Marcus Berkmann

It’s a long time, a very, very long time, since I bought a Coldplay album. Has any band of the past 20 years been so consistently irritating? Oasis were aggressively annoying, which isn’t the same thing. I quite liked the first Coldplay album, particularly ‘Trouble’, and A Rush of Blood to the Head was a fine record, full of the sense of an ambitious young band finding out what they were capable of. After that, though, they made the fatal Faustian decision to become the biggest band in the world. Although I have made it my business to hear subsequent albums, partly out of curiosity and partly to confirm my prejudices, actual folding money has not been involved.

The film critic Anne Billson wrote a typically pugnacious piece recently about the phrase ‘guilty pleasures’, which has spread like Japanese knotweed beyond its origins in pop music and taken root throughout popular culture. In film a guilty pleasure would be something like Four Weddings and a Funeral, which we’re not ‘supposed’ to like because it’s not La Règle du Jeu, but which we do like very much because it’s fab. My nomination in this category, and a possible reason my career as a film critic never quite reached the heights, would be Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

It is coming to something when relatively young pop stars die not of drugs or misadventure but, essentially, of old age and decay. Frankie Knuckles, the house DJ and producer, breathed his last recently at the age of just 59, and several ageing ex-clubbers of my acquaintance told me that it was the end of an era. But it always seems to be the end of an era these days, and very rarely the beginning of one. We read that the New Musical Express, that inky irritant to generations of music lovers who bought it every week even if they disagreed with every word it printed, now sells about three copies a week and is in danger of going under.

Earworm: what a wonderful word. It describes, as nothing else quite can, the effect a really invasive melody can have on your consciousness. Hear the song once and you will hear it again and again, on a loop in your brain. At the pub quiz the other night, the answer to a question was Brotherhood of Man, and at least two of us subsequently suffered the torture of hearing ‘Save Your Kisses For Me’ in our heads for the rest of the evening. I don’t usually think of myself as Drinking To Forget, but this evening might have been an exception. So are people who love pop music more susceptible to earworms, or are people who are susceptible to earworms more likely to love pop music?

Every musical career has its own narrative, and most of them include at least one comeback. To come back, you first have to go away; then you have to stay away; and finally, when everyone has forgotten your name, you wander nonchalantly back under the arc-lights and wave modestly to screaming fans and waiting reporters. Well, that’s the plan, anyway. As has been discussed here before, the gaps between record releases for all but the most irresponsibly prolific artists have become so wide that simply making another album becomes a comeback in itself. Thus has the currency of the comeback been devalued. Sometimes it feels as though there’s a different one every day. A few of them could usefully have stayed away a little longer.

Three months until spring. Four months until the start of the cricket season. And only nine months until the radio starts playing ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ again. Or have you heard enough of Christmas songs by now? Many of us had heard enough of them by Christmas 1988. Every October they return. The first strains of Shakin’ Stevens emerging tentatively from high street shops. Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl, still bickering. Greg Lake, possibly alone now in believing in Father Christmas. Roy Wood’s enormous beard, wishing it could be Christmas every day. And for three months of every year his wish is granted. Millions of Britons suffer the consequences.

Albums of the year? What a good question. Some years we can answer it, some years we can’t. The essence of pop music is its newness, its absolute determination to upgrade itself and keep on upgrading itself, often beyond anyone’s interest in its upgrading itself. Accordingly, there are some years when the paid-up music obsessive has to retrench and consolidate and — quite simply — stop buying new records until he can find somewhere to put them. I only bought about 25 new CDs this year, of which only five or so were new-new-new. As yet, none of them has really come through. But there’s time. There’s tomorrow, there’s next week, and there’s the rest of my life to get the most out of the David Bowie album.

There is much to be said for Schadenfreude. (If it was edible, it would be a meal in a very expensive restaurant, for which someone else was paying.) So it’s probably inadvertently that Morrissey has added to the gaiety of nations this past fortnight with the publication of his autobiography, winningly titled Autobiography. So catastrophically bad does the book turn out to be that Morrissey-loathing critics have queued up to give it (and him) a damn good thrashing. It has been a long time coming. While it has always been clear that The Smiths were every bit as good as we thought they were at the time, it is even clearer now that Morrissey’s symbiotic working partnership with Johnny Marr was the reason why.

First impressions always count, and they are almost always wrong. This is particularly pertinent if you review albums for a living, as I used to years ago. You would listen once, maybe twice, possibly three times if you were really being good, and then form an opinion, which was as much based on your preconceptions — and indeed taste — as on anything you had heard in the grooves. And then you would write your review. You would then forget about the record in question because there were so many others to listen to. It was essentially an industrial process, and it quickly ground my enthusiasm for music into dust. Music, though, is one of the few art forms, if not the only one, in which appreciation is inexorably tied to repetition.

How and when do you become ‘a fan’, exactly? You can usually spot pop stars who are losing touch with reality when they start talking about ‘the fans’ as some kind of independent entity, rather than just a load of people who like their songs. For the music obsessive, though, there’s a simple definition. You’re a fan if you buy someone’s new record without even thinking of listening to it first. Fandom accepts no caution. It only ever hopes for the best. It can take the disappointment of underachievement; it might even half-expect it. Fans have a right to criticise the objects of their affection; in fact, no one has more of a right. It’s a matter of ownership, of pride and, at its extreme, of mild derangement.