A vinyl stay mentioned in the Guardian

PEOPLE wax nostalgic about vinyl. Amol Rajan was on the Today programme the other week, enthusing about the buzz and crackle as stylus nestles into groove.

He went all lyrical about the album covers and artwork too, or I think so; people usually do. As an old friend says on Facebook that he’s reverted to his vinyl LPs, I’d like to echo that, but the dust on my record deck lid tells a different story.

That deck is connected to an amplifier, streamer and CD player, all contained in one clever box. Add modest-sized but good speakers and all music is yours – well, apart from cassettes, and surely no-one yearns for those unspooling bars of plastic.

That said, those little slabs did slot into the Sony Walkman, the first time many of us had music on the go. They went into car stereos too, sometimes unravelling to messy effect, the music slurring to nothing in a mess of tape spaghetti.

The newish hi-fi box sits in the conservatory, while the LPs are lined up in alcoves outside our attic bedroom, divorced from the deck by two floors. Some are 50 years old, including my original copy of John Martyn’s Solid Air, an all-time favourite.

The CDs are closer to hand, lined in their hundreds on the sitting room wall, and still have occasional outings to the spinning slot in the amplifier.

When CDs came in, people with better ears than mine worried about the clinical sound. Yes, vinyl LPs spinning at 33⅓ rpm are real and immediate – and hazardous too when the stylus sticks or skips.

The nostalgic in me, that Hendrix-haired teenager who ordered Grateful Dead’s double live album from Cob Records in Porthmadog, still likes vinyl. Some of those overlooked old discs must be due another spin soon.

That boy’s bald-headed successor spotted a story in last Saturday’s Guardian with the headline “Step inside London’s hotel for vinyl lovers.” Not so much a hotel, it turns out, as a record shop cum warehouse in East London turned into a record-lover’s guesthouse.

The accommodation is free, so long as you agree to spend £250 on vinyl – an expensive night, and a lot of albums to store. Like the stylus, I’ll skip that one, even though it does sound rather wonderful.

Are vinyl albums truly better than other formats, or is it just nostalgia; or can it be nostalgia when people too young to remember are getting into vinyl?

This is a long way to say this vinyl guy has fallen for streaming.

After a flirtation with the free version of Spotify – where adverts butt in like shouty strangers on a bus – I settled for Quobuz, shelling out £13 a month.

The sound is great over the hi-fi, no different to CDs, and as the music is contained in my iPhone, the saved albums can be played over a portable wi-fi speaker and in the car. Music man heaven!

As long ago as March 30, 2018, I wrote here about my ‘blokey’ record collection…

“Yes, those men do line up in the CD collection and slump together in vinyl. It’s always been like that, a boys’ chorus of Richard Thompson, Elvis Costello, Van Morison, Ry Cooder, Bruce Springsteen, John Martyn and Dire Straits, backed up by more recent discoveries such as Craig Finn and The Hold Steady…”

Streaming has let me put that right. On my ever-expanding musical waistline, you will now discover plenty of Rhiannon Giddens – everyone should have more Rhiannon in their lives – alongside Sarah Gillespie, Molly Tuttle, Julie Byrne, Eliza Carthy (a long-time favourite, to be fair), and Lisa O’Neil, the weirdly fabulous singer of soaring Irish folk.

Adding to the non-blokey ballast there is Gillian Welch, a great find.

Cat Power is singing Dylan in her recreation of the 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert – a great listen, if disconcerting as sometimes she sounds just like Dylan. And Dylan is on there too, singing for himself.

Oh, and the new Sufjan Stevens album, which is lovely. Also two family suggestions: The National from our eldest son and Snarky Puppy, a spot-on tip from the middle boy.

There is jazz too, from Thelonious Monk all the way to Ezra Collective – oh, I do love them. Not forgetting Abdullah Ibrahim and his Africa suite. Andy Sheppard too, he’s always busking in the background. Charles Mingus holds up the classic end of jazz.

Oh, and that’s without the classical, the Bach, Montiverdi and Berlioz.

With streaming you can indulge your musical curiosity. At the time of writing, I am listing to the new album by Ben Folds, after wondering what it might be like. The new Nitin Sawhney is there too after he was on Later.

Unlike those old vinyl LPs, you don’t ‘own’ this music. If you stop subscribing, it’s gone. I’m too addicted to give up, but at least I still read proper books made of paper, so that’s something on the nostalgia register.

Fusty footnote: after many mentions in this blog, and in this very post, of Solid Air, streaming has reintroduced me to Bless The Weather, a John Martyn album from 1971. It’s just as wonderful, and the opening track, Go Easy, must be the ultimate Martyn song.

Old music and new discoveries keep this metronome heart ticking.

November drizzles with cold. On such an Armistice Day, it is perfectly OK to cocoon yourself indoors, to stay away from the local war memorial. It is also perfectly OK to join a service of remembrance and pay your respects that way.

Personally, as shall be explained in a few paragraphs, I like to remember one of my grandfathers.

Too often the traditional minute’s silence to honour those who died in assorted wars is preceded by noisy squabbles. The usual suspect newspapers cook up silly poppy stories, conveying red-faced fury about white poppies, or idiot incandescence about an actor or BBC newsreader forgetting to wear a poppy.

There are almost as many examples as there were poppies in those fields.

This year’s efforts include the Daily Mail reporting that a 78-year-old poppy seller at Edinburgh station was “punched” by pro-Palestine protesters. A British Transport Police investigation later found no proof of such an attack having occurred. Perhaps the police should investigate other Daily Mail stories.

Most outrage was reserved for the pro-Palestine march that took place in London yesterday, on Armistice Day. Home Secretary Suella Braverman had wanted the march banned, something the Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley sensibly declined to do.

Having already described pro-Palestine marches as “hate marches”, Braverman then wrote an article for the Times saying the police were biased in favour of left-wing marchers. Her rancid rhetoric is thought to have helped stir up right-wing thugs who held a counter demonstration yesterday, clashing with police. Nine officers were injured and 136 people arrested.

Braverman may or may not survive in her role, but no-one should care about that today. Look the other way. That woman exists merely to cause self-serving rows. There is only one thing in her tawdry political life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about, to misquote Oscar Wilde.

All the finger-pointing and bellowing that too often accompanies remembrance has nothing to do with respecting those who died. Instead, it is the pursuit of what you might call weaponised nostalgia.

There are many ways to remember. Here are a few thoughts about Bill Cole, who has been mentioned here before. William Albert Cole died in 1974. I was 17 at the time, so have been remembering him for much longer than I knew him, which is odd.

Bill did not wish to fight or carry arms as that was against his Methodist religion. He was not a conscientious objector, but volunteered for the Royal Medical Corps.

He survived the Battle of the Somme, one of the heaviest battles of the First World War. The opening day of that battle on July 1, 1916, saw the British Army sustain 57,000 casualties, the bloodiest day in its history. Bill would have been in the thick of that carnage.

As John Keegan records in his book The First World War, many of the divisions were new to the war and were volunteers like my grandfather or were organised around ‘Pals’ or ‘Chums’ battalions. The Somme was the first time such untried soldiers saw war – and, tragically for many, the last.

The horrors Bill Cole witnessed are hard to imagine. Like many who survived, he did not talk about his war, or not until he was close to death.

His military reference refers to him as having been a stretcher bearer from June 1916 to May 1918, and that he later worked as a clerk, his “trade or calling before enlistment”. He was described as “a most reliable and absolutely trustworthy orderly of exemplary character”.

After he returned home, Bill lived a mostly quiet life of faith and family, dying when he was 82. His youngest son, my father Jeff, died recently aged 91, and that loss makes me think once again of his father. That is the way to remember, through the swaying old ropes that tether all families.

My dad was the youngest of three, the golden-haired boy of the family. A happy family photograph printed on the back of his funeral celebration showed the two parents and the three children, with my dad between his sisters.

All are now dead, which is hardly surprising, but still seems shocking when you look at those smiles.

It’s easy to be drawn by the noise, by the shouting and the poppy politicking. Often I have fallen into that trap, too. Better, sometimes, to walk on by and find a quiet place in which to remember.

WHAT sort of fool is still worked up about something former part-time prime minister Boris Johnson said or did; or, indeed, about the latest poison pearl from the lips of full-time nasty person cum Home Secretary Suella Braverman?

Oh, I know the answer to that one. It’s me, however much I say think of something else, switch to another mental channel – move on.

Does smarting at Johnsonian mendacity or Braverman’s cruel snippets change anything? Almost certainly not. They still swim in the deep ocean like weirdo creatures hogging the cameras in the latest David Attenborough documentary.

As the Covid inquiry continues, many lurid details are being sketched in about Johnson, of whom his former fellow Tory minister David Gauke says: “Whatever his electoral appeal, Boris Johnson was wholly incapable of doing the job.”

Ah, now you tell us.

What should have been clear as glass all along is that Johnson never was the decent leader we needed. Instead, during the pandemic we were lumbered with a lethally unreliable, egotistical shuffle-bum who changed his mind all the time, was always distracted and swerved from one thing to another.

Johnson is yet to appear before the inquiry, although the picture being painted of his premiership is already devastating. Here are two scraps flapping in the angry wind.

One: Johnson apparently thought that old people should “accept their fate” and die. Did he include his own father in this cruel calculation – who knows?

Two: in a Trumpian moment to rival the former US president wondering out loud if bleach wouldn’t wash away the virus, Johnson reportedly asked leading scientists Sir Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance if Covid could be destroyed by blowing a hairdryer up the nose. As he’d seen on a YouTube video.

I feel an incidentally coming on, and here it is. During the pandemic Johnson’s government cooked up a wheeze to give millions of our pounds to newspaper groups, some of them run by billionaires who might be said to have a flexible approach to paying taxes.

The scheme/wheeze was an advertising and information campaign called “All In, All Together”.

And here’s a not very funny thing. The Mail was among media groups apparently given public millions, and as soon as Johnson was eased out of Downing Street for general uselessness, the paper gave him a column for a reported £1m a year.

Can such a ridiculous figure be true? And if it is, doesn’t it stink that Johnson deflected our money to the Mail (and other groups, including the Guardian – shame on them) and then the Mail gives Johnson a million back, or so the story goes.

Call it sour grapes if you wish, but Johnson isn’t even a good columnist, just a showy juggler of coloured balls.

Anyway, now he is also joining GB News, reportedly for another high sum. Rich right-wingers just love to shovel money into Johnson’s pockets, never mind how incompetent he was in office. The more he fails, the wealthier he becomes. It’s like he’s on a posh supermarket dash, cramming as much cash as he can into his swerving trolley.

As for Braverman, the Home Secretary – and honestly, I wouldn’t have her anywhere near mine ­­– told the Financial Times that people sleeping rough was a “lifestyle choice”.  She wants to crack down on tents being pitched in urban areas, as they are mostly lived in by people “from abroad”.

To describe extreme poverty and homelessness as a “lifestyle choice” is a stinker even for her. A “lifestyle” is glossy magazines and expensive adverts. It’s nice holidays and tins of posh paint with silly names. Fast cars and slow morals. Private medicine and public schools if you have the money.

Not ending up sleeping in a tent.

As organisations including Crisis, Centrepoint, St Mungo’s and Pathway said in a joint letter (Guardian, November 5): “Sleeping on the street is not a lifestyle choice. Laying blame with people forced to sleep rough will only push people further away from help into poverty, putting them at risk of exploitation. At the extreme end, we will see an increase in deaths and fatalities, which are totally preventable.”

Once again we are back with the “undeserving poor”, as defined by the 1834 English Poor Law and deployed ever since by harsh commentors to suggest that poor people are feckless, work-shy, and not worthy of our help (unlike the undeserving rich such as Johnson, who just get whatever they want).

And when you think Braverman can’t get any worse, she also wants to fine charities if they supply tents to homeless people, while insisting this is what “the law-abiding majority wants”. This member of the law-abiding majority certainly doesn’t want that.