Air rage

The captain’s voice came over the tannoy.

“Ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to ask whether we have a doctor onboard the aeroplane. I’m afraid one of our passengers has been taken ill, and requires medical assistance.”

As a doctor, I leapt to my feet, a grave mistake for I smacked my head on the luggage hold and was unconscious for several minutes. I came to when a doctor put smelling salts to my nose – fortunately, by an odd twist of fate, the pilot was a psychic and had realised that I was about to crack my head open on the luggage hold. By asking for medical help before the accident actually occurred, he had ensured that a doctor would be on hand to give assistance as soon as I injured myself. How very thoughtful.

Moments later, another announcement came over the tannoy. “Ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to ask whether we have a doctor onboard the aeroplane. I’m afraid one of our passengers has been taken ill, and requires medical assistance.” This time, I refrained from leaping to my feet, but stepped gingerly into the aisle where a stewardess carefully upset scalding coffee down my leg.

Again, what could have been a disastrous accident was prevented by the pilot’s psychic powers for a doctor was immediately in attendance and applied soothing poultices to my cracking skin, thereby reducing the severity of the burns.

I settled back in my seat, only to hear another announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to ask whether we have a doctor onboard the aeroplane. I’m afraid one of our passengers has been taken ill, and requires medical assistance.”

This time, I stayed where I was. What a tragic error on my part. The doctor, tormented by what he saw as his failure to give adequate assistance to me was in a suicidal despair in the toilet. Because I failed to help him, he killed himself by disembowelling himself with a small plastic fish-knife. And to think, as a doctor of philosophy, I was perfectly equipped to help him. Life eh?

Power Play

Apologies if the apocalyptic nature of this blog leaves you struggling to sleep at night, pacing the bedroom floor and worrying if football in its current form can possibly survive.

Sorry, but it’s too late to turn back now.

Across the border in Scotland, the SPL might well be in the terminal stages of the disease for it’s hard to see how the lack of competition caused by the outsize Old Firm, inflated expectations for the other clubs driven by a media with no sense of responsibility, and the apparently irresistible rise in player wages driven by those expectations can ever be reversed in the current climate.

But is it so very different in England? Hardly. The issue has reached the Houses of Parliament in recent weeks, a Select Committee taking evidence on the state of the game. And the state is not good.

Perhaps the most interesting comments thus far have come from the comparatively new chief of the Football League, Greg Clarke. For all that the elite would like you to believe that the Football League is little more than an anachronism, it is actually the backbone of the English game. Without its existence, without the pyramid system, the Premier League would be nothing. The dreams, the ambitions that fire those lower league outfits are what gives the Premiership its status, makes it the pinnacle.

Without that, it becomes an hermetically sealed irrelevance. If ever a perfect case in point were required, last month provided it with the three best teams in England pitted against Crawley Town, Leyton Orient – a club about to be crucified by West Ham’s insatiable pursuit of money and the Olympic Stadium - and Notts County with results that would tease the romantic’s taste buds. If nothing else, those games underlined what it is that is special about the English – and British – game and why those links are far too precious to lose.

But according to Clarke, we are at risk of doing just that. He told the committee, “Debt is the biggest problem. If I had to list the 10 things about football that keep me awake at night, it would be debt one to 10. The level of debt is unsustainable. We are heading for the precipice and will get there quicker than people think."

In finest Soviet style, Clarke and the Football League hierarchy are working towards a five year plan that he believes the clubs must embrace, though he noted darkly, “Football can be a bit backward looking - there's a penchant not to change”.

Ironically though, the issue is that football changed too much and too quickly through the 1990s and into the new century. In particular, the advent of the Premier League created a pace of change that all too many clubs simply did not comprehend. Far too many simply spent today believing milk and honey would flow tomorrow. But there isn’t enough of the stuff to make up for the amount they’ve already squandered, not even if they put all the cows and bees on overtime from here til doomsday. Apologies to Bolton for bringing them up again, but if a team with a decade of top flight football behind it is £93million in the hole and has to carry on spending just to tread water in the top division, something is horribly wrong, and those horrors simply trickle down the food chain, unlike the wealth which remains resolutely unshifted from the top.

The issue at the heart of it all is the dysfunctional nature of football in England. The Sports Minister Hugh Robertson has described football as "the worst run sport in the country" and as a member of the coalition cabinet, he should know how to recognise a shambles when he sees one. There are three governing bodies – the FA, The Football League and the Premier League – each of whose agenda runs largely contrary to the others. The Premiership cares nothing about anything else, the Football League wants to relieve them of some of their money but can’t upset them lest they close their doors forever, while the FA sits in a corner consulting Pele over its erectile dysfunction.

How did we get here? That in itself is a constructive reminder of what happens when we forget about sport and think only of money and power. The Premier League was born out of the greed of the big six as they were then, all wanting money and none caring about anybody else. Worked out really well for Everton, did that. The Football Association saw this as an opportunity for it to wrest control of the game from the Football League whose competition had grown in strength and had gradually come to usurp the FA not least because the clubs did not always release their players for international duty. England were routinely hopeless and the FA got it in the neck for that. By running the league, went the argument, they could ensure players were always available for their country and England would go and win lots of games and tournaments. That worked out as well for the national team as the Premiership worked for Everton.

It was, lest we forget, the FA Premier League. It still is, though the Premier League is none too keen on associating itself with the Football Association which is seen as impotent, incompetent – hello World Cup 2018! – and out of touch. In its hurry to beat the Football League, the Football Association created a Frankenstein’s monster of its own and before long, the Premier League did exactly what the Football League had previously done to the Football Association. Made it irrelevant.

Which is where we sit today. A governing body that means nothing. An age old infrastructure that has been rendered so destitute that it can do little more than hold out a begging bowl. And a self perpetuating elite which exists as little more than road kill for the vultures at the top. No wonder Greg Clarke doesn’t sleep at nights. Nobody who cares about football should rest easy.

OVER THE HILL

Maybe you saw the BBC documentary about the great Formula One driver Graham Hill on television last weekend. In these days of frenetic jump cuts and similar tricks to catch the interest of those with the nano-second attention span of the genuine idiot, it was a slower moving hour, and all the better for it, letting his story unfold with good humour, a helping of uncomfortable truth and some real warmth.

But for our purposes, I draw your attention to a clip within, from the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year show, 1971, itself a relic of a former age, from a time when it was enough to get a load of great sportsman together and celebrate their achievements rather than staging an overblown ceremony at some huge arena, an event which you – yes you member of the public – can truly affect with your text votes! As if we were voting for something as utterly pointless as which celebrity can dance or which slack jawed youth can murder a tune slightly less grievously than another.

We digress. The piece opens with Hill and the ineffably majestic Jackie Stewart engaged in what we are forced to term these days, “doing the banter”. It’s banter of an altogether superior nature, Hill playing the raffish cad to the full. “You’ve won six Grands Prix this year Jackie, which is hogging it slightly. Seven is the record. Where do you think you could have done it and it didn’t happen?” Stewart looks at him in exasperation, and with immaculate timing, returns with, “I don’t think that’s a fair question”, the pair as good as Morecambe & Wise. It’s much better in the flesh than on paper...



But amid the crowd of sportsmen and women behind them are a catalogue of giants. Geoffrey Boycott, Raymond Illingworth, George Best, Barry John, Henry Cooper, Mary Peters, even Her Royal Horseness, Princess Anne, who won the gong that year. Now we can all debate whether or not those people would cut it today, whether they could handle the changes in their sports or whether they would be even greater than they were. These are insoluble questions.

But what is not in question is that as charismatic characters, the men and women on that stage stand head and shoulders above the contemporary crowd. Whether you agreed with them or not, Boycott and Illingworth always had something interesting to say. Long distance hippy Bedford could attract controversy at will, and then there was George Best, who looked as if he’d come from rehearsing for “Jesus Christ Superstar”. To that litany, you could add the likes of Gareth Edwards, Peter Osgood, James Hunt, and umpteen others, sports stars who looked like what they were – the luckiest people on earth. Fit, young, healthy, doing the greatest job in the world and being adored for it.

Look now at the footballers, cricketers, racing drivers of today, too many of whom looked bowed down by the pressures, as if they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. A dreary bunch to be honest. But is it their fault? No. It’s us.

First of all, the pressures are unquestionably greater than 40 years ago, far, far greater. Defeats back then, even for national teams, were disappointing. Now they resemble great national humiliations, a bit like Suez or Isandhlwana. If your team loses on Saturday, even to a lucky last minute goal, prepare for the players, management and board of directors to be castigated on phone ins and message boards within moments of the final whistle. How do you handle victory and defeat in a pressure cooker like that, a world where you simply cannot treat those two imposters just the same?

More than that though, the world of media and PR has changed beyond all recognition in 40 years. Veteran journos will tell you that back then, they travelled with the teams they were assigned to, drank with them, saw all the stories and kept quiet because the players were their mates, and they were involved in it as well. Nowadays journalists and sportsmen are not friends. It’s the hunter and the quarry. It’s not entirely the fault of the journalist – the sports journalist that is – for while many are still fixated on the game, newspaper proprietors are not and they send the newshounds to dig up stories of what goes on off the field so that we can all click our hypocritical tongues in disgust. When George Best said that he spent all his money on “Women and booze. The rest I just squandered”, we laughed. If Wayne Rooney were to say the same, we’d want him strung up.

Then there is PR schooling. No top club would allow Best to talk to the media without being surrounded by media advisers. He’d be coached in how to fill the maximum amount of time in saying as little as possible, not because sportsmen are as dumb as popular lore has it – not all of them anyway – but because as soon as they say anything, literally anything, it will be twisted into something sensational. Given the current hysteria that comes from the apparent conclusion that nobody is grow up enough to have a sense of humour and be able to recognise a daft joke when they hear one any more – Top Gear and Glenn Hoddle apologies anyone? – banter is now off the menu. What we have in its place is a sporting environment that is ever more colourless, increasingly dour, ever more robotic.

Sport is an incredibly serious business for the participants because their lives, their families’ security depends upon it. For us, it’s what we do to enjoy ourselves in our spare time. The sooner we lighten up, grow up and remember it’s just for fun, the sooner we will have another Graham Hill to make movies about.

The resurrection shuffle

Rock’n’roll is not a business that forgives old age. Most of its icons lived fast, died young, or simply got out while they were still ahead.

We venerate Lennon and we scorn McCartney. Barrett is the genius of Pink Floyd, Waters and Gilmour are dismissed as bickering pensioners. Cobain remains a touchstone, Vedder becomes an irrelevance simply by continuing to breathe and refusing to have his youthful legacy set in amber.

Would Pete Townshend’s reputation have been better served by following Keith Moon and dying before he got old? In our present culture, yes. The experience of a 62 year old is considered musically worthless in a medium that becomes increasingly pre-pubescent – coming soon, the first embryonic pop star: keep on rocking in the womb world.

Worse, because the likes of Townshend, McCartney and Dylan continue to write and record what the tastemakers instantly dismiss as sub-senile geriatrica, their back catalogue is similarly trashed.

Had Mick Jagger been killed by the Hells Angels back in 1969 in the wake of Altamont as has been suggested recently by an FBI agent, he would be the ultimate holy man of rock’n’roll. Instead, he’s treated as a running joke. The man who was once the Lord of Misrule, the demonic ringmaster of all that was dark and seductive about rock’n’roll, he has been rendered impotent by caricature. It must be all the more galling for him because of the fact that he shares a stage with one of the few rockers whose legend simply grows larger as he grows older, Keith Richards.

Keef is the indestructible skeleton of the music that tore up the latter half of the 20th century, the Don, the overseer for whom the world only has more affection and more respect as the days roll by, as the wrinkles turn into cracks and the global reservoir of Jack Daniel’s diminishes.

Alongside him, Jagger is dismissed as a phoney. Keef is the real deal, Mick the chancer. Mick says he never reads the papers, and if he’s telling the truth, it’s probably a sound self defence mechanism. All superstars are painted with a few broad strokes, but while Keith’s enhance him, Jagger’s shred him. Nowadays, he’s this hipless, post-anorexic frame, topped by a leer of lips, once sexual, now dribbling.

Then there’s the viper’s tongue that lashes out and wraps itself around the throat of your daughter, maybe your granddaughter – it used to be your sister but all of us have got a little older since then. All except Mick, who never allows himself, or at least his persona, to age. And even that’s somehow sad.

Time then to challenge the conventional wisdom for Mick, in his prime, should be revered not reviled. Jagger invented the rock’n’roll star. He was its poster-child, the real deal. He was the pose, the swagger, the arrogance. Boys wanted to be him, girls just wanted him. In popular music, that’s ten-tenths of the law. Jagger is an archetype, he’s an original and his reputation demands rehabilitation.

More than anything, he is one of the great singers of the rock’n’roll era. Keith Richards might be the human riff, the lickmeister who just churns out those memorable Stones breaks, but without Mick’s voice, Keef’s dark, demonic music just would not be the same.

Imagine any other singer who could have voiced “Sympathy For The Devil” or “Gimme Shelter” on those records at that time. You can’t. Those songs are his, they belong to him, imbued with his personality, Jagger living inside them as they rise and fall on his extraordinary technique. That hasn’t changed since the day they were recorded. Forty years on, that’s a Sinatraesque achievement.

Whenever you think of the Stones, you have to think of The Beatles too, so symbiotic was their 1960s relationship. But they were very different animals, not least because the Stones had a front man, a singer who defined the job. John and Paul were never out front in the way as Mick, who would prowl the stage, a predator, caged for a moment, but always like to leap the chasm between band and audience, always ready to electrify the crowd, always capable of moving the experience from theatre to music hall to bear pit to boxing ring and back again, all with the arch of an eyebrow, the thrust of an arm.

In the end though, it’s as a singer that Jagger’s genius will longest endure. If you want proof, take a listen to “Under My Thumb”, one of the finest vocal performances of the rock era. It’s misogynistic lyric means the song is long since discredited, but so perfect is the phrasing, the timing, Jagger need never have recorded another thing and would still be seen as a giant. The contempt that drips from that mouth with the simple “uhmm” he inserts as he licks those lips and dismisses his girl as the “sweetest pet” is masterly. It’s a cornerstone achievement.



No, it’s not pleasant, but it’s a slice of real life, as it was and so, probably, shall it ever be. How often does music give you that these days?

Patti Smith & Kevin Shields - The Coral Sea

So here’s the thing. Patti Smith became the “voice of her generation”. Back in the 1970s, she was the Queen of CBGBs, the rider of the new wave, punk priestess, you know all the labels. Yet she did it by taking voices of previous generations, the romantic poets, the beats, then strapping on a backbeat and being urgent. Most of all being urgent, being the seer, the sayer. “I got something to say, you gotta hear this, I don’t know what I’m doing or how I’m doing it, but I gotta get this out of me”.

She didn’t have the classically beautiful voice, she wasn’t a schooled musician, but what she had to say had to be said. She had to communicate, she had to let her consciousness flow into the mainstream, polluting it to cleanse it. But the mainstream was, is, always shall be, happy enough to stay fouled up. And so Patti’s career has been one of preaching largely to the converted. “The Coral Sea” is not going to change any of that.

Even for Patti Smith, this two disc set is one that challenges, confronts, confounds. After making perhaps the most commercial record of her career in the covers set “Twelve”, this is her mining deep from the well, going back to the source and howling into the teeth of the gale.

It’s not a record in the conventional sense. Patti doesn’t sing on it, bar a few brief snatches. This is a reading of her love letter to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, her bloody valentine as she describes him, who she saw torn from the planet by the ravages of AIDS, forced to sit and watch him suffer in the helplessness that diminishes us all when all we can do is sit and wait for the inevitable, a despair which never truly heals. As Mapplethorpe intimated through his words in her poetry, even in suffering, dying is easy. It’s those of us who carry on living that dwell in purgatory, tortured by our impotence.

Smith’s performance is beyond compelling. It’s not easy to listen to, and it must have been harder to perform. She credits Kevin Shields, her musical collaborator on this, as giving her the environment in which she could separate herself sufficiently from the material to endure the pain of the reading. Shields’ music is respectful, appropriate, Lou Reed like in its textures, wholly in context.

But it’s Smith who captures the attention. I’ve always enjoyed her readings every bit as much as her music, an Old Testament prophet intoning from the hills, bringing truths and maybes and lies and life, making them whole, making them real. If musically she is the next link in the chain after Dylan, as a reader, a beat poet, she’s carrying on the tradition of Ginsberg.



In front of an audience, there is always a responsibility to deliver what you promised on the ticket, and she’s professional enough to do that and do it magnificently. Inevitably, there is the twang of theatrics in there, it could not be any other way, she has to wear some form of mask to enable her to get through material as exposing, as agonising as this must be. But on each disc, there are moments where that mask slips and she’s clearly back in the moment, the moment of suffering, the moment of writing, thrilling bursts of humanity. There won’t be a more compelling record in anyone's collection. It’s not easy listening, it’s not background music, but if you want a slice of truth, get it.

This is reality art, not the garbage that masquerades as “reality” on television. This is life, love, loss. And in the end, what else have we got?

Some People Are Crazy

An outpouring of grief for somebody not a relative nor a close friend, it has a horrible ring of falseness about it, the Diana effect. But the death of John Martyn on 29 January 2009 cut deep. Why wouldn’t it?

The music had been doing just that for 40 years, and whatever the stylistic shifts over those decades, the kernel was the same. A giant, raging bear of a man, a wee, delicate folkie, and every compass point in between. Martyn peeled back his hide and let us peer inside at the good, the bad, the ugly.




Let’s not canonise the man in death, not least because you’d hear him bellowing at you from the other side at such ludicrous caricature. Martyn was a consumer of life, a voracious drinker of its delights and its despairs, a man of short temper and genuine gentleness, who recognised his faults and threw them as wide open for discussion as he did his merits – more so, actually. Big John was a flawed man, and all the more interesting for that, holding up the mirror for us to better see ourselves did we dare to look.

Martyn referred to his recordings as his diaries, and in that sense, the man’s life, his autobiography lies out there for us all to enjoy and endure, for at times, not least on the magnificent “Grace And Danger”, it’s harrowing stuff. He pulled no punches be he in the first flush of love or ripping his fingers to shreds amid the shards of its disintegration.

The big, bluff showman was part of who and what he was, but it was also a screen door, keeping people at a distance from a man whose skin was translucent. His emotional thermostat was irreparably damaged but the music circulated whether the temperature was raging hot or ice cold, all moods and means, ends and beginnings.

An evening in his company was a rare delight, from the surreal between song banter, often trapped in some ongoing conversation with his inner self that we were eavesdropping upon, occasionally doling out an end of the pier joke, always grabbing another belt of beer. Then picking up that Gibson and making it soar, laugh, weep, tease, taunt. Or picking at an acoustic, lilting, haunting, beguiling, chilling, naked.

Then there was that voice, silken nails, words often inaudible yet always subconsciously seeping, sweet soul music, consolation and conversation. A jazzer, a rocker, a folkie. Above all, a great old blues man, a voice from a different past and a troubadour for a future that will perhaps forget him. It will be the future’s loss.

Up there, or down below, he’ll be looking at these tributes and giving them the narrow stare, the mocking glance, because emotion was for songs, not for conversation. But John, don’t laugh at it you swine. We miss you. You should have stayed longer.

Some people talk wouldness and couldness. Some people are just plain good.

From Here To Eternity

Help for Heroes is a charity that football has done a great deal to support in the last year or so, with the Football League in particular adopting it as an official charity and offering plenty of assistance and fundraising opportunities for a cause that raises funds for those who have been wounded while serving in the armed forces, notably in recent conflicts such as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet the link between football and the services is one which dates back many, many years, inevitably so given that footballers and soldiers tend to come from the same place – the expendable factory fodder and cannon fodder that the working people of the nation were once dismissed as. Football, like boxing, was the great escape from the trials and tribulations of that life, but in time of need, whether they had escaped the factory or not, footballers like their peers, could be relied upon to rally to the flag.

Never was that more apparent than in the 1914-18 conflict, the Great War, the war to end all wars as it was billed at the time. Football actually carried on through the 1914/15 season after the war had broken out early on in that campaign and everyone was busy insisting that the war would be over by Christmas which, was as big a lie as “the war to end all wars”.

By December 1914, it was becoming increasingly clear that not only would the war not be over by that Christmas, still others might come and go before peace broke out. So it was that Fred “Spider” Parker, the captain and inspirational leader of Clapton Orient – now Leyton Orient – took his men over the top, away from the safety and security of organised football and into the Army.

Parker became the first footballer to enlist with the 17th Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment at a special meeting in Fulham. A further nine of his team mates took their captain’s lead and took the King’s shilling that day, joining what became known as the Footballers’ Regiment, the first football team in this country to join up in such concentrated fashion. By the time of the Armistice in November 1918, some 41 players and officials had left Clapton Orient to sign up for their country, blazing a trail that the rest of the country followed.

The wholesale slaughter that characterised the First World War means that it was inevitable that some of that early band of brothers would pay the ultimate price of serving their country and, on the Somme in 1916, Richard McFadden, William Jonas and George Scott were killed. Given the horrifically iconic nature of that battle and the way its name rings down the ages even a century on, those three have become symbolic of the way in which football sacrificed a generation to the war, a truly golden generation of men for whom service and sacrifice was an ingrained virtue.

In recent times, those three in particular have become the focal point for a campaign by supporters of Leyton Orient, led by Steve Jenkins, to ensure that they and the club’s contribution to the Great War should never be forgotten. As a consequence, the O’s Somme Memorial Fund was launched in August 2009 in order to raise some £15,000 in order to produce and erect a permanent memorial to them on the Somme.

Badges are being sold in aid of the fund, donations are being taken and funds are desperately needed ahead of the planned dedication of the memorial in the summer of 2011. The fund is around half way to its target and, in a game where money is a deeply debased currency these days, perhaps it’s time that we helped it recapture its soul.

Just £15,000 for a monument not only to fallen heroes, but to working people who have always banded together when their country has called upon them, is a pittance. The memorial will speak not only to the fallen of Clapton Orient but to those who across football, and across football fans, who willingly gave up their lives in the service of the country. If football fails to raise such a trivial sum for such a powerfully compellingly cause, what will that say of us, of the current generation who revel in the freedoms those deaths won for us? How will we answer the charge that we have forgotten them, that we have fallen asleep in our comforts? We can do nothing but give anything we can , however little, to prove that football was a noble calling followed by noble people, and that it still can be, that it can still answer the call.

For further details on the appeal, and for information on how to contribute, go to: http://www.orientsupporters.webeden.co.uk/#/somme-memorial-fund/4535333173