tomorrow Never Knows, I will designate as the halfway point, I thought I’d better report on my findings. It’s been interesting. The pop of the first four albums sounds less tinny and more bluesy and raw in the remastered format. There have been a few revelations (No Reply and I’m a Loser particularly. I’m Looking Through You was unexpectedly moving.). Some of the over-familiars are made strange again (I Want to Tell You with that weird atonal piano line. Eleanor Rigby is given a kick - I remembered again the profoundly disconcerting effect that the line about “Wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door” had on my imagination as a child).

But for me the first big moment comes with Ticket to Ride (halfway through Help!). I don’t know quite why it is – there are plenty of great songs preceding it – but there’s some indefinable quality in the way that Lennon’s underdone vocal, the slightly slurred guitar and the tom-toms mesh together that makes the sound first and foremost 'Beatleness', as opposed to a pop song which happens to be by the Beatles and in their style. You might say that Ticket to Ride is the Platonic Beatle number. A very English sound, timeless; for some reason it reminds me not of Liverpool but of trains rattling through Baker Street tube station and grey-brown autumn dusks. Also the hot chestnut sellers who used to peddle their goods around Trafalgar Square, and may still. I can’t really articulate it; it just is what it is and the world is a tangibly better place for its existence. My friends, we must treasure these glimpses, snatched between the eternities of darkness and so forth. How's that for a music review, heh.

Rage against the machine

People who take these things far too seriously are campaigning to get Rage Against The Machine’s 1992 song Killing in the Name to the number one spot ahead of the X-Factor winner's single.

Fine weapon of choice, is Killing in the Name: a preposterous monster of a track driven by three giant riffs and culminating in the scream-a-long adolescent mantra par excellence: “F**k you I won’t do what you tell me!”

My sixth-form cronies and I, repulsive grungy scroats all, loved it immediately. At a school disco once we somehow persuaded the DJ to play it at headsplitting volume, instantly clearing the dancefloor of handbag-waving girls and their shocked chaperones. Tanked up on two pints of White Lightning cider we hurtled, hooting like lame droogs, into a circle of crazed headbanging. It remains one of my most cherished school memories. The DJ later got into fearful trouble for broadcasting the obscenities, it was said.

Well, it was a more innocent time, they always are.

When we left school soon after and went our separate ways Martpol and I regularly posted each other homemade compilation tapes (later CDs) of our musical ‘discoveries’, painstakingly sequenced and wildly eclectic. This only dried up in the last couple of years: the problem we have encountered being that we each appear to already own every album in the universe, and thus surprising each other is impossible. We’ve got richer as music has got cheaper, leading us to over-indulge, which is why buying stuff isn’t fun anymore and nor is making painstakingly-sequenced compilation tapes and when we gain we always lose so much. We could burn the malls and head for the hills but it’s bloody cold out there in December.

Thirty Years of Pop Music: A Narrative

The fractious economic and political climate of the late 1970s saw a flowering of musical creativity, as a generation of British youths, energised by a radical left-wing ideology, turned their alienation and anger into musical gold. With The Jam’s Paul Weller and The Clash’s Joe Strummer at the forefront, the end of that dark decade was lit up with music that represented both a primal scream of rage and a reaction to the pompous, self-indulgent noodlings of the Prog Rockers. The raw excitement of the seventies has never been recaptured since and a decade of superficial posing was to follow…

…The seventies were the decade that taste forgot, with the garish naffness of Abba and Glam Rock giving way to the anti-everything nihilism of punk. The briefly-interesting Clash had imploded with the pompous, self-indulgent noodlings of triple-album Sandinista, while the nadir was reached with squalid death of Sid Vicious. Like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, the 1980s saw a renaissance of colour, light and refinement. Paul Weller read the signs, disbanded The Jam and took his songwriting to new levels of sophistication with The Style Council. The mood was enacapsulated in the slogan “Choose Life” and peaked with the world-uniting Live Aid events. Freed from the limitations of punk’s three-chord thrashings and primitive production values, in an era of economic prosperity and optimism, pop music, led by the swooning New Romantics and the hedonistic freaks of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, became a joyous expression of living...

… Heaven knows I’m miserable now, sang the Mancunian Morrissey in perhaps the defining British pop song of the 1980s, a decade in which urban alienation plumbed bleak new depths under the harsh realities of Thatcherism…

... I wanna be adored, sang Mancunian Ian Brown in perhaps the defining British pop song of the late 1980s. A generation of creative youths rejected miserabilism as Baggy and Acid House exploded in a glorious celebration of shimmering music and drug-fuelled dancing. Shunning politics and ignoring the harsh realities of Thatcherism, the Stone Roses gig at Spike Island in 1989 marked the musical zenith of the decade…

…By 1989 pop music had reached a nadir. Stock Aitken and Waterman’s soap stars dominated the charts while the pompous, self-indulgent noodlings of The Style Council had alienated rock fans and left the once-mighty Paul Weller without a record contract. The time was right for grunge as a wave of American bands, led by Nirvana, swept across the Atlantic. Themselves influenced by the British punks, but with a gloriously a-political outlook that freed them from the naïve and tiresome cod-leftist sloganeering of the likes of Joe Strummer, the howl of grunge guitars was like an injection of pure adrenalin into the moribund music scene…

… You and I are gonna live forever, sang Liam Gallager in perhaps the defining British pop song of the 1990s, Live Forever. Reacting against the bleak and self-indulgent noodlings of US grunge, Oasis represented a defiant new optimism in British music. Influenced by the punk bands of the 1970s but shunning the outdated politics and class-warfare elements, Britpop dominated the mainstream media as well as the indie charts. Re-cast as “The Modfather”, Paul Weller found a new lease of life, producing his most mature and consistently high-quality work to date. ... Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for? sang Liam Gallagher, in perhaps the defining British pop song of the 1990s, Cigarettes and Alcohol. With Pulp’s Common People also crossing into the mainstream, and Blur vs Oasis representing the middle-classes vs the workers, Britpop was the time when class-warfare returned to the agenda…

…By the late 1990s, pop music had reached a nadir. The pompous, self-indulgent noodlings of Oasis’ Be Here Now and the so-so Dad Rock of Paul Weller represented a creative lull in British music…

…By the late 1990s, pop music had never been more exciting and varied. Inspired by the mad genius of Aphex Twin, innovations in dance and urban music had led to a flowering of genre-bending creativity, crossing into the mainstream with Underworld, Goldie and the Prodigy, and flooding abroad with the Ministry of Sound's euphoric Ibiza anthems, which rejected the pompous, self-indulgent noodlings of the likes of Aphex Twin, Underworld, Goldie and…By the early 2000s, pop music had reached a nadir, with the crass commercialism of the Ministry of Sound’s Ibiza anthems endlessly retreading old ground. The time was right for a resurgence of back-to-basics guitar music. It came from the US in the thrilling form of the White Stripes and the Strokes, augmented in the UK by The Libertines’ irresistible combination of pop sensibilities and self-destruction…Reaching a nadir with the self-indulgent and self-destructive tendencies of Pete Doherty’s Libertines, the mid to late 2000s saw mainstream rather than alternative music as the place for real innovation, as the wild electronic beeps and jagged underground rhythms of urban music seeped into the hits of the likes of Beyonce, Britney and even manufactured reality stars such as Girls Aloud and Leona Lewis…

...The mid to late 2000s saw an unprecedented homogenisation of youth pop culture. Simon Cowell, perhaps the single most powerful force in popular music since The Beatles, read the signs and capitalised with a constant supply line of commercial acts. While the kids slumped like zombies in front of The X Factor, the mainstream monoculture had never been so dominant as the scene moved further than ever from the days of the late 1970s when tribal youth movements were so musically and politically vital…

...The mid to late 2000s saw an unprecedented splintering of youth pop culture. While their parents slumped like zombies in front of The X Factor, the kids were at their bedroom computers or on the streets with I-phones and I-Pods, creating and downloading material from a bewildering fractal array of genres and sub-genres and specialist online music streams. Radiohead, perhaps the single most innovative force in British pop music since The Beatles, read the signs and gave away their album In Rainbows free on the internet. The mainstream monoculture had never been so irrelevant as the scene moved further than ever from the days of the late 1970s when a small number of tribal youth movements dominated the restrictive BBC and chart-led media...

Music journalism

Occasionally I wonder if I would have enjoyed being a music journalist. I have two of the necessary qualifications: I enjoy a wide range of music; and I could happily spend all day writing pseudy bollocks along the lines of “The De Trop Rainbows' new album sounds as if Marianne Faithful had never met the Stones but spent the 60s in a nunnery, then joined Primal Scream for a jamming session with Bob Marley in a Cuban dance hall, with Keith Moon on drums and acid, and Miles Davis on flugelhorn.”

The line between objective and subjective is very fuzzy in music appreciation, as I suppose it is with all arty criticism. Most people not in their teens or early twenties think that today’s pop music is worse than yesterday’s. But I deny the existence of a decline from any previous Golden Age for two reasons. First, because to claim that there has been a general decline in standards is to claim that talent has declined. This is essentially a supernatural claim. Second, people invariably believe that the peak of pop music just happened to coincide with their formative years, so it is always a subjective claim.

But on the other hand, I do think that some individual records and artists are objectively better than others. For example, the White Stripes are objectively better than the Bay City Rollers (better, that is, if you rate musical quality over populism for its own sake, which you don’t have to, but I do). It’s quite hard to say why this is the case exactly, but if you know that sort of thing when you see it, then you know it when you see it. Possibly. Anyway, music journalists depend on this assumption.

But then again the biggest problem I have with music journalism is that reviews are very heavily driven by self-conscious trendiness rather than the objective quality of the music. I recall noticing the full extent of this with the critical reception of Oasis’s third album, Be Here Now in 1997. It garnered gushing reviews across the board, with Q Magazine going particularly overboard with a 5 star eulogy. The reason the reviews were so positive was that all the journos were basing them on the traditional cyclical trend of rave-backlash-rave, rather than on the actual songs. The music press had praised Definitely Maybe (rightly), then had slammed What’s the Story (Morning Glory)?, only to be wrong-footed when every man and his dog bought a copy of what was probably the defining Britpop record. They therefore went, en masse and herd-like, to the other extreme when Be Here Now came out, hailing it as the greatest thing since Sergeant Pepper, whereas in fact when you listened to the album it was a perfectly obvious shark-jump.

This cyclical trending also occurs with decades and pop music movements, since each is in some respects a reaction to the last. This is a very British thing because we are still quite a uni-cultural nation and extremely fashion-conscious. In the mid-90s it was an incontrovertible fact that the 80s was the worst musical decade ever, and that Britpop was the goldenest age since 1967. In the noughties that was revised and Britpop became naff – which, of course, if your image of Britpop is a Kula Shaker appearance on TFI Friday, it was.

But I guarantee you now that in about five years time Britpop’s reputation will be revised again and it will be back in, even if you define ‘Britpop’ narrowly enough to exclude, say, Radiohead, Portishead and Underworld. The cream - Blur, Oasis, Weller Supergrass – all produced cracking albums in the period, and a compilation featuring the best efforts from Pulp, Suede, Charlatans and all the one or two-hit wonders would be at least as good – in terms of ‘objective’ musical quality - as any compilation of the lesser acts of punk, ska, electro, disco, reggae, heavy metal or whatever genre floats your boat (which genre does float your boat is, of course, subjective and largely dependent on your age).

Most of the rest is crap but most of everything is crap. Nineties revival and Noughties backlash followed by Noughties revival and Twenty-teens backlash – you read it here first so you can safely ignore it when it comes.