In a recent episode of The Pod Delusion, Mark Thompson spoke about the good old days when ITV was still a federation of regional television stations. He outlined how, in England and Wales over the past ten or fifteen years, ITV’s regional diversity has given way to a bland umbrella brand.

But not all of the nooks on the ITV network have succumbed to the juggernaut. Four of the ITV regions are still independently owned, and three avoid using the ITV brand. In the Channel Islands, Channel Television still owns the franchise, even though it uses ITV1 branding. But in Northern Ireland, viewers are greeted by idents for UTV. And where I live, in Scotland, the two ITV regions operate as STV.

I can say with authority, given that I live here, that the reality of regional broadcasting on Channel 3 is not quite as rosy as Mark Thompson would like to remember. It certainly is not as quaint and charming as the ITV we remember from our youth — and, incidentally, it was delightful to hear the idents and jingles during Mark’s report.

Sadly, STV is a bit of a basket case. Apparently strapped for cash, for the past year or two it has been embroiled in a dispute with ITV plc that has only served to disadvantage viewers. ITV is trying to gain money that has been allegedly been owed by STV for over ten years. Meanwhile, STV is dropping as many ITV programmes as it can get away with in an apparent attempt to stop owing any more money.

This means that many of the ITV network’s most popular drama programmes have been dropped by STV. This has left Scottish viewers with no options if they want to watch some of the best British commercial television programmes.

Publicly, STV say this is all a brave stance for regional broadcasting in Scotland. That does not really explain why most of the replacements have been cheap imports, films and repeats. As amusing as South Park may be, it is not exactly an adequate replacement for the likes of Kingdom. Incidentally, South Park is seemingly supposed to count as Scottish programming because, in the words of STV director of broadcast services Bobby Hain, it is “mischievous and cheeky… just like the Scottish people.”

Bobby Hain often singles out Al Murray for particular criticism. He reckons that Scots cannot relate to a comedy cockney landlord, forgetting that there is in fact nothing Scots enjoy more than laughing at English stereotypes.

This strategy certainly is not being done for the benefit of the Scottish people. We can tell this because the ratings have largely fallen through the floor. Infamously, STV once ditched Agatha Christie’s Marple in favour of the film Blue Crush — because crap surfing movies set in Hawaii are really Scottish, right? It was a disaster for STV. You could almost have squeezed the viewers into a large football stadium. With just 6% of Scottish television viewers watching it, this made it the least watched of the five main channels in Scotland.

STV have recently broadcast Fitz, the woeful 1990s American remake of Cracker. Presumably they have done this because it is supposed to count as Scottish, despite the fact that it is American. In fact, Fitz more accurately describes what STV viewers go through when they realise that their favourite programme has been replaced by a low budget michty-me, jings, crivvens and help ma boab bag of shite.

Because when STV are showing “regional” programming, it is a parochial embarrassment. One of the programmes it’s pushing most is The Hour. Imagine a cross between The One Show and Live From Studio Five, with a twentieth of the budget and presented from a shed. That barely describes the horror.

In the evenings, STV broadcasts STV Casino. This is the sort of gambling programme I railed against in a previous edition of The Pod Delusion.

More ambitiously, STV sought to find out the Greatest Scot. Among the nominees for the title was John Logie Baird, the inventor of the television. What Logie Baird can’t have foreseen was that his compatriots would be unable to watch anything decent on it.

Soon enough, STV will run out of “Scottish” topics to make programmes about. What next? The History of the Word ‘Outwith‘? Barry Ferguson’s Greatest V-Signs? Susan Boyle’s Ten Favourite Ditches?

Maybe there will be a celebration of the Scots language and / or dialect, with a version of Countdown played in the Scots tongue. Sadly, the only exciting action would be a Buckfast-fuelled brawl surrounding the precise spelling of words like ‘airse’ (‘erse’?) and ‘bawbag’ (‘ba’bag’?).

This new found love for “local” programming really is rich coming from STV. This is a station that, just a few years ago, would do anything to avoid showing locally produced programmes. It transparently sought to meet its quota of regional programmes with cynical late-night repeats of Weir’s Way and extra editions of Scotland Today Interpreted For The Deaf.

This all makes me wonder just what the ‘S’ in STV stands for. Is it ‘Scottish’? Or is it ’stultifying’? ‘Stupid’? ‘Sellotape’? In fact, I think it’s probably ’shite’.

Mark Thompson’s idea is a nice one, but is based on a rose-tinted view rather than the reality we Scots have to live with just now. It is true that something needs to change in order for ITV to survive. But the solution to that is surely obvious when you think about it — they should bring back Blockbusters.

As regular readers may know, I worked for Woolworths until it closed down in January this year. You can read the series of articles I wrote in the aftermath of its closure.

In one of my articles, I wrote about the poster that appeared in the staff area this time last year. It announced:

Remember Remember the 5th of November!

In just less than a year, on the 5th November 2009, we celebrate our 100th birthday!

Watch out for more details coming soon…

Unfortunately we didn’t get many more details about the centenary celebrations. All we heard after that was stuff about trying to sell the company for a pound.

I regret not taking the poster to keep as soon as it was clear that Woolies would not emerge from the mire it found itself in through late November and December. Someone is selling one of these posters on eBay at the moment. The poster is a great piece of history — the 100th birthday that never was.

Or was it? Today, the new owners of the Woolworths brand have been celebrating the centenary nonetheless by putting on 100 promotions and giving away free Pic ‘n’ Mix with every order. That is what I like about the new Woolworths, owned by Shop Direct. Despite being a separate company, they are respectful of the name’s heritage. In fairness, they would be mad not to — the Woolies name must still have appeal, especially among those in a nostalgic mood.

Not everyone is so happy about it. The Woolworths Facebook page is often full of offended comments from people who feel that it is presumptuous and opportunistic of Shop Direct to cash in on the 99 years of Woolworths that preceded their involvement. There were, after all, around 30,000 workers made redundant at the original Woolworths last Christmas. Most probably aren’t in the mood to celebrate.

It is a matter of debate whether Woolworths is 100 really. Today is nothing other than the 100th anniversary of the first F. W. Woolworth store to open in the UK. The company had already been operating in the USA and Canada for decades before that. The UK company became separate in the 1980s when it was bought by Kingfisher. After that, Woolworths in the UK became a separate company when Kingfisher cast it off in 2001.

In the USA, the Woolworths name ceased to exist in 1997. But the original company still exists as Foot Locker, having decided to concentrate on sports goods. If the operation in the USA still counts, Woolworths is 131 years old.

You can still shop in bona fide Woolworths stores in Germany. These, like the British stores, were originally part of the American company and became separate in 1998. It declared insolvency this year, but struggles on.

(Supermarket chains named Woolworths in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa have nothing to do with the original FW Woolworth apart from the name.)

Regular readers will know that until January this year I worked for Woolworths — I wrote about my experiences. Since then I have taken an interest in the future direction of the brand, which was sold last month to Shop Direct.

The new, online-only version of Woolworths is not set to launch until this summer. However, it has already established a strong online presence, effectively utilising social media tools. What strikes me about this activity is that I cannot imagine the old Woolworths doing this — certainly not with as much success.

For the time being, woolworths.co.uk redirects to The Woolies Blog. This new blog is largely used to ask readers what they’d like to see from the new Woolworths, and keeps people updated on all their future plans. A common theme seems to be how the new online-only store is going to make pic n mix work, and I’m certainly interested to see how they crack that one.

There are also a good deal of nostalgic reflections on the old version of Woolworths. The sidebar contains links to classic Woolworths adverts (though disappointingly all but one of them are from 2006 or later). Readers have been asked what items from their Woolies memories they would bring back. The blog also covered the story of the last ever bag of pic n mix which sold for £14,500 on eBay.

Generally there is just a warm and fuzzy feeling to the Woolworths blog. You can see this most in the description of their team. All the teams even have their own cute little icon to represent them. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into little things like this.

It probably signposts the way the Woolworths brand will be developed by its new owners. A year ago Woolworths was stale and perhaps even tacky. Over Christmas the brand was tarnished. Today Woolies already feels more personable and friendly.

Woolworths now also has a Twitter stream, and they are doing a really good job with it. It is done with a good sense of humour. I do hope they get that kettle and fire extinguisher for their portacabin.

They are also using Twitter to ask followers about the five things from the past of Woolworths that they’d like to see back, with the hashtag #woolies5. (I’m working on my top five, but I’m struggling to get beyond the payslip.)

There has also been a hint that there will be an e-museum. I liked the online museum that was part of the old Woolworths website. I doubt that Shop Direct will have access to all of the old material, but I do look forward to seeing how they will recognise the heritage of the brand, which they clearly have a lot of respect for.

I can’t imagine the old Woolworths being able to embrace Twitter and blogging and getting it the way Shop Direct have. The only sign of a sense of humour in the old Woolworths was some cheesy dialogue between Wooly and Worth.

All-in-all, Shop Direct’s approach to relaunching Woolworths is a great demonstration of how a business can use social media to build a relationship with its customers and to refine its offering. Their Twitter stream is an example that corporate use of Twitter doesn’t have to be annoying. It goes some way to disproving this website.

(Hat tip to Chris Applegate via whom I discovered the Woolworths Twitter stream.)

First of all, apologies to anyone who became sick of Woolworths when I published eight posts in a row about it. As you will have seen, “normal” service is on its way to resumption. Anyway, it was good to get it all off my chest, and is at least cheaper than seeing a therapist.

When I started writing this series, I thought I was going to end up with four posts. I ended up writing nine posts, and almost 10,000 words. I have a few final thoughts before I shut up about the subject for good.

A lot of people who have spoken to me about Woolworths have blamed the credit crunch and / or the government for the demise of Woolworths. As my posts have outlined, I think that is a gross simplification of the matter. If you look at the archives of newspapers you can see that people have seen this coming for a while, credit crunch or no credit crunch.

No doubt the staggering deterioration in the economy from October onwards accelerated things a lot. But there were fundamental problems with Woolworths, partly because it was burdened by almost 100 years of history which made it difficult to evolve.

A lot of people said they felt sorry for the way “they” were treating us. I couldn’t find it in myself to be angry (although that was admittedly made easier by the fact that I was planning on leaving anyway). No-one planned on the business failing. As for the administrators, it is their job to recover as much money from the situation as possible. That can mean being pretty ruthless and it cannot be an easy situation to manage.

A lot of customers asked me questions as though I had some kind of magical insider knowledge. When I said I didn’t know what was happening some people would say they thought I was being treated badly. I usually said, “I don’t think they even know what’s happening themselves.” I don’t know if they did know, but I imagine events were pretty fast-moving.

The reality was that I would have had a much better idea of what was happening if I stayed at home and watched the news. Lots of customers would come in and talk about what they had heard on the news, probably not even realising that we were totally unaware of whatever development had come about. It was unfortunate that things happened that way, but I doubt it can be helped.

The more I researched the history of Woolworths for this series of posts, the more I came to the conclusion that it was actually a fundamentally good business — or at least had the potential to be a good business. But throughout its history it has been maltreated in various ways and it ended up battered and bruised, limping on until finally keeling over this year.

For instance, the British arm of Woolworths was always more successful than its American parent. But until 1982 it sent most of its profits back to America. The Kingfisher years were, if anything, even worse.

Kingfisher failed to find an identity for itself and Woolworths was demerged in 2001. Under Kingfisher the stores had begun to crumble. Worst of all, just before the demerger Kingfisher sold all of Woolworths’s property, meaning that the new company had to lease it all back from landlords. Woolworths had crippling rent bills for the rest of its life. Woolworths still had huge takings, but it was brought down by massive overheads.

Arguably, the main beneficiary of the situation was B&Q. Kingfisher, rich having sold all of the Woolies property, continues to own B&Q to this day. But it was Woolworths which originally had the foresight to buy B&Q.

Home improvement and DIY was a big thing for Woolworths by the 1980s, as you can see in this advert from 1980. The products featured are almost entirely DIY-oriented.

Certain that DIY was a growth area, then-chairman of Woolworths Geoffrey Rogers bought the then-fledgling B&Q. The DIY offering in Woolworths was watered down to make way for B&Q. This might be one major reason why so many people cite Wilkinson as the store that replaced Woolworths.

Although Woolies appeared to have lost its way in the later years, there’s no doubt that most people had a real affection for the store. I saw lots of great blog posts during the final few weeks:

• Stephen’s Linlithgow Journal: Goodbye Woolies
• Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe: The Demise of Woolworths
• A Son of the Rock: The Wonder That Was Woolworths
• The Ben Lomond Free Press: Woolworths R.I.P?
• A zippy adventure: Woolies
• Last Year’s Girl: “dig through the record bin and find a record for 59c that you’ve always wanted all your life”
• Indygal: I was a Saturday girl in Woolies
• Indygal: Woolworths in Greenock has gone – end of an era
• Jeff Zycinski: They’re Looting Woolies
• Ewan Aitken: Where will I get my pick and mix now!?
• Silversprite: People I hope will *NOT* have a happy Christmas
• James O’Malley: Woolworths 2009
• Craigblog: Woolworths R.I.P.

And some nice nostalgic offerings from more major news outlets:

• The Guardian: Woolworths: the rise and fall of the department store empire
• BBC News: What is the point of Woolworths?
• The Guardian: Woolworths: a store of memories
• BBC News: Audio slideshow: The Wonder of Woolies
• The Guardian: ‘It’s here for everybody’
• The Sun: Rack and ruin
• BBC News: Mournful mood in Woolies’ aisles
• BBC News: In pictures: The Woolworths story
• The Telegraph: The history of Woolworths
• The Sun: Oldest Woolies branch closes
• BBC News: My sadness at Woolworths’ demise — a journalist’s memories of his first job at Woolies
• BBC News: Woolworths staff feel pain of closure

Now, sadly, the shutter is down for good.

One widespread criticism of Woolworths was that its stores were in bad nick. There’s no question that a lot of buildings were old and hadn’t really been looked after properly. The labyrinthine stockrooms of the Leith store had to be seen to be believed! But I never saw Woolworths stores as particularly drab. What perhaps hurt the most about this frequent comment was the fact that Woolworths had recently embarked on an extensive re-fit programme that plainly hadn’t worked.

Some press reports noted that if Woolies had seen through Christmas there would have been “yet another revamp“. A few months before Woolworths closed for good, its logo changed to a self-consciously modern all-lower case affair. At least one new store’s workers in Northern Ireland had new black uniforms.

Maybe a new image was required, but latterly there was a strange focus on minutiae of the store set-up. The rules by which our in-store displays were set up were tweaked. We were always told to keep to the “planogram” (the plan which our displays were to adhere to). But beforehad we had been encouraged none the less to fill the shelves with as much stock as possible.

Now we had to adhere to the planogram exactly as it appeared on the page, right down to having the shelves on the right notches. I saw one person leave a comment on a news story caustically pointing out, maybe if area managers weren’t sent around counting shelf notches Woolies wouldn’t have got itself into such a mess.

The situation was not helped by the fact that the size of products as they appeared on the planogram often bore no relation to their size in real life. Someone in head office obviously worked out how to squeeze a big picture of a product onto a small picture of a shelf, but they forgot that you can’t so easily squeeze a physical box. Problems were exacerbated whenever a product’s packaging changed, which is more often than you might think.

The obsession with shelf heights pointed to an unhealthy interest in homogeneity. The idea was seemingly to make Woolworths stores up and down the country stock exactly the same products in exactly the same way. But what was the need for this? It takes no account for the fact that different areas have different needs. The result was an inflexible store that sold more or less the same products regardless of what the local rivals were.

Moreover, many stores were not allowed to have top shelves. We were usually not allowed to have bulk stacks. And did you ever wonder where the dump bins of reduced CDs and DVDs went? I believe that they were not allowed either.

Presumably the idea was to make stores tidier. But in my view there was no need to make Woolworths look tidier. Most shops I go into look like a complete bomb site compared to our Woolworths store, and the likes of bulk stacks and dump bins are practically de rigueur in any store that likes to offer value for money, or simply make money from its stock rather than letting it gather dust in the stockroom. At a time when sales were falling, to actively be offering less stock for sale seemed suicidal. By the looks of it, it was.

The identity crisis on the shop floor was reflected in a more general marketing malaise. Historically, Frank W. Woolworth was not a big advertiser, normally restricting the company to advertising new store openings. But in the 1970s the UK arm threw its weight behind showy advertising campaigns brimful of familiar faces.

Woolies eventually became famous for its advertising campaigns and delightfully alliterative slogans like “The Wonder of Woolworth” or, my personal favourite from my childhood, “Woolies Winter Wonderland”. A more recent, delightfully punning slogan, said that Woolies was “Well Worth It”.

At its height, Woolworths was buying entire ad breaks. Check out this whopping two minute long advert from 1981.

The advert is wonderful. It is somehow cheap and cheerful at the same time as being ridiculously extravagant. It is also something undeniably of its time. You’d never see an advert like this today. But it fits Woolworths perfectly nonetheless.

Not quite in the same league is this more recent advert starring Jackie Chan in the fictitious sitcom “The Wooly & Worth Show”. It lasts one minute, but mostly focusies on Jackie Chan rather than Woolworths. It only tells you about a handful of products, and worst of all Wooly even decides not to buy the products that the advert is supposed to be about!! WTF?!

I was never the biggest fan of Wooly and Worth. No doubt an attempt to create a lovable comedy duo à la Wallace and Gromit, Wooly and Worth ended up just being faintly annoying. I was amazed, though, when a customer recently told me that she would miss Wooly and Worth on the television! Maybe most people found them lovable after all. My indifference towards the characters didn’t stop me buying Wooly and Worth keyrings as a memento in the final weeks of the store’s life.

Can you remember the company’s final slogan? I doubt somehow that “More great news from Woolworths” will be remembered as fondly as “The Wonder of Woolworth”. The recent slogan said absolutely nothing about the store and wasn’t an ounce of wit in it. Meanwhile, the classic taps right into people’s nostalgia for the store and its role as shop for special occasions. What about another recent slogan, “Let’s have some fun”? I’m still trying to decode the meaning of it.

One thing that was crystal clear in the media coverage of the collapse of Woolworths was that almost everyone had very fond memories of the store, even if they ceased to shop there in great numbers. Yet its heritage ended up overwhelming Woolworths. Creaking under the strain of almost 100 years of history, the company began to get a serious identity crisis. Straddling a line between changing with the times and continuing to give people what they remember from the past proved to be too difficult.

Meanwhile, the stores — which Woolworths once took great pride in — began to crumble. Recent re-fits misfired, leaving Woolworths with a reputation as a dingy shop.

Wooly and Worth in happier times, posing for my discount card

I have felt very sad about the demise of Woolworths ever since the business began to unravel in front of my eyes around two months ago. I was not sad so much because of my job — I was planning on leaving after the Christmas period anyway. I was just sad to see Woolies go because I was genuinely fond of it as a shop.

I always quite liked the idea that I worked for Woolworths, which had been one of my favourite shops as a child. Kids loved Woolies. I heard a story from another store about a child who enquired to his mother, “Is this Woolies branch closing as well?” When she said they were all closing, the child burst into tears. When I was on the tills during the closing down sale, I heard another child say, “Don’t give us any change!”

My personal affection for Woolies is more surprising because there wasn’t even a branch in Kirkcaldy when I was growing up. There had been a branch at the east end of the High Street, but it had gone by the time I could have any memories of it. It was one of the branches that were sold off in the 1980s.

Today the building houses the Kirkcaldy Indoor Market. But is still very recognisable as a Woolworths, with that classic design of the entranceway that was used for so many Woolworths branches up and down the land.

In the 1990s, there was a small Entertainment-only branch of Woolworths in Kirkcaldy that was more or less in the centre of the High Street. But it closed long before I was old enough to have an interest in buying music, and I have no memory of being in the store at all. That unit has since been an Our Price, a Ponden Mill and latterly a bicycle shop which I think has now closed down.

No, my memories of Woolies came from nearby Glenrothes. I have relatives in Glenrothes, and we would frequently visit, often popping into Woolworths on the way back. When I was a child there was something magical about Woolworths. Maybe it was all the pic ‘n’ mix sweets that I was seldom allowed to buy. I still remember the quaint stickers that used to adorn the pic ‘n’ mix stands — “Please buy before you try” and messages like that.

I always used to wonder why Kirkcaldy didn’t have a Woolies store. It made Glenrothes seem like such a superior town. When I had my job interview at Woolworths, I was asked what I liked most about Woolworths. My answer spoke about how I thought Glenrothes was a better town than Kirkcaldy because it had a Woolies. It must have sounded like I was taking the piss, but it was true.

Woolies finally arrived back in Kirkcaldy in 1998, and it was a large store at that. It filled part of a huge unit that Tesco had recently vacated, having just bought Wm Low whose Kirkcaldy store was judged to be in a better location. From then on, Woolies was always a trusty destination particularly when I had to buy gifts. It is no surprise that Woolworths made most of its profits at Christmas, because in Kirkcaldy at least it was more or less the only place you could find a decent selection of chocolates.

Woolies was also unquestionably useful for other odds and ends. The problem was, you couldn’t always quite tell what odds and ends you would find there. Quite soon after I started working there I clocked that customers were frequently unsure about what Woolies actually sold. I was as well. Even after working there for two and a half years, I would still sometimes be stumped by a question a customer asked about the products we sold, and I would have to go on a wild goose chase to find out if we stocked it.

The store’s role as an events retailer also meant that the range would radically change throughout the year as a matter of routine. Cleverly, shelf space was reserved for seasonal goods. The cycle went from home stuff in January, to gardening in the spring, to back to school in summer, to Hallowe’en stuff in September and October, onto Christmas stuff from then onwards. Tough luck if you wanted to buy a bird feeder during winter though.

Woolworths made a name for itself as a place where you could buy bits and bobs. If you wanted to buy something but weren’t sure where to get it, you could pop into Woolies. This meant that people had an affection for Woolworths — it was that useful shop where you could get your bits and pieces.

But it was also deeply dangerous territory for a store to occupy. Customers would sometimes pin all their hopes on being able to find an obscure household object in Woolies — and would become angry if we didn’t sell it. Then, as widespread access to the internet became a reality, you no longer had to search for your obscure items in Woolies. You could just search Google for them instead.

Meanwhile, all too often people wouldn’t know what Woolworths actually did sell. I primarily worked on the stationery department, but before I worked at Woolies I doubt I would have been able to tell you that it sold stationery. I certainly wouldn’t have bought my stationery from there before I started working there. I shopped at Stationery Box or WH Smith for my ringbingers and refill pads instead.

The sheer variety of goods sold by Woolworths also meant that it had multiple rivals on the High Street, each of whom focussed on a niche that they could specialise in. HMV sold a better range of entertainment products. You could go to Dunelm Mill for your household goods. Around half a dozen phone shops surrounded our back door. There were at least two greetings cards shops a stone’s throw away. The Works had some art and craft stuff. Even for toys you could go to Argos. Apparently Wilkinson destroyed Woolies down south. And of course, Woolworths competed with the major supermarkets on almost everything.

It seemed as though Woolworths needed to bring a better focus to its product range. But at the same time, it was difficult to see which departments could be safely ditched. DIY-type stuff could have been a prime candidate, but at the same time there was nowhere else on the high street (certainly on Kirkcaldy High Street) where you could buy that sort of thing. Entertainment could have gone due to poor sales, but it propped up an important arm of the Woolworths business, Entertainment UK.

I thought it would have been a good idea for Woolworths to position itself as a shop for kids and their parents. That would have brought most Woolworths departments — confectionery, kids clothing, toys, even home goods — under a clearer focus. In a way, I think Woolies had already become that store, but it didn’t have the bravery to properly market itself as such.

It is too easy, though, to blame Woolworths’s demise on the eclecticism of its range. Analysts may have bemoaned the way Woolies stocked Monopoly boards under the same roof as screwdrivers. But that doesn’t explain why one of the healthiest stores on the High Street just now is Poundland, which is like a jumble sale in comparison to Woolies. Plus, the thesis is fundamentally incompatible with the never-ending rise of the supermarket.

My next and final post in the series will look at some of the blunders of Woolworths and what life as a Woolies employee was like in the final few months.

In 1982, the British arm of Woolworths was separated from the American parent when it was bought by retail consortium Paternoster, later to become Kingfisher. It changed the direction of the company forever. According to the Woolworths Virtual Museum, BBC News reported on Woolworths being under British ownership for the first time against a backdrop of the Oxford Street store. Mere weeks later, that very store was closed down.

The Oxford Street store had never been profitable and the new owners sold it to take advantage of the fact that it was a very valuable piece of real estate. This set the scene for a swathe of store closures throughout the decade as Kingfisher sought to capitalise on Woolworths’ portfolio of valuable freehold properties.

When Kingfisher bought Woolworths in 1982, there were 955 stores in the UK. By the end of 1985, there were just 745. Every Woolco out of town store was closed. All 45 Shoppers World (an Argos-style catalogue shop) stores were closed. All of the overseas stores (Woolworths also owned stores in the Republic of Ireland, the West Indies, Cyprus and Zimbabwe) were closed.

What remained of Woolworths was experimented upon. A variety of different shop formats were trialled. One was Kidstore, focusing on goods aimed at children. Another store was bizarrely named Woolworths Weekend (worst marketing ever — why shop there during the week?), while another was The Woolworth Mall.

However, the Kingfisher years undoubtedly shaped Woolies into what we knew it as today. The pic ‘n’ mix offering was turned up to 11. Meanwhile, as well as streamlining the number of shops, Kingfisher streamlined the range of products into more or less the sort of range Woolworths was stocking up to 2008. Believe it or not, the intention was to prevent Woolies from becoming a “jack of all trades” so that it could focus on products that it particularly specialised in.

Meanwhile, experimentation with store formats continued. In the 1990s, Woolworths sought to re-enter towns it had recently left. As a cheap way of doing so, it set up stores in small units that focussed on a particular range. There was a Kids-at-Woolworths which focussed on Ladybird goods, an Entertainment-only shop and a newsagent-style Gifts & Sweets shop.

Subsequently, Kingfisher again appeared to neglect Woolworths. The Woolworths Virtual Museum bitterly notes, “Poor old Woolies, the goose that laid the golden egg for Kingfisher, was left aging in the corner throughout the 1990s – literally an asset to the Group.” This period of neglect is perhaps the root of the problems that eventually spelled the end for Woolworths.

In its day, Woolworth was an innovative store. The “five and dime” concept is one that lives on today in the form of pound shops. Arguably, one of the nails was driven into the company’s coffin by a shop using the Woolworths-invented single-price concept — Poundland (one of the few shops on the High Street that is in good shape at the moment).

Frank W. Woolworth also benefited from his strategy of stocking mass-produced, imported goods which helped drive down prices. Woolworth was also one of the first shops where customers were able to handle and select their goods without having to ask a sales assistant. (The move to self-service, however, was painfully slow, and was not fully completed until decimalisation forced Woolworths to purchase new till equipment anyway. Perhaps that was an early sign that Woolworths had become complacent and set in its ways.)

Woolworths was also, believe it or not, among the first stores to move out of town. In the 1960s it set up the Woolco out of town stores, based on an idea that originated in the USA’s side of the company. However, sceptical local authorities often refused planning permission, fearing that the move to out of town would facilitate the death of the High Street. Woolworths didn’t press on, which is why you didn’t actually see many out of town Woolworths stores.

Having closed all of the branches of Woolco down when it bought Woolworths, Kingfisher set about creating a new out of town store. Seeking to unite all of its British brands — Woolworths, B&Q, Comet and Superdrug — under one umbrella, it created Big W. It didn’t last long. The Woolworths Virtual Museum stingingly blasted:

The Big W format was the most successful prototype store ever launched by Kingfisher. But that has to be taken against a backdrop that their most successful brands – Woolworths, Comet, Superdrug, B&Q, Castorama and Darty were all created by someone else before being absorbed into Kingfisher. Big W was a first – born out of a need to justify Kingfisher’s identity.

Having failed to justify its identity, in 1999 Kingfisher pinned its hopes on a merger with Asda. Everything looked promising until Wal*mart came in and spoiled the party. In 2000, it was decided that the “general merchandise” sector of Kingfisher (comprised of Woolworths, Superdrug and MVC) would be demerged. Today, Kingfisher specialises in DIY rather than being made up of the eclectic jumble of retailers it consisted of in the 1990s.

Woolworths Group plc was formed in September 2001 — but not before Kingfisher had sold all of the Woolworths buildings, meaning that the new business had to lease all of them back from the new landlords. The saddest thing of all is that Woolworths still had huge takings — but it had ginormous rent bills.

The final words on the Woolworths Virtual Museum are rather incongruous.

With a new team at the top, and big ideas for the future, the Group is embarking on the next stage of their history. We look forward to reporting their success here in the Virtual Museum.

The final Woolworths stores in America closed in 1997. Remnants of the company live on though. The UK arm’s joint venture with BBC Worldwide, the DVD publishing house 2 entertain, is still in operation. Meanwhile, the American company still exists as Foot Locker, having decided to focus solely on sportswear in the 1990s.

Believe it or not, the last place in the world you’ll be able to shop in a bona fide Woolworth store is Germany. The company only separated from its American parent in 1997 when it became Foot Locker. But German Woolies appears to still be going strong.

Today, the shutter came down for the final time at Woolworths Kirkcaldy, Store 1201. It was among the final group of branches to close. It is the end of an era. This institution had been a fixture in Britain’s High Streets for almost 100 years.

The history of the original company set up by Frank W. Woolworth goes back even further though. Even though some of the online campaigns to save Woolies laboured under the impression that it was a British store, Mr Woolworth was in fact from the USA and he opened several stores in the USA and Canada before opening a single British branch. And right up until the 1980s, Woolies in the UK sent most of its (substantial) profits back to the USA as well!

According to the Woolworths Virtual Museum website (which was taken down when the company went into administration, but can still be viewed on the internet archive), the origins of the store can be traced right back to 1873. Frank Woolworth worked for William Moore at the Augsbury and Moore Dry Goods Store in Watertown, New York. Mr. Moore came up with the innovation to sell surplus goods at a fixed price of 5 cents.

Mr. Woolworth took this idea further, deciding to set up an entire shop full of goods that cost 5 cents. Having persuaded Mr. Moore to back the store, the first Woolworths shop opened in Utica, New York in 1978. But after an initial success, the store was eventually a flop. Undeterred, Mr. Woolworth opened a second store in Pennsylvania, 60 miles away. It was a runaway success.

From then on, there was no stopping Woolworth. By 1910, F. W. Woolworth paid for the construction of the Woolworth Building — which was the world’s tallest building until 1930 — with $15 million in cash. As well as expanding into the UK, Woolworths also opened branches in Canada, Germany, Ireland and Cuba! (Retailers named Woolworths in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Mexico have nothing to do with F. W. Woolworth’s company.)

It was only in 1909, over 30 years after the opening of the first Woolworth store in the USA, that the brand arrived in Britain. Anglophile Frank W. Woolworth had written several years earlier during a visit to the UK, “I believe that a good penny and sixpence store, run by a live Yankee, would be a sensation here.” The first British F. W. Woolworth & Co. Ltd 3^d and 6^d store was opened on 5 November 1909 on Church Street in Liverpool. It was a roaring success.

Before long, Woolworths had become bigger in the UK than it was in the USA. It was quickly given the nickname Woolies, a sign of the genuine affection the British public had for the store. By the 1920s, a new Woolworths store was being opened every 17 days. Local officials across the country were desperate for a Woolies to open in their town, and if it did so it was seen as a seal of approval for the area. The British image of the chain was further underlined when the company raised enough money to buy two Spitfires during World War II.

Woolworths dropped the fixed price concept during World War II. The 6^d upper limit had been stretched to breaking point during the 1930s as Woolies started selling socks and shoes individually for sixpence. And if you wanted a saucepan, you had to buy the lid separately too! As rationing came in, the 6^d upper limit had to go.

After the war, Woolies grew even more quickly than before. Alongside the programme re-opening stores affected by the events of World War II, 330 new stores were opened within a six year period in the 1950s. At one point, stores were opening at the rate of two per week. The 1,000th Woolworths store in Britain was opened in Portslade in 1956.

Decline set in during the 1970s. Analysts began to criticise the “moribund” store. Throughout that decade, around 150 stores were closed, bringing the number of stores back down from a peak of 1,100.

Woolworths had lots of freehold properties and sold some in order to buy DIY chains B&Q and Dodge City. Analysts were sceptical, but Woolworths Chairman Geoffrey Rogers was right in his hunch that DIY would be a growth area in the coming decade. Mr. Rogers had envisaged 100 B&Q stores opening within ten years. The target was easily surpassed.

Woolworths had much to celebrate after its first seventy years. But that was all plain sailing compared to what would face the company from the 1980s onwards. My next post will look at the history of Woolworths from the Kingfisher purchase onwards.

At work, we are given a choice between working on Boxing Day or working on the 2 January. I have always opted to take 2 January off, even though I tend not to drink much on Hogmanay — certainly not enough for me still to be hungover two days later. Sure enough, this year I have no plans to see in the new year with a bang.

(Even if I did, I probably wouldn’t be able to attend, as I’ve been hit by some winter disease that has taken it right out of me. Yesterday I was sent home from work, and when I got home I went straight to bed and accidentally fell asleep. This was at around 16:30. I stayed asleep more or less right through until 08:30 this morning. I feel better today, but still in no form to celebrate properly.)

Nonetheless, it feels right to work on Boxing Day rather than 2 January, even though I couldn’t articulate a reason why. I don’t know if this is some kind of subconscious Scottish patriotism, the day being recognised as a holiday in few other countries. Maybe it’s just because it’s later, and I want to save it up to enjoy (time discounting wouldn’t be much of a factor, as I filled in the form months ago). Or maybe it just indicates a preference for New Year as a holiday over Christmas.

It has to be said, Hogmanay is pretty naff. To be frank, we could do without the twee BBC Scotland fiddle-me-dee extravaganza. Only an Excuse? ceased to be funny about a decade ago, and lost all relevance to me as I lost interest in football. The other side is not much better, as if the BBC thought that making us suffer most Fridays of the year with Jools Holland on the box wasn’t enough.

But there is still something special about Hogmanay. I think it stems from my memories of it as a child. It was more or less the only day of the year when I was allowed to stay up late. For a nightowl like me, it was amazing. And sometimes I even got an extra special tipple with which to see in the new year: Irn Bru.

Mind you, it’s not as if childhood memories of Christmas are exactly dire. But I think it is easier to fall out of love with Christmas as you become an adult. Gleefully receiving presents makes way for having to give presents. Your eyes are opened to the stress everyone puts themselves under. People get hung up on creating the perfect Christmas, which I would have said rather ruins the mood, which is supposed to be cheerful.

Some people are forced to spend Christmas with family members that they don’t like, and possibly don’t even see for the rest of the year. For some, Christmas Day is a day of dreary, dreaded routine.

Perhaps most importantly, Christmas brings with it a whole suite of naffness. Tacky tinsel, Christmas cards with garish depictions of Santa Claus, and a list of terrible Christmas songs as long as your arm.

Despite the twee TV, our attitude towards New Year is much simpler. You go out with your pals, get blootered and take two days to recover. And perhaps most importantly, there are no bad Paul McCartney songs about New Year. Awesome.

So happy new year everyone! Thanks for sticking with the blog through the dry patches. I might make it my new year’s resolution to update more often. Then again, that was my resolution last year as well…

One of the Radiophonic Workshop’s most famous composers, Delia Derbyshire, left in the early 1970s partly in dismay at the increasing popularity of synthesisers. Disillusioned with the state of electronic music, she soon stopped composing music altogether, only returning to the scene briefly for a couple of years just before her death in 2001.

In recent times, Delia Derbyshire has probably attracted more attention than any other Radiophonic Workshop composer. But during her life it can’t have felt like that. One story often told is that of her application to work as an engineer at Decca, only to be rejected because Decca did not employ women in their studios.

Meanwhile, she received no official credit for realising perhaps the most famous piece of electronic music in the world, the Doctor Who theme tune. It was her job to convert Ron Grainer’s ideas into an electronic composition, and the result stunned Grainer so much that he insisted that Derbyshire share the credit. The BBC wouldn’t allow it.

But while recognition of her talent largely deserted her during her life, today people are well aware of her important contributions to the development of electronic music. There is a near obsessive clamour for any Delia Derbyshire material that can be unearthed.

Earlier this year a library record called Electrosonic was reissued on CD. Along with Li De la Russe (the pseudonym sometimes used by Delia Derbyshire outside of her BBC work), music on the record was also composed Nikki St. George (fellow Radiophonic Workshop composer Brian Hodgson) and Don Harper — not that you’d know it from most references to the album that I have come across. All retailers are listing it as being by Delia Derbyshire. Quibble aside though, there are some real gems on this album, with my favourite track being the delightfully eccentric ‘The Wizard’s Laboratory’.

Tantalisingly, it was revealed this year that 267 tapes from Delia Derbyshire’s attic have been unearthed. There is a promise to “make the archive available to everyone who wants to hear it”.

Appetites have been whetted by the publication on the BBC website of some of the unearthed recordings. Among them is a spellbinding piece of music that sounds quite like a contemporary experimental techno track. Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll noted, “That could be coming out next week on Warp Records.” Amazing for a recording that is almost certainly around forty years old. Nonetheless, Delia Derbyshire comes across as dismissive on the recording itself, saying, “forget about this — it’s for interest only.”

Meanwhile, a couple of CDs of music from Doctor Who were re-released this year. Delia Derbyshire, of course, provided the theme tune(s), though little in the way of effects or incidental music. Most of that was provided by Brian Hodgson, whose works make up the bulk of Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop: Volume 1: The Early Years 1963-1969. For the most part, this disc is less musical, though no less enjoyable for it.

On Volume 2: New Beginnings 1970-1980, the centrepiece is the series of music created by Malcolm Clarke on the “Delaware” synthesiser in which he specialised. This was the first time the Radiophonic Workshop “officially” created music for the series. The result is quite extraordinary — a set of stabbing, piercing, esoteric electronics that sound like the output of someone working in an extra dimension. It’s all the more amazing considering how weedy the Delaware version of the Doctor Who theme sounds.

The sleevenotes describe it as “undoubtedly some of the most uncompromising electronic music ever to feature in mainstream popular entertainment.” It is certainly hard to imagine today’s Doctor Who featuring such adventurous music.

The album is completed by the inclusion of Peter Howell’s 1980 version of the Doctor Who theme — a nod to a new era that is more fully examined in volumes 3 and 4 (not yet re-released). Of all the tweaks and alternate versions of the legendary theme, Howell’s is probably the most successful with the exception of Delia Derbyshire’s original.

Also re-released this year were old compilations The Radiophonic Workshop and BBC Radiophonic Music, the legendary “pink album”.

But among my favourite Radiophonic Workshop-related treats released this year were two CDs comprised of music by John Baker. His brother, the broadcaster Richard Anthony Baker, owned several reels of tapes containing rare John Baker music going back as far as the 1960s. Fearing that these historical tapes would otherwise have been consigned to the dustbin, Richard Baker passed the tapes on so that they could be painstakingly restored. The two volumes of The John Baker Tapes were released on Trunk Records this year.

John Baker was in fact trained as a jazz musician, but ended up in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop as a result of his interest in tape effects. In the words of Radiophonic Workshop archivist Mark Ayres, he could “make musique concrète swing”. A couple of common themes to his music is the twanging sound of a ruler being transformed into some exotic kind of guitar, and inventive uses of glass bottles.

Working there from 1963 until 1974, John Baker became one of the Workshop’s most prolific composers. But in addition to his work for the BBC, he earned about three times as much making music for commercials and suchlike. All the while he was using complex tape manipulation techniques, the main avenue of electronic music exploration prior to the widespread availability of the synthesiser.

The workload began to take its toll, and John Baker became dependent on alcohol. The BBC persevered with him for a few years, but he was eventually dismissed in 1974, partly because his music had also become weirder and less popular. Like Delia Derbyshire, he made very little music after leaving the Radiophonic Workshop.

Volume 1 of The John Baker Tapes focuses on his work for the Radiophonic Workshop, while volume 2 contains his other work. In addition to his delightful music, there are some wonderful behind-the-scenes gems. You hear John Baker describing the process behind how he made two of his pieces. Volume 2 is peppered with strange electronic experiments that were done at home, along with some wonderful recordings of his jazz piano playing.

The disc concludes with his obituary as broadcast by Richard Anthony Baker on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Brief Lives. More touching, though, is the obituary he wrote for the sleevenotes, which you can also read online. The CDs also come with rare photographs of John Baker and notes for each track. The CDs are both exquisitely packaged, with a beautiful 1960s-influenced design.

One CD I’m waiting to get my hands on is Oramics, a collection of music by the pioneering co-founder of the Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram. I can hardly wait to hear it.

Radiophonic Workshop resources

• Wikipedia (of course)
• BBC News Magazine: Four sound effects that made TV history — watch Dick Mills and Mark Ayres reminisce and re-create famous Radiophonic Workshop sound effects!
• The History of the Radiophonic Workshop
• Delia Derbyshire: An audiological chronography
• The Mark Ayres Doctor Who pages

I also got a lot of the information contained in these two posts from an edition of the Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone podcast, ‘FreakZone: 26/10/08 The Radiophonic Workshop Special’. It’s not available from the BBC any more, but if you can find it elsewhere I highly recommend it.

Regular readers may know that I have an interest in electronic music. 2008 has been a bit of a treat for fans of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This year marked 50 years since the establishment of the hugely influential sound effects and music department of the BBC. That, combined with a coincidental discovery of new tapes, has brought a feast of Radiophonic Workshop-related CD releases during the year.

I love the work of the composers of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. For anyone with even a passing interest in electronic music, some of these CDs are an absolute must. Over the years, the Radiophonic Workshop produced some of the world’s most famous electronic music.

It is probably most famous for providing music to Doctor Who. The Radiophonic Workshop was, however, originally set up to meet the growing demand for music and effects to be used in experimental plays and “radiophonic poems” on the Third Programme for which suitable library music could not always be found.

But eventually, the Radiophonic Workshop’s music and effects were in fact used by programmes in every single department of the BBC, meaning that few people in Britain can have been untouched by this magical music. Low-budget education programmes made particularly frequent use of the Workshop’s output. An early exposure to experimental electronic music inspired many to become electronic musicians themselves.

Of course, almost all music produced today is electronic in some form. What we take for granted was largely pioneered by a rather unexotic bunch working away painstakingly in a Maida Vale studio. Initially, the equipment they worked on was old and unreliable even by contemporary standards, having been recovered from the BBC’s “redundancy plant”.

At first no-one could work at the Radiophonic Workshop for longer than six months, as the BBC had a fear that prolonged exposure to electronic music could cause mental illness! Meanwhile, the time-consuming musique concrète techniques largely employed in the 1960s would have many of today’s musicians, who practically have electronic music on tap, running for the hills. Brian Hodgson says he once stayed up for three successive days and nights in order to meet his deadline.

“Radiophonic” music was made possible by the increasing availability of tape recorders which allowed inquiring minds to manipulate sounds in interesting ways. The majority of early electronic music was made by cutting and splicing tapes, changing their speed in order to create the right notes and sounds. Delia Derbyshire always carried with her a book of logarithms so that she could make the calculations required to do her work.

One CD released this year, BBC Radiophonic Workshop — A Retrospective, provides an excellent overview of the output of the Workshop over its forty year life. It showcases the extraordinary diversity of the Radiophonic Workshop. It ranges from a comedy belch produced in 1959 for The Goon Show, to the 1997 theme tune for Michael Palin’s Full Circle, via local radio station jingles and news stings.

The double disc compilation is arranged in chronological order, allowing the listener to track the development of electronic music-making techniques over time. The earlier tracks are, oddly enough, the ones that have stood the test of time much better.

The introduction of the synthesiser may have enabled composers to create electronic music much more easily and quickly. But it also brought with it a set of identikit sounds that were mostly devoid of the charm of the earlier compositions. In my personal view, even though the mastery of the composers remains fairly high throughout, the quality of the sound diminishes as the CD goes on, particularly from the mid-1980s onwards.

By that time, Radiophonic Workshop was struggling to set itself apart. While in the 1960s and 1970s the Workshop had unrivalled access to excellent electronic music making equipment, the 1980s brought about the more widespread availability of such equipment, along with a quality that today sounds rather naff. Soon enough the Radiophonic Workshop found itself being undercut by freelance musicians.

With the BBC’s cost-cutting era under John Birt well under way, the Radiophonic Workshop struggled to justify its existence. It was finally wound up in 1997, just short of its fortieth birthday, by which time just one composer, Elizabeth Parker, was working for it.

Although it is easy to let romance get the better of you, listening to the CD makes me think that the Radiophonic Workshop had ceased to be relevant by then. Fifty years ago, electronic music was a largely unexplored area, ripe for experimentation. By the 1990s, any musician could make music from his home that sounded just as good as what the Radiophonic Workshop could produce.

Nonetheless, there are some real gems to be found on this album. Maddalena Fagandini’s ‘Interval Signal’ is hypnotic and magical. Along with Delia Derbyshire’s ‘Dance from “Noah”‘, it sounds decades ahead of its time. Meanwhile, Peter Howell’s ‘Greenwich Chorus’ sounds so fantastic that it reportedly jammed the BBC’s switchboards when it was broadcast.

This excellent retrospective CD was just one of many Radiophonic wonders that we were brought this year. My next post will look at some of the other Radiophonic Workshop-related gems that have been unearthed.

Around a year ago I wrote a post that analysed the year’s activity on Last.fm. For those who don’t know, Last.fm is a website that tracks your music listening habits. It produces lovely graphs and churns out recommendations as well as providing tailored radio stations for you to listen to at your leisure. I adore the site.

This year, instead of looking just at the past year’s statistics, I have decided to look at my entire Last.fm history. A couple of weeks ago, I hit my 100,000th scrobble (instance of listening to a track). It’s a suitably big landmark.

My 100,000th scrobble happened on 7 December, just over four years after my first scrobble on 18 November 2004. By that time I had listened to 730 different artists. Of these, 18 had 1,000 plays or more. 196 artists had over 100 plays.

My top thirty artists chart looked like this:

And my top thirty tracks were:

There are a few problems with this chart. The top track, ‘untitled (live)’ by Boards of Canada, is actually several different tracks from bootlegged gig recordings. I am quite sure that ‘Xmd 5a’ by AFX should not be that high, as one day I logged in and it showed many more plays than there should have been. It’s still a good track though.

John Cage tracks figure highly because I own three different recordings of Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. In fact, many of these tracks are high up simply because I own multiple versions, normally because I have the single as well as the album. Shining’s ‘To Be Proud of Crystal Colors is to Live Again’ is actually two different tracks with the same title. All of the Autechre tracks and most of the Jaga Jazzist tracks are here purely on their own steam.

It is obvious that, interesting though they are, Last.fm statistics are far from scientifically rigorous. For one thing, one track counts as one scrobble whether it’s 31 seconds long or 31 minutes long. One website, Last.fm Normaliser, attempts to get round this by weighting your artists by the average length of their tracks. This is also completely unscientific, but it is interesting nonetheless.

This table makes my obsession with Autechre even clearer. Even in the normal Last.fm table they have a huge lead. But by this measure I like Autechre twice as much as any other artist. The biggest climber in the top twenty is Steve Reich, who is number 20 in this table, but number 37 in my original Last.fm chart.

My favourite thing to do with Last.fm data, though, is to analyse it using LastGraph. I did this last year, looking at my Last.fm activity throughout 2007. This time, I am looking at my Last.fm activity as far back as the data goes — March 2005, just a few months after my first scrobble.

The graph is so huge that I can’t include a readable version on this page, but a miniaturised version appears below. Click on it to view it at its original size (Warning: It’s a large file).

I love looking at these graphs. They tell a story about my developing taste in music. But they also, in a way, tell a story about what is happening in my life at a certain point. I can glance at the graph and remember that I had exams during a certain period, or I was working lots in that summer, or whatever. It takes me back. I’m also quite surprised sometimes at which artists appear where on the graph. It appears that my memory was a bit out in a few places.

So there we have it. 100,000 scrobbles; four years of tracking my music listening habits.

I have been freshly tagged in a meme by Chris. It’s a seven songs meme. Here are the instructions:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.“

First of all, I need to get this pedantry out of the way. If it doesn’t have words, it isn’t a song. Now on to my seven songs and / or other pieces of music.

I’ve placed this ‘below the fold’ because I’ve embedded YouTube videos and Bleep audio. Remember with the Bleep audio you need to press play again after it fades out every 30 seconds.

Click for more »

By now you may have heard of a website called Muxtape. In a way, I’m surprised it hasn’t been shut down already. It’s probably the most blatantly illegal website since YouTube. Technically, I guess, you’re meant to own the copyright to everything you upload to the service. But of course that’s not what most people use it for.

Muxtape is an enticingly simple website that lets you make a little playlist of tunes, a bit like a mixtape. Webware jokes, as if you would remember mixtapes! Meanwhile, David Title ponders if you have to be between the ages of 29-45 for the mixtape to mean anything to you!

I’m 22 (almost typed 21 there… can’t bear the adulthood), and I love the romance of mixtapes. It is like instant nostalgia. Cassettes are meant to be naff, and they are to an extent. But holding a tape is quite special, like holding a past future in your hands. Defects such as tape hiss, wow and flutter are as acceptable as surface noise. They add to the quaint beauty of the cassette.

And here is the thing. I used to make mixtapes. Then one day I decided to “upgrade” to CD-Rs. The CD-Rs would surely be more reliable and durable, right? Pah. The CD-Rs I bought were defective. For some reason iTunes (or the CD-R, I don’t know which) was making the audio of each track start two seconds before the access points. I wasted 4 CD-Rs trying to fix it, to no avail. Then it was reported to me that the CD-R wouldn’t even play! Annoying or what? The packet of faulty CD-Rs still sits beside me unused.

For all of their faults, cassettes are at least more reliable in the medium term than this. I have come to the decision that CD mixes are a bit like sending someone a letter but typing it out rather than handwriting it. You still put in the hard graft constructing it, but it is still somehow less personal, less human.

Of course, Muxtape is nothing like a mixtape. Indeed, it is probably even worse than a CD. As has been pointed out by David Title, a real mixtape is:

hours of love and care and cursing your slipping on the pause button. It’s recording little personal messages between the songs. It’s handwritting the titles and artists in painfully small print. It’s an act of love.

Muxtapes cannot even be personal. The terms (whatever they’re worth, given the dubious legality of the service) restrict you to one account only — and that’s a public account.

Nonetheless, that cute picture of the C90, the blocks of colours, the oh-so-fashionable massive Helvetica font (not that I’m guilty of that one) and the sheer simplicity of Muxtape is enough to reel you in and get you to make your own.

And make my own I did. Here is my Muxtape.

I should point out that if you like any of the tunes on my Muxtape, I think you should buy the album (the ‘Buy from Amazon’ link on Muxtape is a new addition today — a handy hint). I bought all of these. In the case of John Cage, I bought four different performances of it. In the case of Autechre, I bought the album twice.

Incidentally, there is an interesting take on the legality or otherwise of Muxtape at WebJam. The fact that Muxtape does not provide you with an easy method to download the music may be its saving grace. Besides, the cat is out of the bag. In the same way as shutting down Napster didn’t stop peer to peer filesharing, closing down Muxtape will only lead to several new clones of it.

On the simplicity of Muxtape, it is appealing — but it does make it rather light of features. There is no search function and even Google is blocked from indexing pages on Maxtape. Instead, you are presented with a random list of Muxtapes. Apart from that, you have to rely on word-of-mouth to find anyone’s Muxtape.

It’s just as well some clever fellow has created a smart Last.fm / Muxtape mashup (via Qwghlm). Enter in your Last.fm username and it will find Muxtapes containing artists that you like. Awesome.

In the meantime, it’s worth remembering that Last.fm itself has provided its own playlist service for years now, and it is on much more solid legal ground. There are some annoying restrictions — of course, you can only choose from the tracks that Last.fm has on its servers. Plus, perhaps even more frustratingly, the music is shuffled. This robs you of one of the joys of putting together a mixtape: getting the track order right. Catch my Last.fm playlist here.

A couple of months ago the BBC announced that it had reached an agreement that allowed them to use commercial music on their podcasts. This meant that, at last, the BBC could produce music podcasts. The only problem was that music could only be included in the form of clips a maximum of 30 seconds long.

I don’t know what most people think, but that sets off sirens in my head — music podcasts where the music is cut short. Of course, it is much better than having no music at all, so we should be thankful for this.

The original blog post about it was on the BBC’s interesting Radio Labs blog — take a look at it if you’re interested in the future of radio. There, Chris Kimber made a valiant attempt at explaining how and why the new music podcasts would work.

The interesting thing for me is going to be working out what works well as a podcast as opposed to a linear radio broadcast. Our approach generally is to offer “short form audio snacks”, rather than try to replicate the whole programme experience but with short music clips instead of full tracks. All the research we have done into podcasting suggests that people generally want something special and different from normal broadcast radio programmes, and that short is better than long. Most of our speech podcasts are a maximum of 30 mins long, but with these new music podcasts we are aiming for really short form – about ten minutes is what I’m recommending.

This is just a personal preference (and I know I am in a minority), but I have always preferred long things to short things. I prefer 70 minute long albums, and can just about tolerate a 45 minute long album. But I feel offended and ripped off if an album lasts 35 minutes or shorter.

It’s interesting that most of the BBC’s speech podcasts are 30 minutes long maximum. Two of the four BBC speech podcasts I subscribe to typically last 50 minutes. A ten minute long podcast is not normally my cup of tea — I prefer them to be half an hour to an hour long.

So initially I was sceptical about these new music podcasts. But I went ahead and subscribed to the music podcast that appealed to me most — Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone. My fears came true the first time I listened to it. I found it an unsatisfying listen.

I think a lot of this may be to do with the style of the programme. Sadly, I am no longer a tweenager, so I don’t know if the format works better for, for instance, the Radio 1 indie podcast. But I imagine it would. An indie tune doesn’t typically evolve much from beginning to end, and a short thirty second burst is probably enough to get a full flavour of the song.

But the Freak Zone is too analytical and beard-strokey to treat music like this (interestingly, the podcast tends to last half an hour rather than the recommended 10 minutes). The show prides itself on playing the weird and wonderful obscurities that you wouldn’t hear elsewhere. As such, the pieces of music are more deserving of a full hearing, as it were.

In the first episode of the podcast I downloaded, a short clip of ‘Autopsy’ by Fairport Convention was played. After that, Stuart Maconie began talking about the song’s time signatures, wonderful arrangement and lyrics. I just thought to myself, “Yeah, not that I heard much of it.”

Nevertheless, I am now a regular listener of the Freak Zone podcast. Even though the music clips aren’t long enough, the speech content is interesting enough.

The podcast is definitely doing its job, at least as far as the BBC’s hopes go.

There’s a buzz of excitement in interactive teams, and the radio stations too, about how this can get our audio content to people who don’t normally listen, or who would much prefer to listen in their own time, on their own portable media device.

That certainly describes me. Prior to downloading the podcast, I had only ever listened to the programme once or twice (back in the days when it was presented by Bruce Dickinson). The timeslot doesn’t suit me well, and it is true that I probably wouldn’t even listen to the full show even if I could download it (and I’ve never listened to it on Listen Again).

Despite my reservations, the digest podcast suits me very well indeed. Just a shame about the short length of the music clips.

Last week Channel 4 celebrated its 25^th birthday. John asked in the comments about people’s top ten Channel 4 programmes. I would have written this at the time anyway, but I didn’t have the time and figured I’d just let it slip under the radar. However, since the question was asked, I will answer it anyway.

Bear in mind that I am actually younger than Channel 4 is. As such, you won’t find me waxing lyrical about Max Headroom or Minipops. This is, I’m afraid, strictly 1990s onwards.

These are in no particular order, just what I thought would flow well.

Brass Eye

Following The Day Today, Chris Morris took the skewed news concept a step further with Brass Eye. The programme was sometimes controversial, with everybody specatcularly failing to ‘get’ the paedophile episode. Brass Eye highlighted and parodied media wrongs. Here is a clip about the Bad Aids.

Jam

Most people seem to be choosing Brass Eye in these lists, as have I. But I was more fond of one of Chris Morris’s other Channel 4 programmes, Jam. This disturbing sketch show was shot with strange visual effects and set to a constant background track of ambient music. Quite unique and strange, it really set itself apart from other sketch shows.

The programme often dealt with subject matters that might be seen as taboo. But you can’t help thinking, “doesn’t he have a point?” It would be irresponsible of me to compare this sketch to any recent news events.

4Later

4Later was a strand of late-night programming that ran for a few years earlier this decade. The range of programmes was pretty eclectic. Low budget games and DVD review shows Bits and Vidz were cult classics. Disinfo Nation was an “alternative news programme”. 4Later was the home of the last series of Babylon 5. Late Night Poker was the original poker programme that started the craze. A remixed version of Chris Morris’s Jam was perfectly suited to the late-night vibe.

It is such a shame that 4later was unceremoniously axed, taking with it all of its good programmes. Late nights on Channel 4 simply haven’t been the same since.

One of my favourite programmes on 4Later was The Trip, which mixed archive film footage with arty music. I’m so delighted to have found some clips of it on YouTube! It was just perfect for the late-night slot, and well worth staying up for, especially since the feeling that you were about to drop off just added to the vibe. It is probably fair to say that, combined with Jam, this programme shaped my taste in music a lot in my mid-teens.

The Big Breakfast

Kudos to Channel 4 for trying something different with the morning slot. Normally, if you don’t want news or children’s programmes, you can forget about morning television.

It was a tricky balancing act though. It was sometimes unwatchably chaotic, and sometimes seemingly the whole programme was on the verge of complete collapse. At times it also seemed as though they were all just having fun for themselves and completely forgot about the viewer. I found this particularly during the Johnny and Denise phase.

I was quite fond of the programme in its later years. But for whatever reason, the viewing public switched off. Channel 4 tried something similar with its replacement, RI:SE, but it completely misfired. The Big Breakfast had some kind of magic ingredient that made it work for a few years in the 1990s. But today, we are back to the usual diet of news and children’s programmes. Anything else would just feel wrong.

This isn’t a particularly special clip, but it is typical of the kind of material that was featured on The Big Breakfast in its later years. Nigel Buckland, presenter of late-night film show Vidz, reviewed some Christmas DVDs in 2002. You might see what I mean when I say the programme was a bit shambolic.

The 11 O’Clock Show

It is true that The 11 O’Clock Show was sometimes embarassingly bad. This was bound to happen when it was broadcast daily (soon cut back to three days a week). I still thought it contained more good jokes per week than just about any other programme. Still, it was all too easy for the programme to lapse into telling easy cock jokes.

Let’s not forget, though, that it was the early home of Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais. The huge writing team also had some great names working for it. Charlie Brooker leaps out in my memory. So it’s not as if it had unfunny people working for it. It was worth tuning in to wait for the good bits.

At the time, the programme was perhaps most famous for Iain Lee’s vox pops. Sometimes I got the feeling that the people in the vox pops were told what to say, but they were still funny nevertheless. This one doesn’t look like it has actors, but it does contain lots of dirty jokes about bodily fluids.

Whose Line is it Anyway?

I guess with the improvisational nature of the show, it was bound to be hit and miss. But when it was hit, Whose Line was hysterically funny. It has also stood the test of time rather well. The American version is screened regularly on Five US, and recently the UK version began to be shown on Dave. I find that it’s well worth giving it a look whenever it’s on because there is likely to be at least one laugh-so-much-you-cry moment.

Here is a ‘hoedown’ game from one of the later series of the UK version. Tony Slattery is obviously near his lowest point here which isn’t good to see, but nevertheless it is very funny.

Father Ted

This programme surely needs no introduction. The silly sitcom is the best of the past fifteen years in my view. Here is the classic moment from the Christmas special when Ted, Dougal and others get lost in Ireland’s biggest lingerie section.

The Chart Show

I can just about remember a time when The Chart Show was not The ITV Chart Show. A few months ago I found myself getting very nostalgic and watching lots of videos of old episodes of The Chart Show on YouTube. It was so different to the other music programmes on offer, with nothing in the way of live performances, and no presenters apart from quirky Amiga graphics.

Of course, nowadays most music programming is like this because it’s the most cost-effective way to do it. But even watching The Chart Show today, it has its own little quirks. The whole ‘FFWD’ / ‘RWND’ stuff was a bit gimmicky, but remained in one form or another until its last show in 1998.

For some reason, all of the Channel 4 versions have been removed from YouTube, while many ITV episodes remain! Here is a clip from not long after the change of channels in 1989.

The Crystal Maze

Is this the greatest gameshow ever? Yes. The Crystal Maze also must be one of the very few programme adaptations to be better than the original it was based on. Fort Boyard was good, but bland in comparison to The Crystal Maze.

Partly this is down to the ingenuity of the puzzles, and the different zones. But a lot of it is also down to the charismatic Richard O’Brien. His sarcastic comments just sum it up whenever the team messes up, which it invariably does. And of course, he had that harmonica to hand whenever he felt like putting the team off. And then there was that strange relationship with the computer in the futuristic zone…

Popworld

While the staid BBC subjected the nation’s youth to Fearne Cotton’s asinine interviews with boring boy bands, over on Channel 4 you could watch Simon Amstell being sarcastic to them. Some bands played along with it, while others took great offence. And who would believe it, it was those wankerish indie bands who were worse than the bubblegum pop groups. Essential viewing for weekend mornings, as I have already written on this blog.

Channel 4 is 25 years old today. It’s really the only commercial broadcaster worth watching. Mind you, even Channel 4 is a bit shit these days.

But the important thing is that its idents are still awesome, as they always have been. It’s great to see that Channel 4’s continuity is all in the style of the original iconic designs, with a range of classic idents being shown (some of which I’ve never seen before).

The original idents lasted an astonishing 14 years. That’s an age — you’d never see an ident package lasting that long nowadays. Even more amazingly, the original ‘4′ logo has never changed, merely being adapted for each new era.

The coloured blocks were well loved and recognisable enough for Hamlet to create this spoof version for an advert. For me, it’s surprising in two ways. For one, I’m surprised Channel 4 and the regulators allowed them to do it, given that it could have easily been confused for an actual ident.

Then there is the fact that it is tobacco being advertised — something from a different era. It goes to show just how far Hamlet were determined to advertise despite all the regulations. Sometimes a restrictive environment can make you come up with the best ideas.

It was always going to be a tough act to follow the coloured blocks. I seem to remember the circles era was quite unpopular, but I thought they were quite good.

I also liked the ’squares and stripes’ era, although it dated really quickly.

So it was a bit of a shock to see just how excellent the following ident package was!

Genius.

Channel 4 have a couple of special websites up and running for the occasion as well.

• Channel 4 at 25
• Channel 4 News at 25

More classic Channel 4 idents can be found at The TV Room. BBC News Online has 25 facts about 25 years of Channel 4.

I am quite a fan of Freeview. Even though I hardly ever watch any television these days, I think it is so wonderful to have that kind of choice fairly hassle-free for £20-odd. There have been quite a lot of changes to Freeview recently.

First came the unexpected and abrupt death of ABC1. It wasn’t a bad channel, but it always seemed like there was something that didn’t quite work about it. When it launched there were no adverts for months — so how was it funded? Then there was the distinct lack of space on prime-time on Freeview, which essentially made ABC1 a daytime-only channel.

ABC1’s schedule was therefore restricted to rather tame American comedies. The same ones. Over and over again. What’s more, they did that odd thing that digital channels sometimes do, of showing the episodes seemingly in random order. This was especially problematic for 8 Simple Rules. One minute John Ritter was dead, the next he had come back to life! And then he was dead again.

In a way this was a good thing though, because you knew what you were getting. Unchallenging, homely television. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I imagine that if ABC1 was around ten years ago, I would have loved watching it on the days when I was off sick from school.

Then came Virgin 1, which is Virgin Media’s latest little stone thrown in their big bear fight with BSkyB. “Oh, they think they’re so smart having a channel called Sky One,” some Virgin Media big-wig probably said on day. “We’ll show them! We can have Virgin 1.”

So, Ftn has been killed to death just when it was getting good. I loved Ftn in its later days. Its repeats of retro gameshows like The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor and Bullseye were strangely captivating. Then later at night there was always Takeshi’s Castle if you were up for vegetating a bit. While it was always Freeview’s worst channel, in the past year or so it had carved out a distinctive identity for itself.

The new channel, on the other hand, does not have a distinctive flavour. In fact, it is almost as if they looked at Sky One and decided “we want a programme like that, a programme like that, and a programme like that.”

In short, it is like a watered-down version of Channel Five. Do we really need another channel full of sub-standard American imports? I think not. I would have thought that, especially with the Virgin brand attached to it, they would have put a bit more effort in to make it more distinctive.

Then this week there was the launch of Dave. Dave is essentially a re-branding of UKTV G2, so it’s good to know they’ve gone from one silly name to another. A lot of people are going on about what a great name Dave is for a channel, but I think it is quite silly. They say that it’s based on the idea that “everyone knows a bloke called Dave”, which is true. The problem is that whenever I hear the name I think of that balloon-faced Conservative leader.

As for the programming it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Watching Dave is like being transported back to the 1990s. Have I Got News For You, Red Dwarf and Bottom are among its roster. Essentially, Dave seems to me like BBC Two 2. It’s the channel that BBC Three secretly wishes it could be, if only it could be unleashed from all of those quotas to do with repeats.

Then there is Never Mind the Buzzcocks. I can’t stand watching it, at least when it was hosted by Mark Lamarr. He seems like a genuinely spiteful person. He tells nasty jokes about people, which I don’t mind usually. But Mark Lamarr doesn’t seem to tell them in the sense of “I’m only having a laugh”. He seems to be genuinely nasty. I can’t stand watching it. For a further insight into the dark world of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, check out this blog post by Adam Buxton.

But without a doubt the worst programme on Dave is A Question of Sport. Why does this programme still exist, even in repeat form? It is just diabolical.

Fortunately, this crime is outweighed by the repeats of Whose Line is it Anyway. Now, why is Whose Line is it Anyway not on any more, huh?

Despite the patchy output, the launch of Dave on Freeview seems to add a lot of value. It is replacing UKTV Bright Ideas, which I doubt will be missed by many people. The hours for UKTV History have been cut back, which might not be very popular. But let’s face it. Everyone knows that history channels only ever get ratings if they either

1. Show programmes that are nothing to do with history
2. Dedicate their entire schedule to programmes about Adolf Hitler’s second cousin twice removed’s hairdresser’s pet ostrich.

Despite my interest in electronic music, my collection — shamefully — doesn’t contain very much from before the 1990s. The only ones that I can think of from the top of my head are an album of music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, some Brian Eno and Steve Reich. A recent purchase makes me wonder if I should be buying more old electronic music.

White Noise was the idea of David Vorhaus, a classical double bassist with an interest in electronics. After attending a lecture, he approached members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop — Delia Derbyshire (creator of the famous Doctor Who theme tune) and Brian Hodgson (who created the sounds of the Tardis and the Daleks). Together, they worked for a year on An Electric Storm, perhaps one of the most seminal electronic music albums there has ever been.

Incidentally, Delia Derbyshire was a genius in her own right. On an album showcasing Music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Derbyshire’s work stands out. ‘Time to Go’ takes the famous pips of the Greenwich Time Signal and turns it into a cacophony of blips and bleeps before descending into farts, burps and squirts. I wonder if it inspired David Lowe?

‘Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO’ is my favourite though. An utterly mad piece of music centring around a mad robotic chant. It sounds like it could have been created by a trippy early 1970s rock band, but it was made by a geek in a lab. There is a clip about this particular piece on this page about the BBC documentary ‘Alchemists of Sound’.

Back to An Electric Storm though. Listening to it, you can tell that it is not a recent work. It contains the sort of tricks used by the Radiophonic Workshop. But in a way this is what amazes me the most about it. This album is almost forty years old, yet it sounds more amazing than a great deal of the electronic music made today.

It’s all the more impressive when you consider the multiple hurdles the group had to clear. Having signed a contract with Island Records, they realised that they didn’t know how they were going to record the album. The first works were made by sneaking into the studios of the Radiophonic Workshop. But making an entire album this way would have been too risky. They had to build their own studio and using home-made equipment.

The album was made in an era before the widespread availability of synthesisers. Most of the noises were made by tape manipulation, a laborious task. The technique sounds a bit like an audio version of stop-motion animation. An original sound (from, for instance, Vorhaus’s bass) would have to be sped up or slowed down for each and every note. Even echo effects were achieved by rather crude means — playing two identical tapes out of phase.

A particularly ambitious song, ‘The Visitation’, took three months to make. Recording was taking so long that they faced legal action from Island and had to finish the album overnight. That the track in question — ‘Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell’ — doesn’t sound as though it was particularly rushed boggles my mind.

And what did White Noise receive for their toil? The album sold a paltry 200 copies in its first year, and the group made just £280. Luckily for us, and for electronic music as a whole, it gained traction in subsequent years and became an underground classic. This year it was remastered and re-released.

It is a genuinely pioneering record. Today an artist is labelled ‘experimental’ just for using a farty synth. But White Noise were actually pushing the boundaries and creating something truly amazing. It’s incredible to think that something so ambitious for its time should actually stand the test of time this well.

The album opens with the intriguing ‘Love Without Sound’. Vorhaus’s intention was to release this as a single to try and convert the population to electronic music. The result is a song that is equal parts accessible and impenetrable.

John Whitman’s vocals are other-worldly and detached. The music is a surreal, part-humorous, part-unsettling cacophony of clicks, clacks and warbles. This cleverly interacts with female laughs and moans. Despite the wide and unpredictable range of sounds, the resulting collage makes perfect sense, in its own surreal way. Think the “ho-ho, he-he, ha-ha” bit in ‘I Am the Walrus’, but lasting for an entire song.

This is followed by ‘My Game of Loving’. This track features a famous section of mad tumbling drums laid on top of a kaleidoscopic orgy which is comically followed by snoring. The sex-frenzy is sonically interesting, but make sure you don’t have your iPod too loud or you’ll get some funny looks on the train.

This track particularly reminds me of two more recent electronic acts. The spliced tabla-style drums remind me very much of Asa-Chang & Junray, while I would be amazed if the orgy section didn’t inspire some of Aphex Twin’s more humorous moments. This is not to mention Stereolab and Broadcast, who are influenced by White Noise as a whole.

The humour continues on the next track, ‘Here Come the Fleas’. While today’s electronic musicians are perceived as being serious, beard-stroking types, ‘Here Come the Fleas’ reminds you of the comedy potential of electronic music. The song lays into a lazy slob’s poor hygiene standards. The middle of the song is dominated by a brilliant section that would have made a cool guitar solo. It would have been so easy just to pick up a guitar and do it, but they had to go the hard way and make it with tapes, didn’t they?

That is on the “happy” side, known as ‘Phase-In’. People must have thought that this pioneering electronic music is a barrel of laughs. They were in for a shock when the turned the record over for the ‘Phase-Out’ side. The smiles and laughter are wiped away and the listener is treated to something that approaches the horror genre.

‘The Visitation’ — the track that took three months to make — is, for me, the highlight of the album. This stunning piece is about a couple of lovers who are torn apart by a motorcycle accident. As the girl screams, “please don’t go”, the motorcycle crashes. The spirit of the man who was killed tries to communicate with his weeping girlfriend, but is unable to.

It’s quite spine-chilling really. The music is genuinely haunting and really paints a picture of a dark, rainy night on a remote road where the motorcyclist is killed. It uses stereo to brilliant effect as well.

The singing and narration also creates the right mood. The spirit’s voice echoes spookily, while the singer is the coldly neutral bearer of bad news. When he sings, “Her lover’s not asleep, he’s DEEEAAAAD”, it makes the hairs on my neck stand up.

As I said, it could actually be a horror film. It would make a cracking piece of radio drama. This could be one of my favourite pieces of music. An eleven minute journey into a horrifying affair — it’s impossible not to feel sad listening to it.

Listening to An Electric Storm, there is no doubt that it is a unique product of 1969, the like of which could never be made again. Pitchfork’s review of the album says:

White Noise’s landmark 1969 album An Electric Storm might not the first thing most people think of when considering 1960s music, but there are few records anywhere tied more intrinsically to the moment of their creation. Recorded in the months immediately prior to the widespread availability of keyboard-based synthesizers, An Electric Storm might be one of the most painstakingly crafted electronic recordings of all time. Pieced together on improvised equipment via innumerable tape edits, this remarkable album is at once futuristic and unavoidably date-stamped, serving as a fascinating audio snapshot of a bygone era in sound generation and recording technology.

This was a time before the widespread use of synthesisers and computers, but at a time where there was a lot of enthusiasm and ambition for electronic music. I can’t help thinking that it’s just a little bit too easy to make electronic music today. It is impossible to imagine anyone except the bravest / maddest of souls dedicating a year of their lives laboriously fiddling about with tapes when they could just use their laptop to embark on a sonic adventure.

Given just how mind-bending this early electronic music is compared to a lot of today’s identikit techno, I can’t help but wonder if advances in technology have restricted musicians as much as liberated them.

If you are remotely interested in electronic music, I would recommend this almost as a must-buy. Not only is the music amazing, but it is also a real insight into the painstaking approaches of electronic musicians of the past (the sleeve notes are brilliantly educational in this regard). It really is true to say that they don’t make them like they used to.

• Last.fm page for An Electric Storm with sound clips
• A great review of An Electric Storm
• White Noise Wikipedia entry
• Official White Noise MySpace (!)

It doesn’t feel like they’ve been away for long enough for a proper reunion. But when you think about it, the last album Blur recorded with Graham Coxon was released almost nine years ago! This should make every Britpop fan feel really, really old.

The rumours have been going for a while. Just last year I had heard that all of the members of Blur were suing each other. Now it seems confirmed that they are all — including Coxon — going into the recording studio very soon.

The fact that Graham Coxon is back is the real news though. He was pretty central to Blur. You could tell that just by listening to the sans-Coxon Blur album, Think Tank, which felt really empty and half-arsed. After a lacklustre album, it wasn’t a surprise to see Blur fizzle out.

Meanwhile, Graham Coxon’s solo career sky-rocketed. And who could blame Damon Albarn for not being too bothered given the success (and, let’s face it, damn good music) of Gorillaz. (The less said about Alex James’s WigWam, the better. At best the song sounds like an awful re-hash of ‘Girls and Boys’. And worst it sounds like the consequences of too many drugs.)

Think Tank and the death of Blur was a disappointment because their previous album, 13, is for my money one of the best albums of the 1990s. I still feel that the was completely overlooked by the media and the public, who at the time were too busy still fawning over OK Computer to notice anything else.

Listening to some of the older Blur material, it is easy to see why everyone got so excited about the whole Britpop thing. Blur wrote so many of the great pop songs of the 1990s. You can see this by looking at the tracklisting to their Best of album — more notable for the omissions than the inclusions (where were ‘Popscene’, ‘Chemical World’, ‘Stereotypes’…?).

To celebrate the news of the reunion, it is time for a Blur with Graham Coxon Nostalgic YouTube Extravaganza! (This means a bunch of videos that I will post and will stop working within a week as they get pulled off.)

Coffee and TV

The height of Graham Coxon’s powers as part of Blur.

Click “Click for more” for more.

Click for more »

There was another reason why the European Grand Prix was great. It brought the one-off return of Murray Walker, commentating on an F1 race for a UK broadcaster for the first time since 2001.

Radio Five Live’s regular Formula 1 commentator, David Croft, was off to watch his baby being born. Murray Walker was invited to fill his chair for one race only.

This presented a dilemma to F1 fans: do you stick with the ITV coverage, or do you switch on the radio to listen to Murray Walker?

I was a little bit worried that Murray Walker’s commentary would not be up to much. He did, after all, retire for a reason. His later years on ITV were sometimes frustrating to listen to. His mind was not quite as sharp as it once was, and he regularly had to stop mid-sentence to have a coughing fit.

On the one hand, we knew what we were going to get by sticking to the ITV commentary. James Allen is disliked by many, but at least he does not make as many mistakes as Murray Walker was known to in the latter part of his career. ITV also has the excellent Martin Brundle.

But this was a one-off. A chance to listen to the greatest commentator in the world say, “And it’s go go go!” just one last time.

I opted to listen to Murray Walker, but in retrospect I should have recorded his commentary and listened to it after the race. But that wasn’t anything to do with Murray Walker. He was, in fact, much better than I expected!

But the nature of Radio Five Live meant that three sporting events were being covered at once. And while the Grand Prix took the bulk of the airtime, there were long periods where the focus was on golf or cricket instead. So it was not a full race commentary.

But apart from that, it was a joy to listen to. The producers obviously knew the sort of people who would be tuning in to listen to Murray Walker, and the broadcast began with a familiar tune — but one that hasn’t introduced a Grand Prix for over ten years.

“Aah, they’re playing my tune!”, said a delighted Murray Walker. And immediately he was into the swing of things. He didn’t bumble along as I feared. He might be 83, but you would not be able to guess it. He still knows how to broadcast.

It was classic Murray. He used plenty of catchphrases without descending into self-parody. No one else can start a Grand Prix like Murray Walker.

One light. Two lights. Three lights. Four lights! Five lights! …AND IT’S GO! GO! GO!

It was not perfect throughout. At times he was commentating for the radio, but a couple of times he slipped into saying things like, “and you are looking at…” He also often got tangled up, forgetting people’s positions from time to time.

There was also a classic “Murrayism”.

And Winkelhock goes through in the orange Spyker, well down the field… Well, he’s not well down the field, he’s actually in tenth position because he’s yet to come in.

That was when Winkelhock led the race! Although Murray Walker can be forgiven because I found that fact difficult to believe myself…

I do not agree with everything that Murray Walker says. He supports the British drivers a bit too much for my liking. He was also far too sympathetic to Michael Schumacher. He is seemingly the only person in the world who does not believe that Schumacher deliberately caused crashes at Adelaide in 1994 and Jerez in 1997.

But it is impossible not to love him as a broadcaster. As a describer of action, no one can rival him. Clive James said, “In his quieter moments, it sounds like his trousers are on fire.”

If I live to be 83, I hope that I can have just a fraction of the energy and enthusiasm that Murray Walker has. When something interesting his happening on the circuit, Murray Walker is the first to get excited, and soon enough everyone knows about it.

A particularly colourful and vivid description of Alonso overtaking Massa towards the end of the race showed exactly why Murray Walker is so highly regarded.

Alonso is practically sawing the Ferrari in half with his nose cone!

Utter genius.

(Thanks to Tom for giving me the opportunity to hear Murray Walker’s commentary even though I was at work when the race was on!)

The Guardian has quite an interesting article about “classic” albums that do not warrant the hype (via DJ Martian). I wonder if that has one eye on the 10^th anniversary of the release of OK Computer?

One interesting album on the list is Dark Side of the Moon, as nominated by Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh. I was just thinking recently about how Dark Side of the Moon is probably not Pink Floyd’s best album. Then someone brought it up in a conversation I had. Now this!

But the one that really made me happy was the inclusion of Is This It by The Strokes. Ian Williams of Battles wrote a paragraph about its mediocrity. Everything he says is spot-on.

I recently wrote about how I loathe indie music. I noted that the turning-point came when I was about 15 or 16 in 2001 — the year that Is This It was released. Never was an album title so apt.

There was so much hype surrounding The Strokes, it seemed impossible to believe that they would be anything but good. But when a friend made a CD-R of the album for me, I hated it so much that I returned it!

Is This It was so bad that it actually gave me a headache. It was so unbelievably conservative, derivative and certainly anything but “alternative”. The sheer monotony of the entire album made me depressed.

While I am often willing to give an album more than one chance on the basis that repeated listens can reveal hidden treats, I have refused to listen to Is This It a second time. It was obvious that this album had absolutely nothing to offer. And I didn’t want to risk getting a migraine.

As if to top it off, Is This It — if memory serves — lasts barely more than half an hour. This makes it an absolute fucking rip-off if you buy it at a normal album price. I expect an EP to be that long. Half an hour is roughly the length of a single that is released in the pretty much ubiquitous CD1 + CD2 format.

In short, Is This It lacked breath, depth and length. The personification of one-dimensional music. The prospect that The Strokes were the future of guitar-based music absolutely horrified me. So I turned my back on it all.

At the same time I discovered bands like Broadcast and Tortoise. I spent many evenings that year exploring the Warp Records website, avidly listening to the audio clips of their releases. A door had been opened to an amazing world where exciting and innovative music was being made.

Six years on, I am still listening to exciting and innovative music released on Warp — in the shape of Battles.

For an alternative view on The Guardian article, here is Richard Havers.

I’m not much of a gigger really. In fact, since the first proper one I attended six years ago (My Vitriol, who must now rival Portishead as the slowest-working band in the world), the only other gig I’ve attended was a really awful local band in a pub. I was dragged along, and I haven’t really recovered since.

There are a few reasons for this. One of the main ones is that hardly any of the bands that I like ever play in Edinburgh. My brother says this is because Edinburgh has a 10pm “noise curfew”. WTF! It’s meant to be a city of culture, but no music is allowed in case it wakes up Tarquin. Shameful.

The trek from Kirkcaldy to Glasgow is tiring, time consuming and expensive. But I don’t think anything would have been able to prevent me from seeing what Battles are like live.

Of course, we had to endure a shite support act first. The Penpushers have four members, but only two of them ever seemed to be doing anything at any one time. (My brother pointed out that one of the members was called Obsolete — and wasn’t he just!)

The music was nothing special. I think if this was fifteen years ago, when DJ Shadow was at the height of his popularity, this would have felt fresh and maybe even exciting. Today, the sound is rather dated and underwhelming.

At one point the frontman bemoaned the lukewarm reception, calling the audience “an Edinburgh crowd”. But they deserved an Edinburgh reception. Especially since we were about to see possibly the most futuristic band around at the moment, Battles (not The Battles, as Mr Penpusher annoyingly kept calling them).

The start of the performance caught by surprise. Bassist Dave Konopka, without the other members present, appeared just to be fiddling around, preparing or practising something. Then, all of a sudden, he just turned round and hammered out four bars worth of music.

Konopka stopped playing, but the music continued in a loop. It was a loud, bassy line — the sort that you can feel as much as you can hear. It seemed vaguely familiar, but nothing I could place from Battles’s records. Then he turned round to attend to his magic box. A few button presses later, and all of a sudden the unfamiliar sound was transformed into the very familiar beginning of ‘Race: Out’.

The rest of the band arrived, and we were to be treated to an hour or so of mind-bending music and technology. And the use of technology is quite important, because this is what pushes their unique sound. A simple guitars-and-keyboards band, Battles are not.

Pitchfork seemed to think that their album, Mirrored, is nothing short of revolutionary. Also read their review of Seefeel’s Quique for a comparison of Battles’s mix of guitars and technology to what Seefeel were able to achieve 15 years ago. Battles could not have existed in their current state before today.

It is just as well that they do exist today. Ever since the likes of IDM started to sound a bit stale a few years ago, there has not been much in the way of forward-looking music. It looks as though, right on cue, Battles have come to save the day.

Five or ten years ago, Mirrored would have been one of those studio albums that is impossible to replicate in a live environment. To watch the guitars and Tyondai Braxton’s vocals being electronically manipulated like this in real time is pretty extraordinary. As you may be able to tell, I was as impressed by the technology on display at the gig as much as the music itself.

Indeed, the music itself was a little bit off-colour. Particularly at the start of the set, a few mistakes were being made. Ian Williams in particular seemed more excited by the prospect of jumping around and looking energetic than actually hitting the right key on his keyboard. For a band that is often labelled “math rock”, they seem to delight in being imprecise from time to time.

And this “math rock” band is not just about chin stroking. Infact, particularly on Mirrored, they seem to be almost anti-chin stroking. At times whimsical and humorous, Battles are not afraid to produce an unashamed crowd-pleaser such as ‘Atlas’. And ‘Atlas’ really is a crowd pleaser, with members of the audience singing along to the “whooa-aay-oooh” bit, though they were probably prohibited from singing the rest because of ambiguity as to what the rest of the lyrics actually are.

I suppose the sheer energy is part of what makes Battles awesome live. This is particularly true of their stunning drummer, John Stainer. He clearly has his admirers. One person in the crowd seemed to be there solely to see John Stainer. At one point he just randomly started chanting, “John! John! John! John! John! John! John!” I think in his head the whole crowd was chanting with him.

Unlike Williams, Stainer is so relentlessly dedicated to playing correctly that it almost defies belief. Fast, precise and intricate, it was inevitable that he would start sweating. But I have never seen somebody sweat so much in my life. By the middle of the performance he looked like he had just come out of a swimming pool.

It wasn’t just sweat either. At one point I was unfortunate enough to look up just in time to see a huge string of gob come out of his mouth. I have a feeling that, when I’m old and senile, that will be my best memory of the gig.

I was a little bit annoyed that they didn’t play what I think are the two best tracks on the album, ‘Rainbow’ and ‘Ddiamondd’, but you can’t have it all.

Battles in action: ‘Atlas’ live at Chicago Glass Bottle, 30-03-2007

That full concert (!!) is available on YouTube here.

More Battles awesomeness

• Last.fm event page: Battles at ABC2 on 23 May 2007
• Flickr photoset by Mike Quin: Battles at the ABC
• Battles MySpace
• Battles official website

Blue Peter is in the news at the moment because it is losing a show per week. So it will be going back to two programmes per week, just like it was up until the mid-1990s. And this is not long after it went down from five shows per week.

Of course, like most decent people, I am outraged. But if I was in the programme’s target audience, would I give a monkey’s? Probably not.

When I was actually in Blue Peter’s target audience, I thought Blue Peter was one of the most boring programmes in the world. I just couldn’t understand the appeal.

There were only two different things that ever happened on Blue Peter. The first type involved a twatty presenter abseiling — and the presenters of my era were twatty. Take your pick from Tim Vincent, Stuart Miles or — worst of all — Katy Hill. No bloody wonder I didn’t watch it.

The other type involved making some rubbish makeshift doll’s house out of a bunch of ropey catchphrases. Here’s one I made earlier, sticky back plastic, yes, yes I get it. Ha ha ha.

Apart from that, I have no real memories of the programme from my childhood. In fact, all of my strongest memories of the programme are from when I was in my mid-teens.

Now I am more mature, and I think that Blue Peter is an important institution which is what puts the Great in Great Britain, or something like that. But here is the problem with Blue Peter: it is not aimed at children at all. It is aimed at adults or, more specifically, parents.

Most children’s programmes are, actually. You only had to look at the reaction to Dick and Dom In Da Bungalow, which split people into two camps: children and parents. The parents were shocked that Dick and Dom did not educate, and raised their arms in horror at the ‘Bogies’ game.

But these elements of no-holds-barred immaturity — and the fact that it didn’t provide advertising slots for the shit boy bands that are usually the staple of Saturday morning television — were precisely what kids found entertaining. As for me, the first time I saw it I was actually crying with laughter. I think it would be a sad state of affairs if po-faced parents banned children from being children.

That is why I am suspicious about the Blue Peter institution. I don’t find it offensive, but I think the reason it exists is to keep adults happy. Blue Peter is mostly about mythology and nostalgia more than anything else. It’s about watching the new presenter fail to flip a pancake. It’s about sticky back plastic and “here’s one I made earlier”. It’s about “what a lovely pair of knockers”. It’s about that elephant that did a massive shit on the floor.

But children don’t care about any of that stuff. If children like it as much as adults do, then that’s fair enough. But I suspect that they don’t. Part of me hopes that Blue Peter exists for as long as television exists. Part of me suspects that it really ought to be consigned to nostalgic clip shows.

I was all set to have a little bloggy party. “Another blogging milestone reached!” etc. There I was sitting pretty on the rankings of every blogger’s favourite website, Technorati.

doctorvee
98 blogs link here

That is the message that greeted me when I visited Technorati’s home page yesterday. Fans of round numbers will undoubtedly have noticed that 98 is tantalisingly close to 100 (which is technically less of a round number than it is two round digits and a straight digit).

Of course, we are talking about Technorati here, so I could probably get a more accurate idea of how many blogs are linking to this one by throwing darts. But still, I could say that 100 blogs link here according to Technorati, which is good enough for me.

So what did I see when I logged in to Technorati today?

This reminds me of the good old days of Ceefax. Page 360, motor sport news, was always one of my favourites. So I would call page 360 and keep my beady eye on that top line that scrolls through all of the page numbers. Almost there. 356, 357, 358, 359… WTF? 361?! I have to wait a whole while longer.