Marcus Berkmann

The journalist and broadcaster Danny Baker recently admitted that, getting on in years, he listens to almost nothing these days other than country music. I can see the appeal. If the relentless artifice of most pop music doesn’t wear you out, its sheer unbridled energy is sure to. Fortunately, the term ‘country’ now embraces a remarkable variety of performers and writers, not all of whom customarily wear enormous hats. Instead both country and, in these islands, folk have become traditions on which people can draw while creating something new and distinctive of their own. Looking at my own playlist of the past few months, I see that I am starting to tend more to the folk side of things.

My friend Mitch rings up. ‘Guess what my album of the year is?’ He is trying to fool me into suggesting Donald Fagen’s Morph the Cat, for Mitch and I are both Steely Danoraks of long standing. But I know he was a little disappointed by the album, and he knows I wasn’t. I can’t give him the satisfaction. ‘Don’t know,’ I say. ‘What is your album of the year?’ ‘The Lily Allen album.’ I am dumbfounded. Mitch is staring down the barrel of 50. Lily Allen could be his daughter or, at the very least, the louche older girlfriend of one of his sons. Which, of course, is the explanation.

Wailing and gnashing of teeth appear not to have greeted the news that Top of the Pops is to end after 42 glorious years. Indeed, as far as I can see, no one gives a monkey’s. I have to admit, I am disappointed. Of all those newspaper columnists with nothing to write about, you would have thought at least one would have embraced the cause. And where are the elderly pop-pickers hoisting banners outside Television Centre and brandishing tear-stained photos of Jimmy Savile? Instead, public reaction has been muted and resigned, and possibly tempered by surprise that the show was still going on at all. BBC2, did you say? Early Sunday evenings?

I’m confused. Did five-sixths of the world’s population really watch Live8? If so, what did the other sixth think they were doing? Did they ask permission? I and my friends were playing cricket on the day, and during the tea interval, while stuffing cheese and pickle sandwiches into our faces, we naturally and automatically tuned into Williams v. Davenport on BBC1. (The pavilion didn’t have Sky Sports for the cricket.) But we all agreed that, if any market researchers or undercover policemen challenged us, we would say we watched Live8 like everyone else. ‘Pink Floyd were good, weren’t they?’ we rehearsed. ‘And why on earth were The Who given only two songs?’ Musically, of course, Pink Floyd were the story of the day.

Like every red-blooded male, I do like a gadget, and the latest pointless item of electrical flummery to adorn our absurdly small flat is a digital radio. What a wonderful machine it is. The excellence of the sound quality, the ease of use, and the fact that Radio Two is no longer blotted out by some teenage pirate halfwit broadcasting grimecore out of his bedroom to an audience of eight (all of them actually trying to find Radio Two on the dial) have all justified the purchase, and I now find myself listening to music radio more than I have done for years. Terry Wogan, Ken Bruce, Jeremy Vine, Steve Wright and Johnnie Walker: it’s a surprisingly varied menu, although ennui does creep in when the new Coldplay single has been played one time too many.

‘Art for art’s sake,’ sang 10cc in 1976, ‘Money for God’s sake.’ And promptly split in half shortly afterwards. It’s a conundrum every new young band has to grapple with sooner or later. You want creative freedom, of course you do. You want trillions of dollars, of course you do. You want to have your cake, you want to eat it, and you want to keep your lithe figure afterwards as well. And if you can also manage to marry a swan-necked Hollywood lovely and call your first baby Banana, well, so much the better. For this and several other reasons Coldplay have become the template for ambitious young bands everywhere. Theirs is a career path to slaver over.

Tired. I am exhausted. For one reason and another the workload has been intense recently, and the pressures have been unyielding. After a while you wander through the days in a numbed haze, faintly aware of passing deadlines, and thinking only of pillows. The occasional hangovers hit as hard as Mike Tyson circa 1988. Look in the mirror in the morning and you see the way you will look in ten years’ time. Look in the mirror in the afternoon and you see that this is actually the way you look now. I even dream of sleep, which is a little weird. What is the soundtrack to this strange state? Years of unquestioning belief in the fundamental tenets of pop music — tunes, rhythm, guitars — seem to have been swept aside overnight.

‘Why do you buy so many CDs?’ asked my girlfriend. It was not an unreasonable question, although obviously I wasn’t going to admit that. There are all sorts of reasons why you might buy too many CDs. You are bored of the ones you have. There are things you want. You are terrified you might miss something. It was only £8.49. It was only £6.99. It was only £4.99. Alternatively, it’s a compulsion, and you need professional help. And there’s also the irrefutable truth, which may be the essence of pop music’s appeal, that you never know where the next fantastic song is going to come from.