Marcus Berkmann

‘If you liked that, why not try this?’ Such tempting words, so hard to resist. I love the idea that some immeasurably complex computer algorithm, lovingly created by nerds, can sift through the teeming piles of new music out there and find something for me that I didn’t know I was going to like. One day this glorious state of affairs may even come to pass. For the moment, though, these links always lead you to (i) music you already own and enjoy, (ii) music that sounds a bit like the music you already own and enjoy but isn’t as good, and (iii) music you wouldn’t touch with a bargepole attached to another bargepole. For me it’s always little Jamie Cullum or Michael Bublé.

The summer is over, the Olympians have gone, and Lord Coe has been put back in his box for another year. But some memories will linger on, like a stubborn cold. Music fans, in particular, will struggle to forget George Michael’s performance in the closing ceremony. Other acts came out and played their most famous song for a TV audience of somewhere between nine and ten billion, according to industry insiders. George, wilful to the last, gave us his execrable new single. No one wanted to hear it, everyone was just waiting for it to end, but George wanted to play it, and afterwards he wanted us to buy it. Maybe you need to be that famous to misjudge your audience so acutely. Anyone whose ego does not travel separately would realise that people only want to hear the hits.

Do rock stars buy life insurance? If so, there must have been payouts aplenty this summer, as several more breathed their last. Levon Helm of The Band croaked in April, followed in May by Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch of the Beastie Boys, the famed session bassist Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, and Donna Summer, no longer feeling love, or indeed anything very much. Then, a couple of weeks ago, it was the turn of Jon Lord of Deep Purple, whose terrifying white ponytail I once spotted at a River Café quiz. Although his team didn’t do very well, you could see that he was the sort of person you would want to have on your side.

What does a producer do on a record? I have often wondered this, as the evidence suggests that they either do (i) too much, or (ii) not enough. The heavy rock producer Steve Albini legendarily limits his contribution to switching on the equipment and pressing ‘record’. The band bashes out the song, Albini switches off the equipment and everyone goes for a hearty lunch. By this studied policy of non-intervention, Albini seeks to reproduce a band at its most raw and primal. You don’t go to him if you want fancy keyboard fills or a symphony orchestra wheeling away in the background. Indeed, Albini is so fast that he ‘produces’ more records than anyone else would be able to. Not that he uses the word ‘producer’ any more.

It is a glorious moment in the life of any music-loving parent when your progeny develop their own fierce musical tastes, and start looking rather askance at yours. My case may be extreme, as my two children have had to put up with my music for years. As previously mentioned in these columns, my tinnitus makes it all but impossible for me to work in complete silence, and I have become accustomed to playing up to a dozen CDs a day to get anything done. As a result, daughter (12) and son (10) find other people’s houses eerily quiet, even if someone is digging up the road outside and a Boeing 747 is strafing the rooftops. Maybe surprisingly, exposure to unceasing pop music has not put them off it for life. Instead, they seem to have noticed that I like A Certain Sort Of Thing.

In April, for the first time in ages, I am going to a wedding. At least it will make a change from all the funerals. The middle-aged pop fan feels this all the more deeply, because few of our favourite musicians seem to make old bones. Or, more accurately, they make old bones, but at three or four times the speed that everyone else does. Some of these rock deaths are relatively mundane: falling down stairs (Sandy Denny), car crashing into a tree (Marc Bolan), ski-ing into a tree (Sonny Bono). Others are bizarre. It was Chicago’s guitarist Terry Kath, of course, whose career came to a premature end during a boozy game of Russian roulette. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it’s not loaded.

One morning in 2007, the music critic Nick Coleman woke up to find that he was profoundly deaf in one ear. ‘The silence did not descend silently, however. It made a small sound. You might compare it to the sound of a kitten dropping on to a pillow.’ Within an hour this pffff had developed a pulse, and over the next few days it evolved into an unceasing clamour of clanks, zizzes and whistles. By now Coleman was in hospital and doctors were scratching their heads, as they usually do with tinnitus. I can remember the eyes of my doctor glazing over with boredom when I told him about my own tinnitus. When he heard that I wrote about music, and had been to far too many deafening gigs over the years, his disapproval hardened. A scribble on the pad, and I was on my way. Next!