Demagogue-a-go-go

I don’t want to get bogged down in American politics. The USA is, after all, a foreign country, and one which dumped a load of perfectly good tea into the harbour over the ability to decide things for itself. Americans are grown-ups and don’t need the likes of me telling them how to vote, so I don’t bother.

Looking past the media, which does pay attention to the USA at the expense of even home politics, and I start to worry. It’s not just Trump; groups like Alternative für Deutschland and the French Front National are gaining a share of the vote. If the UKIP can keep Nigel Farage, who seems to be the only party member who can walk and talk at the same time, its success will continue. After the Labour MP Jo Cox was stabbed to death by a man with links to Britain First and other far-right groups, a Guardian article talked about Britain’s political class being under attack.

Of course it is, even if Jo Cox was not a member of it.

It’s ridiculous that Britain, the USA, or anywhere that isn’t an absolute monarchy still has a political class. But inertia, and a sense of entitlement that borders on freemasonry, has kept one there. Now there’s talk of making Michelle Obama the Democratic candidate for president in 2020; time would be better spent not offering more of the same if it no longer works. Labour took an almighty gamble putting Jeremy Corbyn in charge, but at least he’s not another clone of either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.

Every day at work I pass a poster for the Ashok Kumar Fellowship. Ashok Kumar was a Labour MP for Middlesborough from 1997 and the only chemical engineer to be an MP at the time. After his death in 2010, the Institution of Chemical Engineers has run the fellowship in his memory. Maybe the institution is onto something. Nurses, architects, sailors, schoolteachers and farmers may feel that they too have been short-changed. What if political parties recruited from a true spectrum of our society, with all the different careers and social backgrounds it has, rather than the rather tight profile of accountants* and lawyers currently on offer? Perhaps frustrated voters will be tempted away from random demagogues.

* - I was at school and university with someone who is now prominent in the Conservative party. Even if he were to represent a party that I would vote for, I would not go near him as his only qualification is in politics, and his short career in accountancy is largely there to pursuade voters that he is something other than a "party animal". After testing him out in a constituency where he stood no chance of being elected - a common Conservative method of hardening its candidates - he is now MP in one of their safest seats.

Record Bore Day

Did I queue up for hours yesterday to buy a picture disc of “Histoire de Melody Nelson” the colour of a nicotine stain? Or a 78 of “Anarchy in the UK” fashioned from compressed bogies? This may disappoint a few people, but no I did not.

I agree that record shops are an endangered species. Just as with post offices and libraries, our culture will lose something if the physical place where people hear music and talk about it, rather than merely buy it, disappears. Let’s separate the myth from real life, though; those places painted in black to hide the dope stains were always spoken of highly because they were rare. For every Probe or Volume or Missing, the sort of places Nick Hornby wrote “High Fidelity” about, there were numerous greeting card shops that had record racks. People who moan about the supermarkets selling CDs don’t remember, or choose not to remember, how clueless WH Smiths and Boots were about music when it used to be sold in their branches.

It’s a very urban phenomenon, anyway; if you lived in the country or a rather unequipped suburb, you just had to buy things by mail order. Even if rural internet speeds aren’t so good, things are now so much better.

Unfortunately, gamely supporting your local record shop (if you ever had one in the first place) has been confused with records, as in the vinyl format. I’m exactly the right age for this argument, so here goes:

When I started off (Mirror Man by the Human League on 12 inch, by the way*, from The Music Shop in Belle Vale shopping centre**) vinyl was the only real way to do it. CDs were still a millionaire’s plaything, and cassettes, although priced the same as records after years of being priced higher, were flimsy things with crushed, tiny artwork. There were times when tape came in handy – bootlegs, catching things off the radio, portable players, making mixtapes – and recording onto blank cassettes allowed you to miss out the drum solo, but pre-recorded tapes were awful. It was records, records, records.

When I started taking interest in older acts, the likes of Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Can or The Doors were well served because their labels kept a good back catalogue. Re-issue labels did their best to fill in the gaps for other bands whose labels had disappeared – like The Kinks. As CDs grew in popularity, the reissuers had a choice; should they divide their rather marginal market up by making things available as records, cassettes and CDs, or do they choose one format and stick to it? By focussing on CDs, they could then do a much better job of making older music available to new listeners.

So my own music collection grew as a CD collection from the early 1990s onwards. If I bought anything while abroad, Spain was still good for vinyl but France had gone all-CD. I kept buying new records until the bad quality of pressings put me off. Was the drop in quality control a symptom of a struggling business, or a sneaky trick by The Man to make me buy the more profitable CDs? Please send your answer in on a postcard. I don’t moan about the sound quality – my turntable, CD player, amplifier and speakers all came to roughly the same price and, if you look after the discs, they sound as good as each other. Putting a FLAC or a high-bitrate MP3 through the same set-up sounds just as good as well.

So I still play records, but the revival of the format as an object of desire just strikes me as a hipster gimmick. Some foolish youngsters don’t even play them! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-36040746

As Record Store Day is always Saturday, the same morning as Radio 2 broadcasts “Sound of the Sixties”, I check if Brian Matthew ever mentions vinyl reissues of listeners’ favourite tunes from their youth.

He doesn’t.


* I’m usually Mr Metric, but I always still say “12 inch single”.  I know that countries elsewhere in Europe call them “Maxi-Singles” because they don’t use that system of weights and measures. This is all a bit “Pulp Fiction”, isn’t it?

** Somewhere that sold stationery and greetings cards as well, when I started going there, in a circa-1970 concrete shopping parade next to an outlying group of Liverpool council estates 45 minutes walk from home. Huyton, strangely, didn’t have a record shop!