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The second-best book about twentieth century music

'Thus, from the birth of radio circa 1922 to its death by TV and reruns in the mid-1940s, there was almost enough work for all the talent in a ballooning country, and all bets were off concerning the incidence of genius.' Quote from 'The House that George Built' by Wilfrid Sheed

Everybody knows the best book about Twentieth Century music is Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise but there’s another brilliant book set in the same period – Wilfrid Sheed’s The House That George Built, a history of the golden age of American popular music. It’s about the generations of American songwriters, starting at the turn of the twentieth century in what Sheed calls ‘the piano era’, who essentially invented what we now know as popular music.

It’s sub-titled ‘with a little help from Irving, Cole and a crew of about fifty’ and it’s told through the abbreviated life stories of the dozens of lyricists and composers who grafted on Broadway, on Tin Pan Alley and in Hollywood to make us all song addicts. It’s warm and entertaining and full of mad insights into the psychology and economics and aesthetics of pop music.

It’s also a catalogue of amazing songs – from Basin Street Blues to Body and Soul to Baby it’s Cold Outside to April in Paris. I’ve created a Spotify playlist for each section. The artists are a bit variable – performers from the other end of the Twentieth Century aren’t as well-represented as they ought to be on Spotify – and there are a few gaps but it’s an amazing mosaic of song. Let me know if you’ve found better versions.

You may think you want the death penalty but you don’t have the stomach for it

Surveys suggest that a majority of ordinary Britons want a return to the death penalty for the most heinous crimes (this online poll on The Sun’s web site has 80% in favour). And, thanks to the government’s rules for e-petitions, our legislators may soon be obliged to debate the topic again. Some of them may even vote for it. I’m opposed to the return of the death penalty and I find the pop media’s pro-execution rhetoric to be chilling and inhuman but I’m certain that it will never happen. Britain just doesn’t have the stomach for the cascade of secondary decisions that we’d have to make in order for it to become law:

Who will do it? A court-appointed executioner? How about a group of ordinary citizens pressing buttons at home, none of them knowing whose button actually does the deed? Or the victim’s family? I’ll suggest that executioners are drawn by lottery from the list of people who’ve expressed support for the new law. That sounds logical: it surely can’t be OK to vote for the death penalty and expect someone else to despatch the condemned, can it? If there’s a chance that you’ll have to squeeze the syringe, will you still vote for it? And, once appointed, how will the executioner cope with the attention of the media? Will he or she be allowed to sell the story of the condemned’s last moments? Or will the law mandate anonymity? And what will happen the first time the family of an executed criminal brings a civil case against the executioner or the prison or everyone involved in the deed?

How will we do it? A lethal injection? Electrocution? Hanging? None has a great track record. None is humane. How will we decide? It’ll take a decade. High-tech solutions will be proposed (shot into the vacuum of space? Instantaneous robotic dismemberment? Nanoexecutioners?). The debate will rage. Campaigners on both sides will mount judicial challenges. It’ll be chaos and, as soon as the first horrendous screw-up happens, it’ll all start again.

Will we do it publicly and who will observe? I’ll argue that judicial killings should be streamed online from multiple angles (in 3D) and that a panel of ordinary citizens should be obliged to observe from close quarters – selected by the jury service process, perhaps.

And will a doctor be present? Someone will need to ensure good practice and certify death. Does the Hippocratic oath permit that? Will the BMA? And if they don’t, will rogue doctors show up to do the honours or will we have to create a new class of state-appointed ‘execution doctors’?

What will we do with the body? Will we consign the dead to a secure prison graveyard or permit shrines to arise in public cemeteries? How about mandatory cremation and scattering? Will we forbid elaborate funerals and celebrations of the lives of the wicked deceased?

What will we do the first time an innocent person is executed? Will the new law have provision for automatic compensation? Will executions cease while standards of evidence are examined and investigations reviewed? Could the death penalty actually survive a mistake? Or would we be back at square one?

And what about death row? Will there be a single, national facility (designed by a rockstar architect, perhaps, with an atrium) where the condemned work through their decades of appeals? Or will each prison keep a mini-death row of its own? Will the inhabitants be allowed access to the media, web sites, Twitter accounts? Will there be a reality TV show?

There are other questions: will we execute young people or people with learning disabilities? Will we execute mothers of young children? Will we execute foreigners? Will the new law require derogation from international human rights law? Will Britain become a pariah once it rejoins the club that includes all the most hideous regimes on earth (and the United States)? Will the first executions for nearly fifty years bring about civil unrest? Can a civilised state tolerate the introduction of state-sanctioned killing? Will it dehumanise us and our children? Will MPs even contemplate the prospect of another nasty and divisive debate about the grimmest of all subjects? Who will draft the bill, draw up the regulations, implement the policy? Will civil servants and prison officers who object be forced to implement the law? Will employment tribunals consider the dismissals of conscientious objectors? And so on. And so on. Like I said, we don’t have the stomach for it.

Steampunk radio on the Victorian Internet


A remarkable story about Victorian media innovation

Radio is changing. The first digital radio platform – DAB – is in danger of being eclipsed before most of us have even bought one. The second wave is evolving fast, but widespread Internet radio is years away so radio stations are investing in web sites and apps. Meanwhile, audiences for radio everywhere are steady but looking fragile and everyone’s waiting for a persuasive mixture of content and convenience to justify the switch to digital. And billions of cheap-to-own FM radios are a huge impediment to switching.

130 years ago, nearly thirty years before the first public radio broadcast, at an international electrical exhibition in Paris, entrepreneur Clément Ader prototyped a package of content delivered on a new platform, the telephone. He called his prototype a ‘telephonic opera’ service because opera performances were the main content (just as they had been in Zurich in 1878, when a performance of Don Pasquale was relayed via telephone only months after its invention). The prototype became a commercial product later in the decade under the name Théâtrophone.

Subscribers to the service, including, I kid you not, Marcel Proust (in his cork-lined room at 102 Boulevard Hausmann), dialled in from their home telephones (a technology that was only a decade old itself) and asked to be put through to one of the participating theatres. They then listened to the evening’s performance live. In stereo. At the time of the original demonstration, Scientific American said:

The singers placed themselves in the mind of the listener, some to the right and others to the left. It’s easy to follow their movements and to indicate exactly, each time that they change their position, the imaginary distance at which they appear to be.

Two separate telephone lines delivered signals from two stage microphones: one right, one left (this Wikipedia entry suggests eighty microphones and, since they weren’t electronic microphones, just crude acoustic ones, that doesn’t sound unreasonable).

A subscriber to an equivalent service in London, Electrophone, described the process:

You lifted your ordinary telephone receiver and said ‘Electrophone please’ and in a moment you were asked which theatre you wanted and in another moment you were in your armchairs around the table listening to musical comedy at the Adelphi…

Theatres, music halls – and, later, places of worship, all over London were wired up to the Electrophone exchange at 34 – 35 Gerard Street in Soho and Electrophone attendants (we’d call them Studio Managers or OB engineers) were stationed in each to position mics and connect subscribers.

Electrophone listeners in 1901

If you’d lived in Budapest in the 1890s (and been a wealthy gadget freak) you’d have subscribed to a service called Telefon Hírmondó which, you’ve got to admit, was startlingly like a modern radio network, with content organised into ‘channels’, a daily schedule (including stock quotes, local press, finance, theatrical and sporting news) in addition to the usual operatic performances (what is it with the opera?). There were children’s concerts, acts of worship, folk music, recitals. Advertisements, inevitably, were inserted between juicy news items. The company employed 100 people, with job titles like ‘editor’ and ‘programme controller’ and, at its peak had 6,000 subscribers.

The Théâtrophone receiver
The Théâtrophone receiver

But what’s remarkable for me about these services (there were dozens worldwide) is how closely they resemble the ones we’re building now on The Internet. Clicking ‘play live’ for Radio 3’s nightly live concert is essentially the same as asking the Electrophone ‘attendant in charge’ to put you through to the Wigmore Hall – a personal, two-way circuit connecting you to a live event a long way from home. Nineteenth Century opera nuts were using two-way telepresence to enjoy remote performances that were significantly more immersive than what was to come from terrestrial radio decades later. The spatial separation and specially-designed in-home kit (the ‘Electrophone table’ and Théâtrophone’s special receiver) that came with these services must have made these experiences extraordinarily vivid. Vivid enough for Proust to listen to a performance of Pelléas and Mélisande all the way through in 1911.

They even had pretty sophisticated tiered business models – an extra £5 per season for Covent Garden, for instance (no freemium as far as I can tell, though). These pioneers built a highly immersive Victorian cyberspace on the first of the really big wired networks – and, let’s face it, mostly because they misunderstood what people would actually wind up using their telephones for. The implications for the services we’re designing and promoting now set the mind reeling.

  • Google ‘Théâtrophone‘, ‘Electrophone‘ or ‘Telefon Hírmondó‘: you’ll find plenty of web sites about these pre-radio experiments. Here’s a good technical overview of Electrophone, for instance. I owe the inspiration for this post to a terrific Sunday Feature from Radio 3 last year called The Pleasure Telephone, presented by Edward Seckerson. The programme is sadly unavailable. Hunt down a recording if you can find one.
  • The picture at the top shows a coin-operated Théâtrophone receiver of the kind that would have been installed in cafes and special listening rooms. All the pics are from the Wikimedia Commons.

Radio 4’s Pick of the Week – all at once

All the clips from Radio 4's Pick of the Week stacked up in Garageband

A week ago I speculated here about what listeners might do with BBC radio content if allowed to play with it. I came up with something quite linear – a kind of listener-curated Pick of the Week. Here’s something a bit more playful (or dumb, depending). It’s the fifteen clips from Sunday’s Pick of the Week, selected by Graham Seed, all at once.

Click play to hear the cacophony. I think it adds up to quite a pleasing, BBC radio-shaped lump of sound – and another way of expressing the variety and unpredictability that is BBC radio. Wouldn’t it be fun if we could provide tools for listeners to play in this way? Respectful apologies to all the programme-makers involved (and to Graham Seed too, of course).

It’s not entirely unproduced – I stacked the fifteen clips as tracks in Garageband, trimmed them all to 30 seconds each and then staggered them to come in at four-second intervals. This means that the maximum you’ll hear at once is eight. There are no fades, apart from the final clip, which seemed to need one.

You’ll hear: Supermarket Symphony (Radio 4), Composer of the Week, Gian Carlo Menotti (Radio 3), Barbara Windsor’s Funny Girls, Hylda Baker (Radio 2), George Bernard Shaw, Widowers’ Houses (Radio 3), Bird Fancyers Delight (Radio 4), Afternoon Play, Gilda and her Daughters in Looking for Goldie (Radio 4), Twenty Minutes, Romance (Radio 3), Down and Out in the the City of Angels (Radio 4), The Robeson Files (Radio 2), Johnnie Walker meets Neil Diamond: New York City Born and Raised (Radio 2), Tim Key’s Suspended Sentence (Radio 4), A Hundred Years of Mervyn Peake (Radio 4), Afternoon Play, Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think of You (Radio 4), Desert Island Discs, John Graham (Radio 4) and I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue (Radio 4).

Allowing listeners to curate BBC radio

A Radio Times radio listing written on Steve Bowbrick's hand in felt pen

It was a quite brilliant weekend for BBC radio – so much good stuff that really stood out. Loads of radio that wasn’t just gripping, interesting, entertaining but was also sonically fascinating – a uniquely radio experience. Sounds that I really wanted to share. Another testament to what’s unique and different about radio (and BBC radio in particular, obviously).

There was the awesome boom and roar of 5 live’s Haye-Klitschko coverage, Craig Charles’ inspired heavyweight Motown vs Stax evening over on 6 Music, Paddy O’Connell’s brilliant riff on the Johann Hari story on Broadcasting House, the oddly intimate sound of sheep shearing on Radio 4’s On Your Farm, Saturday Live’s hilariously unpredictable live broadcast from centre court on the morning of ladies’ final day, a gorgeous Beverley Surprise Minor on Bells on Sunday, Stewart Lee on why comedians are better than everybody else, Jarvis Cocker introducing a concert of electronic music from Radio 3, Von D. May’s favourite synth sound with Mistajam on Radio 1, mindblowing Hindu devotional music at the crack of dawn on Asian Network, and a song about Elvis’s sock by the Valentines on Radio 2.

And it got me thinking about how you get people to share great radio, to tell their friends about it, to spread the loveliness. At the BBC, we’ve got ‘sharetools’ (the palette of social network links you’ll find on most BBC content pages these days) and embed buttons and these days there’s quite a lot of content that you can download and keep forever but rights and agreements and regulation make it difficult for us to allow listeners to share the actual sounds. But could we allow listeners to go beyond ‘liking’ our stuff and encourage them to lift clips, assemble montages of good stuff and share them with friends? I mocked up a sort of sample montage from the amazing output I heard at the weekend – no clip is longer than about twenty seconds and the whole thing is less than four minutes. I’ve added in a little linking element between clips – the kind of transition you might offer listeners to pick from a menu if you built a tool to do this.

Would you share BBC audio in this way? Would you go to the trouble of curating a montage like this if BBC radio provided a tool to do it? And what form would a tool take? A button on programme pages? An addition to the transport controls in Radioplayer? A mobile app?

Download the MP3.

Five radio station iPhone apps

Dandelion Radio

Dandelion Radio

Update, 30 June. Paul Webster, on Twitter, prompted me to stick a sixth radio iPhone app in here at the top of the post: a lovely app from Dandelion Radio, the online-only indie music streaming service ‘inspired by John Peel’. He’s right, the app is lovely and although Dandelion’s licence only permits live streaming (no on-demand audio), the app has some lovely geeky extras, like real-time track info and data pulled in from MusicBrainz and other sources while you listen. Highly recommended.

Most radio station apps are hugely boring – just a marketing must-have or another tickbox on the platform strategy. And besides, the whole idea is evil – radio should be out on the open web, not in miserable single-platform ghettos. And there’s no reason why it should be, of course. Visit the BBC Radio 1 web site on your iPhone or Android device and you’ll experience something with the integrity of an app but with no download. It’s just a beautifully-crafted mobile web site.

But, in the meantime, let’s not be dogmatic. Let’s accept that radio stations have good reasons to build their own apps and that some of them are all right – even lovely. There are dozens, possibly hundreds, of simple radio listening apps, for every genre, language and country – from Cuba to South Korea – but I’m not interested in those. Here are the five radio station apps* I like best:

RTE Doc on One

The RTE Doc on One strand is one of the jewels of world radio. Multiple award-winning home to gorgeous, humane, intelligent documentary radio.

The app does one thing really well – you can listen to hundreds of full-length programmes from the archive (including programmes from Ronan Kelly’s equally important Curious Ear strand which is home to the less predictable, sonically interesting stuff). I spend a lot of time in the Doc on One app and I’ve still only listened to a fraction of the programmes on offer. The app, like a lot of others, is sadly a bit out of date and doesn’t support multitasking but you can ‘background’ by switching to Safari, which will do in the meantime (and is another reminder of how hopeless the whole closed app store model is).

This American Life

If you’re a card-carrying member of the Cult of Ira you’ll definitely need this one. It’s the whole enchilada, all in one place, and it costs a couple of quid, which supports the programme, so you’ll get a warm feeling. Every radio show (TV shows too, if you like that sort of thing) plus blog posts and some odds and ends of audio from the old days – including the early NPR appearances of David Sedaris who got his break here, courtesy of Ira Glass. This American Life is hugely influential everywhere in speech radio and you’ll often hear voices from Radio 4, RTE 1, CBC Canada etc. in the shows.

WFMU

I fired up the WFMU app while cleaning my teeth this morning and (I kid you not) it dropped me in the middle of this twenty-five minute recording of a lecture by semiologist of pop culture Roland Barthes (in French) from 1978. That’s pretty much all you need to know about the WFMU app. You get access to live and on-demand content from the the best freeform radio station in the world. Mostly music, on a chaotic, essentially incomprehensible schedule (even the station’s web site calls WFMU ‘dysfuntional’), from every conceivable genre, but always with an experimental/weird vibe. My favourites are Benjamen Walker’s brilliant Too Much Information, MAC’s amazing Antique Phonograph Music Program (definitely the only place you’ll hear wax cylinder recordings every week) and the occasional eructations of Ken Goldsmith’s Ubuweb (from whence came the Barthes).

CBC Radio Canada

This is pretty much your bog standard radio station app – access to live streams from the CBC stations plus audio from CBC TV (which is weirdly OK). But this one’s got CBC Radio 3 in it, which makes it inherently interesting because Radio 3 is a fascinating attempt at a redefinition of a national public service radio station. Radio 3 plays only music by new Canadian artists so it’s a kind of explicit reinvestment of public money in national talent, a ‘Buy Canadian’ drive on a massive, 24/7 scale. Fascinating and slightly disorienting. There’s something faintly anthropological about looking in on a nation’s musical culture in this hermetic form. I’m not sure if it really works. Could it work in the UK, for instance? A kind of round-the-clock BBC Introducing? I don’t think so.

Radio France

The Radio France app is beautifully put together with live listening for all the Radio France networks including France Bleu (the local radio network) and lots of extras, including news bulletins pushed to your phone (which are in French, obviously) and access to videos and podcasts for each network. FIP is my favourite station: a kind of chic 6 Music, with an impossibly eclectic mix of music delivered in cleverly-themed chunks – and not a crusty former rockstar-cum-DJ in sight. The perfect soundtrack for your next salon or hipster soirée kind of thing.

This list necessarily excludes a whole generation of radio station-substitutes – Mixcloud, Last.FM and Audioboo to name but three. Apps that offer a mobile audio experience in many ways richer and more provocative than even the most freeform schedule-bound radio station could. Another blog post, I think…

*And yes, I know that not all of these apps are strictly station apps (one of them doesn’t even belong to a radio station) but they’re closely associated with stations and represent old-school radio brands in app-land so that’s good enough for me.

From the NASA archive

Astronauts John Young and Gus Grissom are pictured during water egress training in a large indoor pool at Ellington Air Force Base, Texas, in this image from 1965

I love this 1965 image from NASA’s archive. The caption reads:

Gemini Water Egress Training. Astronauts John Young and Gus Grissom are pictured during water egress training in a large indoor pool at Ellington Air Force Base, Texas. Young is seated on top of the Gemini capsule while Grissom is in the water with a life raft. Waiting in the rear, Frankie “bow-tie” Kornacki, Grissom’s bookmaker, patiently awaits payment for a string of bad college football bets. Grissom prolongs training, suggesting “another go-round”, hoping to avoid the expected unpleasantness

Click the image for a bigger version.

Is that it for the PC?

A vintage IBM PC

The latest Mac OS is the first that can only be bought from an app store, from a tightly-integrated, locked-down, official source. I reckon that’s pretty much it for the free-range, open platform we call the PC.

Googling myself the other day, I found this article from The Guardian nine years ago.

It’s about the unexpected persistence of the Personal Computer. My point was that the general purpose lump on your desk was already then a dinosaur, overdue for replacement by:

a swarm of gadgets variously attached to your person, colonising your home (at about ankle height), discreetly re-stocking your fridge or representing your interests on the net while you sleep.

The anti-PC forces were then strong, or at least numerous. You had thin-client efforts from Oracle, Sun and various startups, a bunch of clunky ‘Internet-on-your-TV’ products (got some of those in my loft), WAP stuff and the first generation of web apps that offloaded your PC’s functions to the net. So, even then, things didn’t look great for the PC.

But, I proposed, the PC persisted because it offered us a kind of autonomy and control that was profoundly liberating. The PC (in its various flavours) had, after all, entirely changed the world for a lot of us about twenty years previously, precisely because it was a blank slate, an autonomous zone. Do you remember the rather daunting feeling of powering up a new computer in those days? The “What do I do now?” feeling that forced you to a) learn a programming language, b) publish a fanzine or c) write a screenplay – because there simply wasn’t anything else to do. I said, back then:

…for the young, the PC is a liberated zone, a place of permission, autonomy, creativity and of almost unlimited possibilities. Very few man-made things can ever have carried so much meaning, condensed so much value and potential for action.

But now, nearly a decade after that article and thirty years after the revolution began, it looks like the PC may finally have reached its sell-by date. The whole complicated, liberating architecture is collapsing. Steve Jobs used the phrase “the post-PC era” in his keynote on Monday. A BBC manager told me the other day: “we’ve done some research, the PC’s finished as a platform”.

And its replacement doesn’t look anything like as liberating. That ‘swarm’ of devices has arrived but without the messy, unfinished, frankly out-of-control software/hardware ecosystem that produced the generations of iconoclastic hackers and creators busy remaking the world for us in business, politics and culture in 2011.

It drove us all crazy while we fought with it to install printers and format newsletters and debug compilers but we’ll remember the stack of hardware and software that makes up the PC as a place of enormous freedom – to tinker, to modify, to fix, to build and invent.

And will the new, closed platforms evolve into sophisticated tools for creation and invention? Probably. But will they also limit our access to the hardware, close off the OS and force us to add new functionality and content via monopoly commercial gateways? Yes they will.

And what kind of creative culture will emerge from the next thirty years of gorgeous, integrated, properly-finished but utterly closed platforms? Will these post-PC platforms diminish the impatient, inventive hacker mindset that the old platforms produced? Or will the geeks just invent a new one and move on?

David Hepworth – a Q&A about curating music

It has been my privilege, over the last few years, to write a few pieces for Britain’s best music (and arts and movies and stuff) magazine The Word – including, a couple of issues back, an article about the curation boom (my articles went the way of all flesh, of course, when David and Mark closed The Word, but here’s one about my early Internet life that I scanned).

The magazine’s publisher is David Hepworth (its editor – and the man to whom I tremblingly submit my copy – is David’s long-time publishing partner Mark Ellen). David oversees the selection of tracks for Now Hear This, The Word’s covermount CD: a monthly curatorial gem that regularly stays in our car CD player for the whole month (until the next one comes out).

I asked David a few questions about this rather successful example of 21st Century music curation (and also about his Saturday morning vinyl curation habit #platterday).

SB: tell me about the Word covermount. How does it come together each month?

DH: It’s put together by Andrew Harrison and Alex Gold with ideas thrown in by everybody else.

Are you extensively schmoozed by label PRs? Do bands send you stuff?

The record business is on the bones of its arse but you wouldn’t know that from all the stuff we get sent. Yes. PRs are instructed to try and get certain acts on the CD. it’s one of the few places where they can place unheard music and assure it gets heard.

Are there punch-ups in Word Towers about who’s on it or do you keep it all to yourself until its done?

No punch ups. You chase thirty tracks and you can’t get all of them. You might get twenty possibles which you edit down to fifteen. You need a mix.

What are the economics of the covermount? A few years ago everyone seemed to have one – and the newspapers went mad for them. How do they work?

Newspapers etc. have them for totally different reasons. They pay big money for music in order to outsell their competitors. Eventually they realised that the likes of Prince were taking them for a ride. They cost a lot of money because you have to pay mechanical royalties with them.

What’s the fate of the covermount? Will you replace it with a memory stick or a Spotify playlist?

No. It works because it’s a physical object.

Supplementary question: tell me about #platterday. Is it a model for publishing in the social media era or just what you do with a bacon sandwich on Saturday mornings?

I just got out my old deck and loved restoring the ceremony of playing black vinyl records on Saturday morning. Twitter just seemed an obvious way to share that experience. I posted a picture of a shelf full of my records and people started saying “oh play that one” which is clearly insane.

What is curation in this new sense? Is it different from being an editor?

I dunno. What I’m always trying to do is say something that doesn’t sound like the usual over-heated recommendations. It’s very hard. I find 99% of recommendations don’t actually convey anything about the nature of the thing recommended at all. They’re just endless variations on the expression “it’s brilliant!” Saying something meaningful about music is very hard, that’s why most people don’t bother.

Is there a business in it?

Shouldn’t think so.

David keeps a rather good blog of his own and curates a storytelling night called True Stories Told Live.

UPDATE: I asked David why he no longer picks the tracks himself. He says:

I did it for three years and was only too delighted to pass the job on. If you choose the tracks you have the unenviable job of writing the accompanying blurbs, which is like pulling teeth.