I said last year that, now the Beeb has practically had to pull out of sport, its Glastonbury coverage is not only excellent but, for me, just about the best thing about the corporation these days. And brilliant the coverage was again. I can't possibly watch all of the things I'd like to while they remain available on iPlayer. But the right wing press (ok, the Daily Mail) got its knickers in a twist about political bias because of the attention given to Jeremy Corbyn. I'm not a fan of Corbyn and even less so of McDonnell, whose comments at Glasto about housing and the Grenfell Tower disaster were truly and unsurprisingly awful. I'm not just talking about his "murdered by political decisions" comment, which had two angles. The first was his argument that housing in our country is built only for "financial speculation rather than for meeting a basic human need". Well he would think that because he won't accept that a market produces better results than a command economy, despite all the evidence to the contrary, including the self-evident fact that the standard of housing provided by the likes of the Smolensk Workers Co-operative would not exactly command a lot of enthusiasm here. The second was fire service cuts, which was refuted by the London Fire Commissioner, Dany Cotton, who said "there were no issues about numbers of firefighters". What one has to recognise, of course, is that when McDonnell blames "governments" and "political decisions" he doesn't just mean since 2010 as he has no hesitation in blaming the Blair and Brown governments as well as Cameron and May since, to him, they are all awful Tories of one kind or another.
But back to the accusation of bias in the TV coverage. Corbyn was invited to speak by the festival organisers. A bad call for me as I think politicians only belong there in the audience, but one the organisers are entitled to make. And it is then only reasonable for the Beeb to cover it, as it's part of the event. The fact that lots of petit bourgeoisie who can pay the nearly £250 a head for the cheapest ticket seem to be overwhelmingly supportive of someone who would tax them hard is remarkable but not surprising as they all get carried away with young person's group think on occasions like this, even if some are ageing hippies. And of course those who have a student loan would love to have it written off, though why they think they should benefit compared to the people of the same age who didn't go to university, or indeed other people who willingly signed up for a loan of any kind, I'm not sure. There'd be just as much logic in writing off the car loans of people under 30. Seems the idealistic young are just as interested in a "bung" as anyone. This seems to me of more import than the BBC briefly covering something that actually happened at an event they were televising. I suppose they could have totally ignored it and not shown or said anything about Corbyn but to me that would have been strange and tantamount to censorship.
The other thing about Glasto that caught my attention was Ed Sheeran having to explain on twitter that he hadn't been miming or using tape recordings, but simply using a loop station to create his own backing riffs and rhythms as part of his remarkable one man show. I must admit I thought everybody knew about loop stations. We first saw someone using one many years ago now at a pub or golf club gig. I was nearly as fascinated as when I realised a similar performer was enhancing his vocals through software on his laptop - I'd just thought he was remarkably good at impersonating all sorts of famous singers till I realised. I thought Sheeran did well, though the set was perhaps a little long: we were losing attention and felt the audience there was too about three-quarters of the way through. Mind, I've had the riff from Eraser on a loop in my head ever since. Its autobiographical lyric is totally risible in some places:
I forget when I get awards now the wave I had to ride
The paving stones I played on that kept me to the grind....
Guess it's a stereotypical day for someone like me
Without a nine to five job or a uni degree
To be caught up in the trappings of the industry....
I used to think that nothing could be better than touring the world with my songs
I chased the picture perfect life, I think they painted it wrong
I think that money is the route (sic*) of all evil and fame is hell....
With my beaten small guitar, wearing the same old jeans
Wembley Stadium crowds, two hundred and forty thou**
And to the next generation inspiration's allowed....
And I'll find comfort in my pain eraser....
You poor sausage, Ed Sheeran MBE. You're all of 26 years old.... and though you had to make quite a few independently produced EPs before you got a record deal (the first when he was 14 and one of which was a minor hit and won a silver disc) it wasn't that slow and long a trajectory to fame aged 20! Most buskers aren't expecting that big breakthrough to come easily, nor do most stars find the trappings of fame tiresome so quickly. But I do think this is a good song, nevertheless. After all there are plenty of risible Joe Strummer lyrics I like to sing along to.
It took me a long time to get Sheeran. My boss told me about him and suggested I might like his stuff. As she's a big Led Zep fan she has taste so I took a listen. Now Sheeran is officially genre-d (a verb I probably just invented) as pop, acoustic and contemporary folk. Well, he clearly isn't folk, but as my favourite man with just an acoustic guitar, Roy Harper, isn't either, I thought he might be promising. This was very early in Ed's career - his first album might just have come out. I checked him out on youtube and was nonplussed. I saw him on several TV shows, including Graham Norton. I remember saying to my other half "I feel I ought to like this guy but I just don't warm to him". I gave him more chances than there are in a monopoly card deck. The song that finally did it for me, perhaps predictably, was 2016 Grammy winning Thinking Out Loud from his second album, Multiply, which I then went out and bought. And I quite liked some of it; though the grime/rap stuff didn't seem to me to fit with the rest of the tracks. Though to be fair, Sheeran has always been as much grime as folk - some of his independently produced teenage EPs were grime collaborations. And it didn't stop me buying the latest album, Divide, because I thought I should and I liked more than its predecessor (though when I go back and listen to X now I think I prefer it). Glastonbury is the first time I've seen a live Sheeran set and I loved it. It's not the first time I've had to see a live performance to really get an artist. I guess this is partly because what you don't see when he does one song on a TV show is the energy he puts in to his set.
But now I really do like him, rather than thinking that I ought to like him. I just had to give him far more chances than I've ever given any artist previously. Mind, I still don't like singing along to rap: I just can't remember that many words that quickly!
*I typed these lyric extracts direct from the official CD inlay, not some dodgy website
**I find this lyric remarkably self aggrandising. On a pedantic point of detail, you can't play to 240 thousand people at Wembley. Well not all at once. The official stadium capacity is 90,000 but it's generally lower for concerts and was about 80,000 a night for Ed Sheeran's "X" tour. The official figure (well, on Wikipedia anyway) for the tour was 229,725 over 4 nights, but that wouldn't have rhymed. They can get more in by using a 360 degree layout, the maximum so far being 92,000 for U2, but for Adele in a few days' time they are going to get 98,000 in. Over 4 nights that will be 392 thou, a new record for Wembley. Eat your hear out Ed, or just use your pain eraser. P.S. Oops, Adele damaged her vocal chords after two of the Wembley gigs....
Friday, 30 June 2017
Sunday, 25 June 2017
The biggest ever endorsement wedge in sport
Which sportsman has earned the most dosh from endorsements in a single year? Not golf's Tiger Woods. Not basketball's Michael Jordan. And certainly not football's David Beckham.
The answer is George Forman. Just about everyone will remember the George Foreman lean, mean grilling machine, a counter-top grill designed to drain out the fat, which rode the early healthy eating wave. Foreman having retired once from boxing, been a preacher and gone back to pugilism, was invited to a trade fair in Las Vegas in 1995. There he met a man who had been trying to market the grill, but with little success. That man saw for himself how popular and personable Foreman was - and also a big carnivore. But he didn't have the cash to do the normal up front endorsement fee. So he offered George a cut of future profits. The men hit it off and Foreman, perhaps surprisingly, agreed to the deal. Rebranded under George's name and face it became a huge success. Foreman, on 45% of the profits, hoped he might gross a million dollars in total out of the deal. After a slow burn start (sorry) they soon couldn't make them quickly enough to meet demand and Foreman's monthly cheques, initially modest, were approaching $4 million by 1999. That year he sold out his stake for a lump sum of $137.5 million, the most any athlete has made from endorsements in a single year. Well that's what I read but not long afterwards CNN reckoned* it was over five years and might have be exceeded by Jordan's unpublicised deal with Nike, though a more recent book** pooh poohs that. But it's a great story and, either way, it's more than George's lifetime earnings from boxing. One can only say "gorgeous", Foreman's nickname.
Even stranger, while Foreman sold the rights to use his name in perpetuity (which generally means 80 years - a commercial manager I know has a saying "irrevocable isn't never, perpetual isn't for ever") he felt he'd been sacked and, while he had some ongoing obligations, willingly continued to promote the product and go to the factory. The story appears in huge detail on CNN's website (see below).
Not that I know of anyone who ever owned one. Oh, maybe one; we remember it being on someone we know's wedding gift list.
* CNN Money, June 1 2003. Gorgeous George - the George Foreman lean mean fat-reducing grilling machine....is a phenomenon
**Bouts of Mania, Richard Hoffer, Aurum. The book covers the 6 famous fights featuring combinations of Frazier, Ali and Foreman between 1971 and 1975, including the Foreman-Ali 'Rumble in the Jungle' which Ali won against all expectations, using his 'rope-a-dope' tactic to weather the Foreman storm before knocking him out.
The answer is George Forman. Just about everyone will remember the George Foreman lean, mean grilling machine, a counter-top grill designed to drain out the fat, which rode the early healthy eating wave. Foreman having retired once from boxing, been a preacher and gone back to pugilism, was invited to a trade fair in Las Vegas in 1995. There he met a man who had been trying to market the grill, but with little success. That man saw for himself how popular and personable Foreman was - and also a big carnivore. But he didn't have the cash to do the normal up front endorsement fee. So he offered George a cut of future profits. The men hit it off and Foreman, perhaps surprisingly, agreed to the deal. Rebranded under George's name and face it became a huge success. Foreman, on 45% of the profits, hoped he might gross a million dollars in total out of the deal. After a slow burn start (sorry) they soon couldn't make them quickly enough to meet demand and Foreman's monthly cheques, initially modest, were approaching $4 million by 1999. That year he sold out his stake for a lump sum of $137.5 million, the most any athlete has made from endorsements in a single year. Well that's what I read but not long afterwards CNN reckoned* it was over five years and might have be exceeded by Jordan's unpublicised deal with Nike, though a more recent book** pooh poohs that. But it's a great story and, either way, it's more than George's lifetime earnings from boxing. One can only say "gorgeous", Foreman's nickname.
Even stranger, while Foreman sold the rights to use his name in perpetuity (which generally means 80 years - a commercial manager I know has a saying "irrevocable isn't never, perpetual isn't for ever") he felt he'd been sacked and, while he had some ongoing obligations, willingly continued to promote the product and go to the factory. The story appears in huge detail on CNN's website (see below).
Not that I know of anyone who ever owned one. Oh, maybe one; we remember it being on someone we know's wedding gift list.
* CNN Money, June 1 2003. Gorgeous George - the George Foreman lean mean fat-reducing grilling machine....is a phenomenon
**Bouts of Mania, Richard Hoffer, Aurum. The book covers the 6 famous fights featuring combinations of Frazier, Ali and Foreman between 1971 and 1975, including the Foreman-Ali 'Rumble in the Jungle' which Ali won against all expectations, using his 'rope-a-dope' tactic to weather the Foreman storm before knocking him out.
Friday, 23 June 2017
The most successful person in sport in our neck of the woods
Who has been the most successful person, in terms of long term sustained success, in top level sport in the British Isles over the last few decades, if not ever?
There are some small clues in how I phrased the question. The 'most successful person' perhaps implies not necessarily a competitor. So a coach or manager maybe? And the 'British Isles' being the group of islands off the west coast of continental Europe. So including Ireland, then. I realise that particular nomenclature irritates many Irish people but sorry, it's a geographical fact (well, Wikipedia agrees with me) and a useful, if outmoded expression. But it was done not to irritate but to define the question properly and to not completely give the game away, as the person is, indeed, not Sir Alex Ferguson, but Irish.
David Walsh gave me the answer, though he posited it more subtly, by calling horse trainer Aiden O'Brien "the greatest sustainer of success these islands have ever seen". O'Brien was 26 years old and had just 3 years experience of training mostly moderate horses to win mainly jump races, when John Magnier invited him to train horses at his Coolmore stables at Ballydoyle, Tipperary 21 years ago. Aiden O'Brien was the unlikely successor to unrelated namesake Vincent O'Brien, the trainer readers of the Racing Post had voted "the greatest figure in the history of racing". Over a 40 year career Vincent O'B had trained 43 classic winners in Britain and Ireland. The most successful British trainer, Sir Henry Cecil, was some way behind, winning 31 British and Irish classics in a 44 year career. So Aiden O'Brien's appointment might have been considered a gamble, a long odds punt, even a risk. Now he has had the strength of a 200+ team of horses at the modern Ballydoyle behind him. But even so his statistics are remarkable: with his most recent winner, Wings of Eagles at the Derby, Aiden O'B has trained 65 classic winners in 21 years, an average of more than 3 a year and a hit rate he maintained from the off: he won 3 in his first year, starting with a 20-1 shot in the 1997 Irish 2000 Guineas. And Wings of Eagles was a 40-1 outsider, so he doesn't just train favourites. It was his 6th Derby win, including 3 in a row from 2012-14. He's won a lot overseas as well, including 2 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. Most of the horses he now trains are sons and daughters of his past champions, from the Coolmore stud machine: he delivers the champion stallions and brood mares, they return him the yearlings.
I'm not an avid horse racing fan, indeed I don't pay it much attention bar a fun day out at the races once a year and watching the Grand National on tv. I didn't see the Derby live. Of course it's a race that often has an exciting finish with jockeys like Lester Piggott bringing a horse late out of the pack and timing their sprint finish. But Wings of Eagles triumph is worth watching on youtube - coming very fast from a long, long way back. A truly remarkable piece of sporting action. And yet another classic for Aiden O'Brien, the most successful person in sport in our part of the world.
There are some small clues in how I phrased the question. The 'most successful person' perhaps implies not necessarily a competitor. So a coach or manager maybe? And the 'British Isles' being the group of islands off the west coast of continental Europe. So including Ireland, then. I realise that particular nomenclature irritates many Irish people but sorry, it's a geographical fact (well, Wikipedia agrees with me) and a useful, if outmoded expression. But it was done not to irritate but to define the question properly and to not completely give the game away, as the person is, indeed, not Sir Alex Ferguson, but Irish.
David Walsh gave me the answer, though he posited it more subtly, by calling horse trainer Aiden O'Brien "the greatest sustainer of success these islands have ever seen". O'Brien was 26 years old and had just 3 years experience of training mostly moderate horses to win mainly jump races, when John Magnier invited him to train horses at his Coolmore stables at Ballydoyle, Tipperary 21 years ago. Aiden O'Brien was the unlikely successor to unrelated namesake Vincent O'Brien, the trainer readers of the Racing Post had voted "the greatest figure in the history of racing". Over a 40 year career Vincent O'B had trained 43 classic winners in Britain and Ireland. The most successful British trainer, Sir Henry Cecil, was some way behind, winning 31 British and Irish classics in a 44 year career. So Aiden O'Brien's appointment might have been considered a gamble, a long odds punt, even a risk. Now he has had the strength of a 200+ team of horses at the modern Ballydoyle behind him. But even so his statistics are remarkable: with his most recent winner, Wings of Eagles at the Derby, Aiden O'B has trained 65 classic winners in 21 years, an average of more than 3 a year and a hit rate he maintained from the off: he won 3 in his first year, starting with a 20-1 shot in the 1997 Irish 2000 Guineas. And Wings of Eagles was a 40-1 outsider, so he doesn't just train favourites. It was his 6th Derby win, including 3 in a row from 2012-14. He's won a lot overseas as well, including 2 Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. Most of the horses he now trains are sons and daughters of his past champions, from the Coolmore stud machine: he delivers the champion stallions and brood mares, they return him the yearlings.
I'm not an avid horse racing fan, indeed I don't pay it much attention bar a fun day out at the races once a year and watching the Grand National on tv. I didn't see the Derby live. Of course it's a race that often has an exciting finish with jockeys like Lester Piggott bringing a horse late out of the pack and timing their sprint finish. But Wings of Eagles triumph is worth watching on youtube - coming very fast from a long, long way back. A truly remarkable piece of sporting action. And yet another classic for Aiden O'Brien, the most successful person in sport in our part of the world.
Thursday, 22 June 2017
Best Musicians I've seen play
A Post Script to my post on Chris de Burgh (High On Emotion, 19 June). A few days after the gig, making conversation on a journey, I asked my better half what I thought would be an imponderable question - which band has been the best musicians we've seen play? Not the best gig, or favourite, simply the best technicians. Surprisingly, given the number of gigs we've seen spanning many genres over 5 decades, within a minute or two we had totally agreed on a very short list: 10cc (the team backing Graham Gouldman in their current incarnation), Ian Dury's Blockheads (the classic 70s line up) and Chris de Burgh's 1980s backing band. (His current band are pretty good, too).
Given we've seen, between us, bands such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Keith Emerson's The Nice and ELP, The Who, Santana, The Rolling Stones, The Clash, REM, Muse and the Red Hot Chili Peppers with many, many more besides I was very surprised this conversation was so short and lacking in contention. Indeed, it rapidly left us wondering what to talk about next!
I hasten to note that we were talking about groups of musicians playing as a band: if we were talking individual players then I'd have come up with a long list of names including Keith Emerson, Dave Gilmour, Jimmy Page, Robert Fripp, Dick Heckstall Smith, Rick Wakeman, Carlos Santana and John Frusciante for starters.
Mind, there's a lot more to being a good pop musician than good technique and performance. Now I like classical music and I'm very fond of going to see ballet. But in classical music technique is all. Yes that technique must include playing with feeling, not like a robot, but otherwise that's it, apart perhaps from things at the avant garde end of the spectrum. But creativity is king in pop music - and jazz - and people who know very little about music theory can make exciting new pieces of music. Maybe because they know so little and take risks or break the accepted rules of composition.
But it's still satisfying to watch musicians who are masters of their instruments.
Another post for another day: best gigs I've been to. I'll need to go and lie down and think on that one for a bit.
Given we've seen, between us, bands such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Keith Emerson's The Nice and ELP, The Who, Santana, The Rolling Stones, The Clash, REM, Muse and the Red Hot Chili Peppers with many, many more besides I was very surprised this conversation was so short and lacking in contention. Indeed, it rapidly left us wondering what to talk about next!
I hasten to note that we were talking about groups of musicians playing as a band: if we were talking individual players then I'd have come up with a long list of names including Keith Emerson, Dave Gilmour, Jimmy Page, Robert Fripp, Dick Heckstall Smith, Rick Wakeman, Carlos Santana and John Frusciante for starters.
Mind, there's a lot more to being a good pop musician than good technique and performance. Now I like classical music and I'm very fond of going to see ballet. But in classical music technique is all. Yes that technique must include playing with feeling, not like a robot, but otherwise that's it, apart perhaps from things at the avant garde end of the spectrum. But creativity is king in pop music - and jazz - and people who know very little about music theory can make exciting new pieces of music. Maybe because they know so little and take risks or break the accepted rules of composition.
But it's still satisfying to watch musicians who are masters of their instruments.
Another post for another day: best gigs I've been to. I'll need to go and lie down and think on that one for a bit.
Wednesday, 21 June 2017
Austerity - who will pick up the pieces?
I've written before that I don't see how the likes of Corbyn, Sturgeon et al can "end austerity" when government spending has actually increased over the period they are wittering on about (Why we can't end austerity 2 June 2017). Nicholas Macpherson has spoken up to confirm that. Who is Nick? He was permanent secretary at the Treasury under 3 chancellors, Brown, Darling and Osborne. Referring to Corbyn's remark that people have had enough of austerity he noted that Osborne's trick was to talk tough while putting in place a programme that was "admirably pragmatic and flexible". In other words keeping the spending taps open. So, while Ireland managed to reduce gross public debt from 86% of national income to 75% between 2010 and 2016, Britain's public debt went from 76% to 89% over the same period. "In short, Britain never experienced austerity" says Nick.
I'm glad Nick agrees with me (er, that phrase sounds a bit familiar?) but David Smith has pointed out why we are both, after a fashion, wrong. It's not about the actual numbers, it's all semantics, of course.
According to Smith, Osborne thought about making real cuts in spending*. In the run up to the 2010 election he was considering 20% across the board cuts, like Canada had implemented, but coalition government made that impossible. (For better or worse? Certainly less traumatic in the early years but as a result we are deeper in debt going into another set of tricky waters. One for future historians to debate, I suspect).
So, while Osborne didn't actually make real net cuts in spending, what Smith goes on to explain to numbskulls like me is that, when people talk about seven years of "austerity" the word doesn't have its normal meaning. While the Cambridge dictionary says it means "a difficult economic situation caused by the government reducing the amount of money it spends", Smith says that it has come to mean any or all of deficit reduction (i.e. borrowing a lot but not quite as much as had once been foolishly planned), falling wages in real terms, rock bottom interest rates or even "the fact that a Grenfell Tower tragedy could happen in the 21st Century" . One can understand people wanting to see rising real terms wages, interest rates on savings that exceed inflation and public sector spending increasing in real terms. Wouldn't we all? But Smith says he has heard "some strange contributions in recent days from people purporting to be economists". Smith concludes that the problem with Osborne's gradual approach (which I actually think was the right approach in the circumstances prevailing at the time) is that it necessarily takes a long time. Many of the things people are tired of cannot be changed at the drop of a hat. As an example, although some hawks on the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee have started voting for an interest rate rise, it will be a long slow haul before anything like 'normality' returns. So he concludes that "however you define it, austerity has further to run".
Though maybe not so much in Northern Ireland, given the DUP's position of strength. The province already benefits from public spending that is £5437 a head more than taxes raised there. Now it's only right and proper that less affluent areas of tge country are subsidised by the rest. But the Northern Ireland subsidy is already nearly twice the figure for Scotland (£2824), when even the Spectator says that Scotland's deal is unfair on England and called for the Barnett formula to be reviewed**. But the DUP want to tone down austerity. I think they actually mean "pump up the volume". Wouldn't we all like to have a fairy godmother?
Nevertheless, I am reminded of Humpty Dumpty, for whom a word "means just what I choose it to mean". And we all know what happened to Humpty.
*Austerity has further to run, however you define it, Sunday Times 18 June 2017
**Yes, Scotland does receive an unfair share of public spending. Probably. Alex Massie, The Spectator 11 March 2015. Public sector spending in Scotland is 116% of the UK average, in Northern Ireland 124% and in Wales 110% (says the BBC, Treasury: soending in Wales is 110% of UK average 22 November 2013) which is why the Welsh government doesn't want tax raising powers before a review of Barnett.
I'm glad Nick agrees with me (er, that phrase sounds a bit familiar?) but David Smith has pointed out why we are both, after a fashion, wrong. It's not about the actual numbers, it's all semantics, of course.
According to Smith, Osborne thought about making real cuts in spending*. In the run up to the 2010 election he was considering 20% across the board cuts, like Canada had implemented, but coalition government made that impossible. (For better or worse? Certainly less traumatic in the early years but as a result we are deeper in debt going into another set of tricky waters. One for future historians to debate, I suspect).
So, while Osborne didn't actually make real net cuts in spending, what Smith goes on to explain to numbskulls like me is that, when people talk about seven years of "austerity" the word doesn't have its normal meaning. While the Cambridge dictionary says it means "a difficult economic situation caused by the government reducing the amount of money it spends", Smith says that it has come to mean any or all of deficit reduction (i.e. borrowing a lot but not quite as much as had once been foolishly planned), falling wages in real terms, rock bottom interest rates or even "the fact that a Grenfell Tower tragedy could happen in the 21st Century" . One can understand people wanting to see rising real terms wages, interest rates on savings that exceed inflation and public sector spending increasing in real terms. Wouldn't we all? But Smith says he has heard "some strange contributions in recent days from people purporting to be economists". Smith concludes that the problem with Osborne's gradual approach (which I actually think was the right approach in the circumstances prevailing at the time) is that it necessarily takes a long time. Many of the things people are tired of cannot be changed at the drop of a hat. As an example, although some hawks on the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee have started voting for an interest rate rise, it will be a long slow haul before anything like 'normality' returns. So he concludes that "however you define it, austerity has further to run".
Though maybe not so much in Northern Ireland, given the DUP's position of strength. The province already benefits from public spending that is £5437 a head more than taxes raised there. Now it's only right and proper that less affluent areas of tge country are subsidised by the rest. But the Northern Ireland subsidy is already nearly twice the figure for Scotland (£2824), when even the Spectator says that Scotland's deal is unfair on England and called for the Barnett formula to be reviewed**. But the DUP want to tone down austerity. I think they actually mean "pump up the volume". Wouldn't we all like to have a fairy godmother?
Nevertheless, I am reminded of Humpty Dumpty, for whom a word "means just what I choose it to mean". And we all know what happened to Humpty.
*Austerity has further to run, however you define it, Sunday Times 18 June 2017
**Yes, Scotland does receive an unfair share of public spending. Probably. Alex Massie, The Spectator 11 March 2015. Public sector spending in Scotland is 116% of the UK average, in Northern Ireland 124% and in Wales 110% (says the BBC, Treasury: soending in Wales is 110% of UK average 22 November 2013) which is why the Welsh government doesn't want tax raising powers before a review of Barnett.
Tuesday, 20 June 2017
Some good news on Brexit
Yes, really. I read some great news on the day the negotiations started. You could be forgiven for thinking there isn't any (and I'm guilty for adding to the gloom) but the Times reports* that, contrary to the doom mongers who have consistently said we don't have, and can't get, the people with the knowledge to do the necessary deals, that we've got ourselves a star on trade deals. And just in time for the start of the season, to make a football transfer analogy.
His name is Crawford Falconer and he was New Zealand's ambassador to the WTO. He has been appointed Britain's chief trade negotiation adviser and second permanent secretary at the Department for International Trade. He has more than 25 years of trade policy experience with New Zealand, one of the most outward looking countries, and with the OECD. He has worked on some of the thorniest international trade issues, including the dispute between the EU and the USA on subsidies to Airbus and Boeing.
Not only that, he thinks it's a do-able task. He is hugely positive about Britain's potential, the experience we have despite 'taking a cup of tea' while Brussels has done all the recent negotiations and, though he says there are plenty of highly paid people who are inherently difficult and will come up with 10,000 reasons why there's a technical difficulty, he damned them as bureaucrats with a personal financial interest in stringing things out like a Japanese kabuki play. He says the next 2 years is partly political, partly technical but he doesn't see it as problematic. "That'll be a lot of hard work for a lot of bureaucrats but actually, in the political sense, it's not fundamentally complicated".
Sounds like my kind of guy and the best signing of the transfer window. What with him and Pickford and Klassen joining Everton, that's cheered me up a lot!
* Britain has put its post Brexit trading future in good hands, Ian King 19 June
His name is Crawford Falconer and he was New Zealand's ambassador to the WTO. He has been appointed Britain's chief trade negotiation adviser and second permanent secretary at the Department for International Trade. He has more than 25 years of trade policy experience with New Zealand, one of the most outward looking countries, and with the OECD. He has worked on some of the thorniest international trade issues, including the dispute between the EU and the USA on subsidies to Airbus and Boeing.
Not only that, he thinks it's a do-able task. He is hugely positive about Britain's potential, the experience we have despite 'taking a cup of tea' while Brussels has done all the recent negotiations and, though he says there are plenty of highly paid people who are inherently difficult and will come up with 10,000 reasons why there's a technical difficulty, he damned them as bureaucrats with a personal financial interest in stringing things out like a Japanese kabuki play. He says the next 2 years is partly political, partly technical but he doesn't see it as problematic. "That'll be a lot of hard work for a lot of bureaucrats but actually, in the political sense, it's not fundamentally complicated".
Sounds like my kind of guy and the best signing of the transfer window. What with him and Pickford and Klassen joining Everton, that's cheered me up a lot!
* Britain has put its post Brexit trading future in good hands, Ian King 19 June
Monday, 19 June 2017
High On Emotion
Which artist or band have you seen play live the most times?
It won't surprise many of you to know that, for me, the answer is Roy Harper who, perhaps eccentrically, I consider if not the greatest living musician and poet, then at least my favourite. But, given my liking for bands like the Kinks, through Jimi Hendrix, progressive and punk rock, to REM and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the identity of the artist I've seen next most often might be a surprise: it's the deeply unfashionable Chris de Burgh, who we saw for a 6th time at the Liverpool Philharmonic recently.
Indeed, we'd have seen him at least a couple more times if it hadn't been for the boycott initiated by my wife - initially a bigger fan than me but a deeply unforgiving person at times - after de Burgh's egregious affair with his children's nanny in 1994 while his wife - the lady in The Lady In Red - was lying in hospital recovering from a broken neck incurred while horse riding. Fortunately for de Burgh his daughter, Rosanna Davison, who won Miss World in 2003, is more forgiving, blaming the nanny, while admitting that it takes two to tango*. For himself, de Burgh admitted to being "guilty as hell" but he and his wife are still together. Either way, we hadn't seen de Burgh since a gig at Alton Towers in 1990.
We first saw de Burgh when we were invited to join a big buddy of mine from the football club we played at for a gig at the Liverpool Empire in the early 1980s. By that time he was touring his 6th album, The Getaway, with an extensive back catalogue. But, despite avidly reading a weekly music paper all through the 70s and early 80s and listening to a lot of radio, I knew nothing about him and had hardly heard a single track of his. He was deeply unfashionable years before he became deeply unfashionable after the mega success of The Lady In Red, described by one reporter as "a mawkfest which only James Blunt has been able to come up with songs more irritating than"#.
So I was a bit surprised in nineteen eighty whatever to find a sold out Empire Theatre, with a clearly passionate audience enthusiastically welcoming songs they knew very well. And to find that de Burgh was more of a quirky story telling troubadour than a conventional balladeer singer-songwriter. Indeed, his second album, released in 1975, was called Spanish Train and Other Stories. It contains his best known song at that time, A Spaceman Came Travelling, which has become a standard on Christmas playlists despite being an almost anti-Christmas song, the thesis of the story being that the star in the east was some kind of flying saucer and the shepherds and co were of course afraid of the alien being who emerged to speak to them. Spanish Train is quirkier still, the Lord arriving at a dying railwayman's bed to claim his soul, only to find the devil has got there first but is offering to play poker for the soul, then upping the ante to 10,000 souls. The devil, of course, cheats to win before
And far away in some recess
The Lord and the devil are now playing chess
The devil still cheats and wins more souls
And as for the Lord?
Well, he's just doing his best
The song ends melodramatically with de Burgh imagining his own soul is at stake:
That train is still on time
And my soul is on the line
Oh, Lord, you've got to win.
With changes of time and tempo and a driving riff of a chorus this is a truly great song. De Burgh always plays these two songs live, together with another from the same album, the crowd pleasing Patricia the Stripper.
By the time we accompanied our friends to the following year's gig at the Empire (de Burgh has always liked playing Liverpool and probably gets as warm a reception there as anywhere) we'd bought a compilation album and were already bemused that songs like High on Emotion, Don't Pay The Ferryman and Ecstasy of Flight (I Love The Night) had been very minor chart hits, if they had made any impression at all. They are high quality pop-rock dance songs which come across well in large auditoriums; all they needed was airplay.
In practice, de Burgh's commercial success was limited and very patchy before The Lady in Red. Bizarrely his first album went to number one in Brazil: it didn't chart anywhere else. The second, Spanish Train, reached the top 40 in the UK and Norway. The next two didn't chart, but his 5th album was a number one seller in Norway and the sixth in Norway and Germany, achieving platinum sales, as did the seventh album, Man On The Line, which was his first big selling album in the UK. That second gig prompted us to buy several of these albums from his back catalogue and get into his stuff properly. And one track on his first album, 1974's Far Beyond These Castle Walls, called Satin Green Shutters, became one of my wife's favourite ever songs. It's a bit of a Romeo pre Juliet ballad, i.e. in love with the idea of being in love, but beautiful none the less.
In another staple of his set, Borderline, he imagines a couple of mixed nationality split by the onset of war as the man returns to his own country to fight against that of his lover:
And it's breaking my heart
I know what I must do
I hear my country call me
But I want to be with you
I'm taking my side
One of us will lose
Don't let go, I want to know
That you will wait for me until the day
There's no borderline, no borderline
And as he makes his way to his homeland:
We're coming to the borderline
I'm ready with my lies.....
Walking past the border guards
I want to break into a run
But these are only boys and I will never know
How men can see the wisdom in a war
At this last line, mid-song, the audience broke into spontaneous applause. Well it might have been spontaneous 40ish years ago but most of the audience know exactly what's coming and de Burgh always builds in a pause before going into the chorus to allow the applause to fade. The story could be about any war, but it has the feel of WWII and the sequel to the song, Say Goodbye To It All from a later album implies the man is German and the woman French. Leaving aside the obvious question of whether there could be wisdom in a war against fascism, Borderline is a very good song. The new songs he played also went down well. One that made an impression on me was about a refugee from Syria, his difficult journey across land and sea and his wish to one day go back to a peaceful homeland.
De Burgh was born in Argentina, son of a British diplomat, Colonel Charles Davison and an Irish secretary, Maeve Emily de Burgh, whose father, Sir Eric de Burgh, had been Chief of General Staff in India in the World War II. The family settled in Wexford at Bargy Castle, a dilapidated 12th century castle which Eric de Burgh bought in the 1960s and turned into a hotel, where the young Chris sang to entertain guests. The environment clearly influenced his story telling as the themes of his early albums like Far Beyond These Castle Walls and Crusader show.
De Burgh went to a public school (Marlborough). Public school alumni are, apparently, disproportionally represented in successful acts: I knew about John Mellor, aka Joe Strummer of The Clash and the members of Genesis and Radiohead come to mind, but in more recent years it's an epidemic: James Blunt, Chris Martin, Lily Allen, Mumford and Sons and so on, leading to articles like one in the New Statesman** bewailing the lack of ordinary Joes in pop and claiming that pop culture will be doomed as a result. (Hmmm, Joe Strummer seems to give the lie to that chestnut, surely? But maybe these days ordinary Joes are too busy with smartphone games to pick up a guitar.) Either way, even the NME said in 2011 "it's wrong to hate bands for being posh".
With the release of his 8th album Into The Light in 1986 featuring The Lady In Red, de Burgh revealed a more mature and smoother sound, with his ballads now stripped down, confident and, ok, lowest common denominator. Gone was the Romeo, wondering just what love would really be like, as The Lady in Red and Missing You became huge chart hits and, with platinum selling albums in the UK and Germany and Gold in the US, suddenly everyone had heard of him.
Now you might think it's easy to write simple love songs but I recall one of my progressive rock heroes, possibly Robert Fripp, telling a music journalist who was sniffy about pop music "if we could write songs like Abba, don't you think we'd all be doing it?"
Of course, how often you've seen a performer is influenced by many factors: opportunity, your own availability, availability of readies, who friends and family want to see etc. Nevertheless, de Burgh is worth seeing and listening to and I willingly admit I'm a fan. You don't get to sell 45 million records if you can't write a decent song.
And as those around us in the cheap seats belted out the words to Patricia the Stripper after de Burgh had everyone on their feet for High On Emotion, I reflected that I've seen plenty of bands leave the house rocking but, perhaps surprisingly, none more so than Chris de Burgh.
We also met up with my old football chum who we hadn't seen in the 30 years we spent moving up, down and across the country, so it was a great night.
If you want to hear some of de Burgh's stuff you might not have heard, including Spanish Train, A Spaceman Came Travelling and Borderline, setlist.fm has links to many of the songs he's been playing on his tour e.g. here. I'm never sure whether these sites treat artists properly but the pathetic royalties they get from streaming wouldn't be material to Mr Davison, though the fact that these links often get taken down imply otherwise. Either way you'll find some good songs out there.
*http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/miss-world-lashes-out-at-dads-former-teenage-lover-26216516.html
#http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/chris-de-burgh-great-hands-shame-about-the-voice-422038.htmli. Actually, I quite like some of Blunt's stuff too and also the way he sends himself up in interviews.
** Stuart Maconie, The priveleged are taking over the arts - without the grit pop culture is doomed, New Statesman 4 Feb 2015.
It won't surprise many of you to know that, for me, the answer is Roy Harper who, perhaps eccentrically, I consider if not the greatest living musician and poet, then at least my favourite. But, given my liking for bands like the Kinks, through Jimi Hendrix, progressive and punk rock, to REM and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the identity of the artist I've seen next most often might be a surprise: it's the deeply unfashionable Chris de Burgh, who we saw for a 6th time at the Liverpool Philharmonic recently.
Indeed, we'd have seen him at least a couple more times if it hadn't been for the boycott initiated by my wife - initially a bigger fan than me but a deeply unforgiving person at times - after de Burgh's egregious affair with his children's nanny in 1994 while his wife - the lady in The Lady In Red - was lying in hospital recovering from a broken neck incurred while horse riding. Fortunately for de Burgh his daughter, Rosanna Davison, who won Miss World in 2003, is more forgiving, blaming the nanny, while admitting that it takes two to tango*. For himself, de Burgh admitted to being "guilty as hell" but he and his wife are still together. Either way, we hadn't seen de Burgh since a gig at Alton Towers in 1990.
We first saw de Burgh when we were invited to join a big buddy of mine from the football club we played at for a gig at the Liverpool Empire in the early 1980s. By that time he was touring his 6th album, The Getaway, with an extensive back catalogue. But, despite avidly reading a weekly music paper all through the 70s and early 80s and listening to a lot of radio, I knew nothing about him and had hardly heard a single track of his. He was deeply unfashionable years before he became deeply unfashionable after the mega success of The Lady In Red, described by one reporter as "a mawkfest which only James Blunt has been able to come up with songs more irritating than"#.
So I was a bit surprised in nineteen eighty whatever to find a sold out Empire Theatre, with a clearly passionate audience enthusiastically welcoming songs they knew very well. And to find that de Burgh was more of a quirky story telling troubadour than a conventional balladeer singer-songwriter. Indeed, his second album, released in 1975, was called Spanish Train and Other Stories. It contains his best known song at that time, A Spaceman Came Travelling, which has become a standard on Christmas playlists despite being an almost anti-Christmas song, the thesis of the story being that the star in the east was some kind of flying saucer and the shepherds and co were of course afraid of the alien being who emerged to speak to them. Spanish Train is quirkier still, the Lord arriving at a dying railwayman's bed to claim his soul, only to find the devil has got there first but is offering to play poker for the soul, then upping the ante to 10,000 souls. The devil, of course, cheats to win before
And far away in some recess
The Lord and the devil are now playing chess
The devil still cheats and wins more souls
And as for the Lord?
Well, he's just doing his best
The song ends melodramatically with de Burgh imagining his own soul is at stake:
That train is still on time
And my soul is on the line
Oh, Lord, you've got to win.
With changes of time and tempo and a driving riff of a chorus this is a truly great song. De Burgh always plays these two songs live, together with another from the same album, the crowd pleasing Patricia the Stripper.
By the time we accompanied our friends to the following year's gig at the Empire (de Burgh has always liked playing Liverpool and probably gets as warm a reception there as anywhere) we'd bought a compilation album and were already bemused that songs like High on Emotion, Don't Pay The Ferryman and Ecstasy of Flight (I Love The Night) had been very minor chart hits, if they had made any impression at all. They are high quality pop-rock dance songs which come across well in large auditoriums; all they needed was airplay.
In practice, de Burgh's commercial success was limited and very patchy before The Lady in Red. Bizarrely his first album went to number one in Brazil: it didn't chart anywhere else. The second, Spanish Train, reached the top 40 in the UK and Norway. The next two didn't chart, but his 5th album was a number one seller in Norway and the sixth in Norway and Germany, achieving platinum sales, as did the seventh album, Man On The Line, which was his first big selling album in the UK. That second gig prompted us to buy several of these albums from his back catalogue and get into his stuff properly. And one track on his first album, 1974's Far Beyond These Castle Walls, called Satin Green Shutters, became one of my wife's favourite ever songs. It's a bit of a Romeo pre Juliet ballad, i.e. in love with the idea of being in love, but beautiful none the less.
In another staple of his set, Borderline, he imagines a couple of mixed nationality split by the onset of war as the man returns to his own country to fight against that of his lover:
And it's breaking my heart
I know what I must do
I hear my country call me
But I want to be with you
I'm taking my side
One of us will lose
Don't let go, I want to know
That you will wait for me until the day
There's no borderline, no borderline
And as he makes his way to his homeland:
We're coming to the borderline
I'm ready with my lies.....
Walking past the border guards
I want to break into a run
But these are only boys and I will never know
How men can see the wisdom in a war
At this last line, mid-song, the audience broke into spontaneous applause. Well it might have been spontaneous 40ish years ago but most of the audience know exactly what's coming and de Burgh always builds in a pause before going into the chorus to allow the applause to fade. The story could be about any war, but it has the feel of WWII and the sequel to the song, Say Goodbye To It All from a later album implies the man is German and the woman French. Leaving aside the obvious question of whether there could be wisdom in a war against fascism, Borderline is a very good song. The new songs he played also went down well. One that made an impression on me was about a refugee from Syria, his difficult journey across land and sea and his wish to one day go back to a peaceful homeland.
De Burgh was born in Argentina, son of a British diplomat, Colonel Charles Davison and an Irish secretary, Maeve Emily de Burgh, whose father, Sir Eric de Burgh, had been Chief of General Staff in India in the World War II. The family settled in Wexford at Bargy Castle, a dilapidated 12th century castle which Eric de Burgh bought in the 1960s and turned into a hotel, where the young Chris sang to entertain guests. The environment clearly influenced his story telling as the themes of his early albums like Far Beyond These Castle Walls and Crusader show.
De Burgh went to a public school (Marlborough). Public school alumni are, apparently, disproportionally represented in successful acts: I knew about John Mellor, aka Joe Strummer of The Clash and the members of Genesis and Radiohead come to mind, but in more recent years it's an epidemic: James Blunt, Chris Martin, Lily Allen, Mumford and Sons and so on, leading to articles like one in the New Statesman** bewailing the lack of ordinary Joes in pop and claiming that pop culture will be doomed as a result. (Hmmm, Joe Strummer seems to give the lie to that chestnut, surely? But maybe these days ordinary Joes are too busy with smartphone games to pick up a guitar.) Either way, even the NME said in 2011 "it's wrong to hate bands for being posh".
With the release of his 8th album Into The Light in 1986 featuring The Lady In Red, de Burgh revealed a more mature and smoother sound, with his ballads now stripped down, confident and, ok, lowest common denominator. Gone was the Romeo, wondering just what love would really be like, as The Lady in Red and Missing You became huge chart hits and, with platinum selling albums in the UK and Germany and Gold in the US, suddenly everyone had heard of him.
Now you might think it's easy to write simple love songs but I recall one of my progressive rock heroes, possibly Robert Fripp, telling a music journalist who was sniffy about pop music "if we could write songs like Abba, don't you think we'd all be doing it?"
Of course, how often you've seen a performer is influenced by many factors: opportunity, your own availability, availability of readies, who friends and family want to see etc. Nevertheless, de Burgh is worth seeing and listening to and I willingly admit I'm a fan. You don't get to sell 45 million records if you can't write a decent song.
And as those around us in the cheap seats belted out the words to Patricia the Stripper after de Burgh had everyone on their feet for High On Emotion, I reflected that I've seen plenty of bands leave the house rocking but, perhaps surprisingly, none more so than Chris de Burgh.
We also met up with my old football chum who we hadn't seen in the 30 years we spent moving up, down and across the country, so it was a great night.
If you want to hear some of de Burgh's stuff you might not have heard, including Spanish Train, A Spaceman Came Travelling and Borderline, setlist.fm has links to many of the songs he's been playing on his tour e.g. here. I'm never sure whether these sites treat artists properly but the pathetic royalties they get from streaming wouldn't be material to Mr Davison, though the fact that these links often get taken down imply otherwise. Either way you'll find some good songs out there.
*http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/miss-world-lashes-out-at-dads-former-teenage-lover-26216516.html
#http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/chris-de-burgh-great-hands-shame-about-the-voice-422038.htmli. Actually, I quite like some of Blunt's stuff too and also the way he sends himself up in interviews.
** Stuart Maconie, The priveleged are taking over the arts - without the grit pop culture is doomed, New Statesman 4 Feb 2015.
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