Marcus Berkmann

Seconds after I filed last month’s column, Oasis broke up. Seconds after I filed last month’s column, Oasis broke up. As ever on such momentous occasions, I didn’t quite know how to respond. Would a street party be excessive? Might a night on the lash be considered lacking in respect? In the end I settled for opening a bottle of champagne and toasting the good sense of the Gallagher brothers, who should probably have done this years ago, ideally before forming the group in the first place. Why do Oasis generate such loathing? It’s not just me, although I accept I am a repeat offender.

So which pop radio station do you listen to? It’s a question people who run pop radio stations often feel compelled to ask, without really wanting to hear the answer. So which pop radio station do you listen to? It’s a question people who run pop radio stations often feel compelled to ask, without really wanting to hear the answer. Most of their friends and contemporaries listen to Radio Four, and so do mine. But I need music to work to, and to wash up to, and Radio Two has come to occupy a significant place in my life. Ah, Radio Two. Once old, fuddy and duddy, more recently it has been home to Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, and still it’s the most popular radio station in the country. Maybe the most hated, too.

In the course of a long listening career, records tend to come and go. I look back at old columns and marvel at the enthusiasm I once felt for records I no longer remember owning, let alone enjoying. Some records come and go and come back again, of course, and a few stay for ever: the 30 or so albums you’d be buying tomorrow on Amazon if your house burnt down today. And just occasionally there’s an album you think has gone for good but which returns, better than ever before, and you wonder, was it always this good? Was I not paying attention? Shall I play it again right now, or wait until tomorrow?

Personally, I felt inclined to blame it on the boogie. Sunshine, no. Moonlight, definitely not. Good times, maybe to some extent. But boogie, for certain. On Facebook, my friend Nathan was wondering which tabloid would be the first to use the headline ‘The King of Pop-ped his clogs’. Soon the jokes were flowing. What’s the difference between Sir Alex Ferguson and Michael Jackson? Ferguson would still be playing Giggs in August. Radio Two was playing the modern equivalent of martial music when a royal dies: every time I switched it on, ‘Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough’. Jackson had long since got enough, but couldn’t stop. ‘Can You Feel It?’ Not any more.

Even music isn’t immortal. Even music isn’t immortal. For each of us, a little bit dies every day. I was in the pub with my friend Bob when on the jukebox came ‘Please Please Me’. You couldn’t ignore it: this pub operates its jukebox at full Spinal Tap volume to deter the uncommitted. ‘I love this song,’ Bob said — or, rather, screamed at the very extent of his lung capacity. And I thought, I don’t any more. In fact, almost all early Beatles, the music I grew up with, is dead to me now. I can hear nothing in it I haven’t heard before, and what I have heard before no longer incites any response.

Some say that pop music has nowhere else to go, but they are wrong: there is still extreme old age to negotiate. This week the American singer-songwriter, activist and folk evangelist Pete Seeger is 90 years old. Fifteen years ago, when he was 75, I’m not sure anyone was paying much attention. Folk music had drifted so far away from the cultural mainstream that search parties had given up for the night and helicopters had been recalled to base. Now, of course, everyone is a folk singer and Seeger is a revered elder statesman, with the satisfaction of having survived long enough to witness the revival of his own folk revival.

‘All critics are failed writers,’ someone with a New Zealand accent said on Desert Island Discs the other day. ‘All critics are failed writers,’ someone with a New Zealand accent said on Desert Island Discs the other day. Obviously I have completely blanked out who it was, but I do know she was talking out of her fundament. Most of us become critics not just because we need the money (please send all cheques payable to me c/o The Spectator) but because we love the subject of which we write, and obviously because other critics drive us potty. The Pet Shop Boys have a new album out, which I haven’t yet heard, but I have read some of the reviews, one of which floated the iconoclastic notion that the Pet Shop Boys are electropop’s Ramones.

There really should be a technical term for it: the compulsion to buy an album when you know beforehand that you aren’t going to like it. There really should be a technical term for it: the compulsion to buy an album when you know beforehand that you aren’t going to like it. In 2005, Paul McCartney put out a record called Chaos And Creation In The Backyard, an unwieldy title for what I thought was the best music he had made in a quarter of a century. I speak as someone who has bought an awful lot of McCartney albums. What are we searching for when we buy a McCartney album? Lovable moptop tunefulness, unaffected by the passing years? Possibly, but I rarely play my Beatles albums any more, while for the last month I have been playing little but Ram from 1971.

January was a fierce month for celebrity life expectancy, especially if you are in your late forties and feel you grew up with these people. John Updike. Bill Frindall. Patrick McGoohan (‘I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered’). Ricardo Montalban (‘from Hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee’). Tony Hart and Sir John Mortimer and David Vine. But not John Martyn, please no, tell me that’s a mistake. True, he wasn’t in the best of health. Having drunk enough for two alcoholics and taken enough heroin to floor an elephant, he had his left leg lopped off in 2003 when a cyst exploded, and, once confined to a wheelchair, he piled on the weight.

And so to the records of the year. I usually do this piece in December, but as all sensible shoppers know that’s the worst month in the year to buy anything for yourself — particularly music, in what is very much a buyer’s market. Amazon’s prices, normally comfortingly low, lurch up into realms of profitability during December, to catch out unwary parents and relatives who don’t buy things there for £4.98 every day of the week. In mid-December I wandered through a branch of Zavvi, the doomed rebrand of Virgin Megastores. I was there, and some tumbleweed, and a couple of sad teenagers in shabby Zavvi uniforms, who may have been making alternative career plans for the new year.

It all started earlier this year, when my friend Chris managed to get four tickets for the first Leonard Cohen concerts at the O2. ‘There’s one for you if you want it,’ he said. Well, obviously I wanted it, but cash was a little short at the time — in fact, not so much short as entirely absent, avoiding me as though I’d said the wrong thing. And I do have an ongoing tinnitus problem, the result of reviewing too many awful Tin Machine gigs for a certain crazed mass-market newspaper in the early 1990s. Earlier this year I went to a friend’s book launch held in a seedy West End dive where they played chart tunes at ear-splitting volume, and for a week afterwards I thought my head was going to explode.

No one quite believes it, but the new Guns N’ Roses album is finally coming out. Axl Rose has been working on it for 17 years, demonstrating, as rarely before, the fine line between perfectionism and padded cell. It is a reminder, though, that in these busy times quite a few acts have gone missing in action. The stories about Gerry Rafferty, who checked into a London hospital in August for tests on his liver, did a runner, and was spotted several weeks later buying whisky in Harrods, reminded those few of us who used to buy all his records that he hasn’t exactly been at his most productive recently.

A musician friend of mine acquired his first iPod recently, and like small boys who don’t realise that everyone else went through this about five years ago, he and I frequently discuss our battles with the things. A musician friend of mine acquired his first iPod recently, and like small boys who don’t realise that everyone else went through this about five years ago, he and I frequently discuss our battles with the things. To be fair, though, there is some substance to these conversations, as we are both fascinated by the way people listen to music — I as a fan and part-time critic, and he as creator, teacher and equally fervent consumer (mainly of 1970s Krautrock, the last time we spoke).

Fandom can be a lonely place. If you love a band, truly love a band with that slightly teenage desperation you hope never to grow out of (until they make a substandard record and you abandon them forever), it’s a love affair like no other. Other fans may love the same band, but they love them differently. My favourite band, as I may have mentioned in this space once or twice, are Steely Dan, a pair of jazzy old perversities now in their fourth active decade. My friend Mitch is also a fan, and every time the group release a new album we have roughly the same conversation on the phone: me enthusing ridiculously and saying it’s the best album they’ve made in years, and him saying he’s not so sure and really it’s not a patch on The Royal Scam (1976).

Marcus Berkmann on Travis Elborough's nostalgia for LP records  There’s a rather wonderful new book out by a man named Travis Elborough, which sounds a bit like one of those dead Dorset villages where every second house is a holiday rental. Mr Elborough’s previous book was a great thundering roar of nostalgia for the Routemaster bus, and The Long-Player Goodbye (Sceptre, £14.99) is a great thundering roar of nostalgia for the LP record, from its origins in the 1940s, through its long heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, to its current rather enfeebled state as a weekly CD giveaway glued to the Mail on Sunday. Mr Elborough feels, as many of us do, that the 40-minute album is a thing of beauty and its current status as an endangered species is a disgrace.

Marcus Berkmann on Michael Jackson It seems hard to believe, but on 29 August Michael Jackson will be 50 years old. Maybe fortunately in this case, the music industry doesn’t really go a bundle on 50th birthdays: I believe there’s another half-hearted greatest hits coming out, but that’s about it. How will Jacko celebrate? I think we can all imagine him alone in one of his vast decaying houses, Charles Foster Kane crossed with Miss Havisham, playing his Nintendo all day and pausing from time to time to pick up the latest nose and stick it back on. If George Orwell was right, he will have the face he deserves — surely a punishment far greater than any crime he committed. All that money, all that success, and what was the point of any of it?

It’s tough out there in the crazy world of pop. Two years ago The Feeling were the most played act on British radio. Their debut album, Twelve Stops and Home — almost certainly the only album in history to be named after a late-night Tube journey from Leicester Square to Bounds Green — sold 1.5 million copies and inspired several other bands to start playing plinky-plink 1970s pop. In turn, as previously discussed here, this has provoked Radio One into announcing that Rock Is So Over and shifting its entire daytime programming policy in a plinky-plinky popward direction.