YAMMER

A few weeks ago New York magazine ran an excellent article comparing the styles of comedy of Larry David of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ fame, and Woody Allen. http://nymag.com/movies/features/56930/ Both Jewish writers and comedians, each man was defined as either a Schlemiel or a Schnook, while incidentally the new breed of Jewish slacker comedians, Judd Apatow being their apotheosis, was described as a Schlump.

I was reminded of this yesterday when a friend sent me a clip from YouTube. It was a track called ‘Broken Leg’ by a band called ‘Blue Juice’ from their soon to be released second album. I’d never heard of them before, but watching the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJAWLfdkapQ I was struck once again by the notion that Indie Pop gets a much softer ride both from the critics and listeners than do mainstream artists.

Listening to the song made me think back to Rick Springfield and his Grammy-winning hit ‘Jessie’s Girl’. Back in the day, Springfield was about as un-hip as it was humanly possible to be. A sub-Cassidy pin-up, he switched careers between that of a top-40 musician and an actor in an American soap. Nevertheless, play the songs side by side, and it seems clear to me that the 1981 US #1, pisses all over the new offering by the Aussie youngsters. Nevertheless like the schnook and coincidentally-monikered Rodney Dangerfield, Rick ‘never got no respect’.

Now this is no life changing observation it has to be said. But it does make me think how two value systems seem to be at work here. David Lee Roth once commented that the reason why so many rock critics loved Elvis Costello, was because most of them looked like him. And this schlump-like approach to music criticism pervades to this day. It seems that one can only obtain true critical acclaim, is if you look like the misfit who is writing about you.

Blue Juice come from a long line of geeks, their ‘witty’ rope-skipping championship-themed video seems pulled directly from the pages of Weezer, another band with a singer who struggled with a disability, Rivers Cuomo born with one leg longer than the other. The band Wheatus, known primarily for their number one hit ‘Teenage Dirtbag’, sported a boss-eyed singer. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then I guess it was only appropriate that his were skewed, the song containing a veiled reference to the Columbine killers.

Any road, my point isn’t that people with some sort of affliction shouldn’t be allowed to make records or have hits, my point is, just because you’re some sort of misfit or suffering from a physical attribute which may have made teenage-life difficult for you, doesn’t automatically mean you can write decent songs. You can be as crazy as you like - cf. Phil Spector - and make fantastic music, but you can also be what-is-known-as traditionally handsome, and still write brilliant songs. What bothers me, is this sense of inverted snobbery, that someone like Rick Springfield can only be enjoyed in a post-modern ironic way. There’s even a term for it; ‘a guilty pleasure’. So all those unfashionable bands whose songs we secretly loved: Boston - More Than a Feeling, ELO - Telephone Man, Foreigner - I Want to Know What Love Is - can now be enjoyed, usually when drunk in front of a Karaoke machine, even though they were seen as pariahs by the in-crowd at the time their records were actually released.

And of course it goes on. There are a slew of completely average Indie Pop bands who don’t even deserve the term Pop - they simply aren’t skilled or brilliant enough to merit it. ‘Blue Juice’ are the ones getting my goat today, (and I am sure they are lovely boys) but consider; ‘Editors’ - aptly named but a sub New Romantic electro jerk-off, ‘Death Cab for Cutie’ - utterly unmemorable and formulaic jangle, ‘Foals’ - art twaddle (and duller than ‘The Beat’), the same could be said for ‘Vampire Weekend’ and ‘Interpol’, and lets just ignore the irrelevance of ‘The Kooks’, ‘The Pigeon Detectives’ and ‘Maximo Park’. These bands come and go, cluttering up magazines and evening radio schedules, never reaching further than middle-of-the-bill on a Festival listing before disappearing back into day jobs as supply-teachers or computer programmers.

I know in the past the Record Industry needed such fodder in order to give itself something to do while it waited for the next major release, but those days are gone. Much like the Independent Film sector which is now simply waiting for the flushing of excess product to be completed so it can restructure itself and come up with a future-model that might actually work, so Music has to do the same.

“But these bands you listed, they give people pleasure,” I hear you whine. So does Morris Dancing and Death Metal, but I don’t hear any of you complaining that those particular art forms don’t get enough investment or coverage.

No, I say let these Pop Schlumps toil away in the netherworld. Be happy being bar bands. Play for your mates. Have a laugh at the youth club. But don’t foist yourself on the rest of us exhausted souls. Don’t expect a record deal, let alone sales. The Pop world has been awash with mediocrity for too long. I say it’s time for a cull. If you aren’t absolutely brilliant, just do us a favour and please... keep it local.

© Simon Fellowes September 2009

In the aftermath of the death of Michael Jackson (self proclaimed King of Pop), certain quarters have drawn a parallel between his demise and that of the King (proclaimed by everyone except Chuck D)... Elvis. The final days of both men found them surrounded by a bevvy of low-rent lackeys whose sole priority it seems, was to maintain their place on the payroll by catering to their employer’s every needs. I well remember footage of Presley surrounded by his ‘good old boy’ cronies, all of them deferential, all laughing at every quip, comment or supposedly witty aperçu from the man in the studded white jumpsuit. Jackson’s entourage was yet more invidious. The doctor who allegedly pumped him with anaesthetic to get him to sleep (and how!) had been previously bankrupted while working in Vegas. Who wouldn’t take a job with the most famous man in the world to pay off your debts, even if it did mean bending the rules? The choice was his. Take it or leave it. If you don’t like it, go back to your lawsuits and debtors. No wonder Conrad Murray, the doctor in question, opted for the gig at Neverland. 

I was reminded of the corrupting effect of power while standing on a raised platform last night, filming the second of U2’s two night’s 360˚ show at London’s Wembley Stadium. How I ended up there is a story in itself. I had gone to meet an old friend who is directing the filming of the show. He had graciously given me an extensive tour of the stage and the production area, and five minutes before the gig was about to begin, led me to a viewing area where he felt I would best enjoy the performance. On arrival at the designated spot, we discovered I lacked the particular wristband required, and entry was politely barred. Attempts to to locate the relevant wristband proved fruitless, but my friend, ever the host, had a better idea, and led me to another platform where he said I could stand behind the cameramen shooting wide angle footage of the show. This cameramen was however, nowhere to be seen, and despite frantic efforts by my-friend-the-director, it transpired no one knew of the person’s whereabouts. Now, only minutes from showtime, my friend turned to me and said. “You know how to operate one of these things don’t you?” My eyes widened. I’m a director not a camera operator, but I know how to compose a shot, and I know the kind of footage a director would want from wide-angle coverage of a rock concert. So I replied, “Sure,” not knowing how to change tapes, batteries, or even how to turn the damn thing on or off. That’s how I found myself filming U2. My greatest fear was that I would see my hastily-composed efforts, as I tried to familiarise myself with the camera’s dynamics, beamed across Wembley for everyone to see. Luckily for me, and for the audience, the footage I was shooting was for the archive, possibly to be released at a later date. Everything, as ever, could be fixed in the edit. Nevertheless, as I pressed my one good eye to the viewfinder, something odd struck me.

During the preceding hours while I had loitered backstage, enjoying the hospitality of the band, eating and drinking their food, being shown - up close and underneath - their extraordinary stage-set, marvelling at the calm efficiency of the production team, I had found myself, almost unwillingly, certainly unknowingly, being drawn into - if only for a brief moment - their own special world. Hence, finding myself perched with an extraordinary view of the performance, and being tasked to capture it as best as I could, it felt only honourable that I should try and deliver the best I could under the somewhat surprising circumstances. I say this because of what I am about to write. 

My position of de facto crew member immediately compromised my ability to be wholly objective about what I was about to witness. Usually when I go to any event, I am unencumbered by any specific relationship to the proceedings I am enjoying (or not as the case may be). The worst that can happen is that I know people involved. If the performance stinks, I just blather something meaningless at the time, and wait for a few days to pass before letting slip my true thoughts, and then only if my friends swear on their mothers lives they really want to hear them. Luckily after last night’s gig, I didn’t find myself in any such compromising position. Besides - from what I could tell - I enjoyed the performance. I had allowed myself the occasional moment to stand back and appreciate ‘the whole’, but for the most part I was checking framing, and making sure to respond as best as I could from sound cues to songs, many of which I had never heard before, and if truth be known, some I will probably never want to hear again. Those I did know, for the most part, were delivered with aplomb. Stand out tracks were ‘Beautiful Day,’ ‘With or Without You’, ‘Stay’, ‘Walk On’ and surprisingly ‘Vertigo’ - a song I had always dismissed as somewhat throwaway but turned out to be explosive live. (I am still convinced the lyrics are about the Saudi bombers that flew into The Twin Towers but no one believes me...) However, some of U2’s classics which I have previously seen performed brilliantly - ‘Streets Have No Name’ and ‘One’ - felt almost tossed away as if the band are bored with playing them. Nevertheless, overall, it was a more-than-efficient show, musically speaking at least. The crowd were delirious and sung their 30-something hearts out. They forgave the band for their new album (more on that later) and drifted away into the night, light on merchandise - it seemed to me - but thoroughly satisfied by the evening’s entertainment. Yet as I joined them on my way home, I felt that the abiding memory would not be the songs, would not be the sometimes emotionally-chaotic Bono, or the ever-grumpy Larry, would not be the plea for the release of Burmese freedom-fighter Aung San Suu Kyi, or even the message of brotherly love beamed from the screens by Desmond Tutu, looking like a character from the TV show Banzai - “Racial Harmony Now? Place your bets!” - No... what the audience would be talking about over the water-cooler on the following Monday morning is the extraordinary stage set.

Designed by a man named Willie Williams, and realised by the architect Mark Fisher, the structure had been in the making for over three years. By now, many of you may have seen photographs of it in the media. But nothing can quite prepare you for the ‘real thing’ when it is in full modus operandi. I had been to other large-scale U2 concert tours before; Zoo TV in 1992, PopMart in ’97, and Vertigo in 2005. They all had memorable stage sets, but they were all operating essentially within a proscenium arch (even the Vertigo tour with it’s semicircular walkway). What this means is that one is essentially dealing with a facade. However impressive the structure facing you, a quick look behind and everything is revealed as cladding, essentially a series of screens hung from scaffolding. With the four legged claw built for the 360˚ tour placed, not directly centre of the Wembley pitch but two thirds of the way down, the audience can see everything. It hovers much like the giant spider built by the artist Louise Bourgeois and exhibited in the great turbine hall of Tate Modern when it first opened - perhaps this is where Williams found his his inspiration. It is an impressive structure when at rest. When lit up and moving, it is at times, absolutely breathtaking. To walk away from the show and not have marvelled at the spectacle would be an act of sheer bloody-mindedness, bordering on stupidity. If one saw the stage in any other context, say as a piece of contemporary urban sculpture, the response would be unanimously positive. It is quite likely going to be the most visually exciting piece of man-made machinery that I, and the five million or so other people, will see during the coming year. Whatever one’s thoughts on Bono and his band, the degree of creative ambition and licence they are happy to grant in order to present their audience with an everlasting theatrical memory is not something to dismiss.

Indeed, most of the reviews of the show have been positive. One that was not, and that caught my eye, was written by The Independent’s Simon Price, a man so unhappy with his lot that he still walks around in his late thirties dressed as a teenage Goth. Each to their own. But his beef with the show rested not on the staging, which he admitted was ‘quite cool’ (high praise indeed), but the band’s new material which peppered the set. The album, despite an extensive marketing campaign (the week of its UK release it felt as if U2 had moved into your living room) has sold relatively poorly. But this is as much due to the downturn in general CD sales as anything particularly wrong with the record (which debuted at number one in 30 countries including the UK and The United States). But reviews were mixed, and repeated listenings have not done it huge favours. The lead-off single failed to crack the top ten in the US, UK or Germany, two follow-up releases (‘Magnificent’, ‘I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight’) fared notably worse, and received wisdom was that apart from the band’s core-audience the public at large was really only interested in seeing them live. As this was the only real way to make a living out of music nowadays, it was surely no skin off the band’s nose. Despite this relatively lukewarm reaction the album definitely has its merits, most of them captured in the more melancholic and contemplative songs. The best of these and in my opinion the stand out track on the album, is the lament ‘White As Snow’. But the song illuminates the dilemma in which I feel the group now finds itself. 

Bono is fifty years old next year. The band has been together for thirty-three of them. The rabble rousing of the past, the flag waving, the intentionally grotesque posturing (The Fly, Macphisto), the grand gestures, not only feel a little worn, but sit uncomfortably on the shoulders of older and wiser men. Mercifully the proselytising was reigned back on Saturday night; hell, there’s little wrong in bringing to the attention of a captive audience what it really feels to be a captive, especially if it only takes up five minutes of their time. But the pontificating of the past, the back-slapping with presidents, has left the band vulnerable to easy jibes. The eco-friendliness - or not - of schlepping 180 trucks worth of gear around the world twice, has predictably opened the band up to accusations of hypocrisy. It seems they can do no right. I mentioned this to my friend, suggesting the band come up with a range of T-Shirts. They could read ‘Blame U2’, ‘Blame Bono’... and one for Bono himself reading, ‘Blame Me’. Perhaps then people might lay off, though I doubt it.

However, more interesting that any of this, and something the media tends to forget amongst all the hoopla, is the music. Where does a band go as it moves into the third stage of its life. Where does a man go? This is something I felt Bono himself was grappling with as he stood looking out over the vast London audience. 

U2 have been the earnest young punks, figuring out how to define themselves, making mistakes along the way (Adam’s haircuts being a prime example). They ended up the biggest rock band of their generation, and fair play to them, have managed to hold onto that position for twenty years. They have seen off REM, Guns & Roses, Nirvana, The Stone Roses, Oasis, and a host of others. Only Springsteen and Metallica can be seen as competitors when it comes to animating vast crowds around the world - Radiohead having willingly thrown in the towel - while still making number one albums perceived to be of artistic worth.

But U2 can’t be the U2 of old forever. There is nothing more embarrassing than watching a man pout and gurn as he shimmies from pillar to post in the quest for eternal youth. As former dinosaur-hating punks, U2 will know this. There’s an art to growing old gracefully while remaining as potent as ever; look to their former mentor BB King as a perfect example. But finding a means of expressing that evolution is a complicated task. This is made yet more complicated when all your audience wants to do is fix you in aspic and use you for a trip down memory lane. Look at The Rolling Stones. 

That is not to say that it’s time for unplugging the Fender and setting up a Céilidh. There’s a way of staying angry and aggrieved, noisy and boisterous. But it can only work if one is able to express what was once a sense of tumultuous sexuality, a teenage call to arms, in a manner that still feels honest and genuine to the individual you are now. Bolting on grooviness in the hope of staying hip is always patently see-through, and undermines the true essence of who you are (the song ‘Get on Your Boots’ reeks of this).

U2 have to find a new way of expressing the anger, love and passion of old, but in a way that makes sense to the men they have become. It’s an exciting challenge. To fail would leave them in two equally arrid places. The stadium oldies band, cranking out hits, slipping in one or two new songs while the audience goes off to pee. Or worse still, evaporating into the ether like Bowie, mojo lost, the increasingly desperate efforts to redefine himself since a decade of continued brilliance, failing time and time again, leaving nothing but a sad pantomime husk.

It seems scarily apropos that the tour which precipitated the end of the Diamond Dog, is also remembered for its vast spider-like structure whose grandiosity eventually suffocated all who stood beneath. Let’s hope that the Irish can learn from their Heroes, while keeping at bay the battalions of Yes Men who live only to expedite your demise.

© Simon Fellowes   17/8/2009

A new format has begun showing up on our TV screens. It has been around in some guise or another for the last couple of years, but last weekend it seemed to reach its apotheosis. I am talking about the pornography of ‘escape’.

We have had the pornography of cooking, gardens and interior design. We have even had the pornography of property buying - how hollow that now looks. The notion of changing your life has been constant over recent years, even if it is only a question of swapping your wife for a week (and note how the show was called ‘Wife - not husband - swap’, even though it was aimed squarely at women, tapping into a sense of self-loathing and inadequacy perhaps). The worst of these shows have been those trading off the body dysmorphic - too fat or too thin, super size or super skinny, make me a new a face etc. Anything to effect a change. To become someone else... someone new.

The latest of these proposes a change to your life.

‘Monty Hall’s Great Escape’ tells of a posh Bristolian marine biologist (...for chrissake) who sublets his city flat for six months, and moves to the wilds of West Scotland to live in a run-down shack by the edge of a beach. It all seems idyllic, the sun always shines, the views are spectacular, the locals are delightful. But then they would be. Monty is something of a cash cow and is quickly handing out tenners left right and centre. He buys pigs and chickens from local vendors. He has a crew re-building the shack. He has landscape gardeners fencing off his plot of land. His only regret is that the actual owner of the ‘bothy’ (the technical term for the shack), won’t allow him to put in a window to enjoy the view. As the landlord points out, if the original tenants wanted to see the view, they would step the f**k outside.

At one point, Monty fancies purchasing a boat, so he drives into town, in his top-of-the-range Landrover, and picks up a dirigible with trailer, no haggling involved. No wonder the locals loved him. One presume it was his own money he was using. Or maybe, as BBC licence payers, it was actually ours. Neverthless, and despite this largesse, the reality of the situation is that Monty is living in a stone shack, with no heating, no comfy bed, no toilet or bathroom facilities, and dieting solely it seems, on bacon sandwiches. I wonder how he’ll feel when the weather turns.

Anyway enough of the perma-grinning Monty. More important is what the programme is selling us; the simple life, the organic, the back-to-basics.

As this credit crunch escalates and jobs are being carved off by their hundreds every day, western societies, coddled since the second world war, are genuinely beginning to feel a sense of unease. As stories reach us of social and economic breakdown in the Ukraine - a country longing to join Europe - we begin to wonder if there is any chance of revolution, however small, happening here. There is already talk of a summer of unrest. Rumours of police riot-training and stocking-up on shields and tear gas abound. The usual scare-mongering probably, but with a government so clearly adept at obfuscating facts and lying to its people, who knows what might be true? We watch France become bolshier, the Greek youth explode, the Icelandic debacle...

Meanwhile, Obama pours a 50 billion here, another 20 billion there, as US companies announce losses of such astronomical proportions that they no longer shock, struggling even to make headline news.

A billion suddenly feels like a million did six months ago.

No wonder we feel like packing up and running away. Admittedly most of us are far too lazy to do anything about it. And that’s what TV execs are counting on. They know we’ll prefer to enjoy someone else doing it on our behalf. And that’s what Reality TV is all about. Watching people do things we would never have the nerve, the energy or the wherewithal to do ourselves. If they fail, so much to the good. It makes us feel better about ourselves for never getting up off the sofa in the first place.

So this return to a bucolic, simpler - ‘Cranford’-like - time... is it truly all its cracked up to be?

My experience of the countryside, and I lived there for ten years as a child, is slightly different. When I visit it now, I am struck by the reactionary, conservative, claustrophobic, petty-minded and inward looking atmosphere that abounds once one travels ten miles away from any city. There are good and bad people everywhere, but the advantage of a town or city, is that you can usually avoid the bad ones. In a small village they are always in your face. Ask Madame Bovary.

Besides, if the countryside is truly so great, why do so many people migrate to the cities in the first place? Of course, it’s about money, but once they have made their stash, why don’t they immediately move back where they came from? Because they remember how it was. Only people who have never lived in the country move there. They’ve watched the TV programmes, they’ve been seduced by the porn. People who have spent the early part of their lives in the countryside and manage to escape, remember the hardships, the drudgery, the unremitting slog. Those who move there and wax lyrical about its slower pace, find themselves spending most of their days talking to animals. Or worse, plants. They make jam and bake bread. But it all takes hours... and is still eaten in minutes. “It’s about the process!” I hear you holler. But how much bloody process can one person take? If it was all about ‘the process’ why do we pay bakers to bake our bread for us?

It’s a great life for the children is thrown up as a mitigating reason. No it’s not! Children are so bored in the countryside they have to create imaginary worlds and imaginary friends. You don’t need to do that in the city. There’s enough stimuli to make such dysfunctional behaviour completely unnecessary (unless you’re a single child and completely ignored by your workaholic parents that is...). Once a child begins to realise that wandering around in his or her own private ‘zoo’ at the bottom of the garden, is frankly absurd, they begin to commit small acts of vandalism, breaking things for no particular reason, killing small animals, kicking down walls. Eventually drink, drugs and sex appear on the menu. If your precious child hasn’t been fortunate enough to obtain a place at ‘Uni’, or a job with his uncle in the nearest town, his life atrophies into a medicated, dunderheaded stupor as they slowly begin to replicate the meaningless lives of their Victorian forebears. They retreat into their own codes, their own language, their own way of doing things. Outsiders are something to be fleeced and then driven away. You want to integrate? Maybe in ten or twenty years. And that’s if you accept the rules, don’t rock the boat, accept the status quo... “Don’t come around here trying to change us with your fancy city ways.”

This notion that you’ll find some kind of personal salvation by turning your back on all you know and running away is a myth. And it’s damaging because it perpetuates the same aspirational crap which has brought us where we are today. Always offer the consumer something they don’t already have... and convince them they need it. As they don’t believe in the riches any more... the bigger house, the new car, the hundreds of pairs of shoes... get creative! They know what they bought into before doesn’t work anymore, which is largely why they’ve stopped buying. So what to sell them now?

The idea of 'Escape'.

Get simple. Knit. Grow your own!...

Have you any idea how much more expensive that turns out to be compared to going to your local Tescos and buying your food off the shelf? (“It’s the process!”) This new version of the countryside is being sold by people who arrive on the Friday night and are back in Notting Hill by Sunday teatime. It’s the only version they know.

Sure there are great things about small communities of like-minded souls, fresh air and long walks will do anyone the power of good. But you can experience that anywhere. You don’t have to up-sticks and live on an island to find it. But as a recipe for change, a panacea for society’s ills, this notion of ‘Escape’ is patent nonsense. And in the way porn works in comparison to a healthy sexual relationship, it is a pretty poor substitute for the truth.

So... get a grip. Life is all around us. We have no excuses, no easy refuge. We simply have to stay where we are and learn to get on with it.

Music is in rude health. This is a wonderful thing. Admittedly it means nothing. Music is part of the fabric of life. As soon as man figured out how to stretch animal hide over a piece of wood or whittle a hole into a twig and blow, music has been a fundamental part of our daily existence. As my last essay postulated, music isn’t the problem, it’s the music business that is. However, as a new year comes upon us, another thought strikes me, one more profound than the concerns of a behemoth of an industry facing up to the fact that its glory days are over.

The BBC announced its list today of the fifteen brightest hopes for 2009. Some I was previously aware of, due to various heads-up from friends in the business, some not. But what surprised me when I clicked on the various pages and links to the artists’ work was how young they all were. In reality they aren’t that young at all. They’re the normal age for kids starting careers in bands, the same age I was when I signed my first record deal. What’s different... is me. I am now a lot older, not much older than I was last year, but something inside of me has appreciably shifted. Because for the first time in my life, when I looked at these musicians and singers and listened to them speak, I thought to myself, “My God, these are children!”

This of course says far more about me than it does about them. But as I clicked and observed, something else came to my notice. None of the music being made was particularly interesting to me. That’s not to say it didn’t have energy or imagination, much of it did. But not one of the 15 artists on offer had created anything that made me want to investigate further. And I had to admit that out of fifteen of the best for 2009 that was a pretty poor ratio.

Wondering what it was about these bands that left me disinterested, I came to the conclusion that it was the age-old problem. Everything they were doing I had heard before, in another era, in a purer format, and in a context where it made some sort of political and social sense.

The electro of the Eighties came out of the development of new technology - the synthesiser, the sequencer, the sampler - coupled with a reaction against a previously drab and strike-ridden decade. Shiny, shiny, bad times behind me. The folk music of the 60’s & 70’s was inspired by a Peace movement turning away from 50’s consumerism which had led to the Vietnam War, a misguided attempt to halt the spread of Communism and perpetuate the American Dream. The psychedelic scene which ran simultaneously was motivated by the same sense of rebellion but with better drugs.

For some reason, these seem to be the musical forms most prevalent amongst the current list of hopefuls. There are a couple of tedious rock bands ploughing the early Simple Minds/New Order furrow, but they can be dismissed as a last hurrah of bedroom bloke-dom.

Watching these youngsters raid the cultural dressing-up box, I find myself smiling. There’s no harm in what they’re doing. It all looks like fun. And if I had children I would be encouraging them to join in. Boxing Day was in fact spent teaching my 8-year old nephew the riff to James Bond and the chords to ‘Highway to Hell’ on his scaled-down Fender Strat copy.

But the big difference, when it comes to the music performed by this new crop, is that as opposed to what came before, it doesn’t mean anything. Perhaps it doesn’t set out to. But it only means something by proxy, a reflection of its own lack of meaning. And this I suppose, is what makes men of a certain age frown and mutter over their lovingly-maintained vinyl collections. Or worse, gives them something to ponder as they spend months downloading the entire catalogue onto their 120GB Ipods. The new garden shed, as I call it.

The kids don’t give a damn either way. They’re simply too busy plundering. Much in the way of a fashion designer. To anyone who follows fashion it has become clear for the last twenty years, that apart from the occasional bum-cleavage revealing pair of denims, there hasn’t been a single original idea. Designers instead plough through history books and travelogues, picking something from here and mixing it with something from there. It’s not a question of brain surgery, just a sharp eye and a quick pencil.

Pop music has now reached the same impasse. 60 years since the days of Bill Haley and the beast has been flayed to a pulp. It doesn’t help when prime-time talent shows reduce the history of the pop song to meaningless pulp. But the public don’t seem to mind.

Pop music has long ceased to be anything truly worth caring about. Of course it still is to to the 30 and 40-somethings who write about it and desperately continue to try and sell it. But to anyone born after 1980, and that means just about everyone on the BBC’s list, music is simply part of the disposable junk of life. Like a top from Miss Selfridge, worn today, binned tomorrow.

The young generation don’t pay for music. They don’t examine it. The only stars they are interested in are the ones that implode. The gig is simply an excuse for a night-out and a sing-a-along. All the stadium acts of the last ten years have built their careers out of songs with chants for choruses rather than lyrics. Woohs, Lahs, and Eh-Oh’s have been the order of the day. So much for revolution.

And the reason? Teenagers have studied the generation that came before. Us. With our angst-ridden hopes of music being able to change the world. How absurd. Pop music is really about emotion. It’s a way of figuring yourself out. Finding out where you fit in. How you want to dress, where you want to hang out. And in that regard, the kids who are checking out the bands for 2009 are doing exactly the same thing, unencumbered by any notion of meaning, potency, or important point of view. They’re using music as something to play with. To dress up to. To have a laugh. The lyrics of these new acts are funny, smart, reflective, cheeky... and they speak to the experience of being a teenager now. Not one from times past.

And if this all feels irrelevant, empty and pointless to anyone over the age of 25, then so it should. This is a fuck-you to us. Through greed and exploitation we reduced Pop Music to a soulless pile of regurgitated nonsense. This generation is smart enough to celebrate that fact and make something useful out of it.

It’s day-glo, it’s third-hand, it’s amateur and shambolic. It’s ramshackle, half-arsed, indulgent and comedic. There’s a knowingness in its stupidity. The mix and match appropriation of everything from Kate Bush to Afrika Bambaataa is done with an irreverent verve that would make Malcolm McClaren proud.

But more than anything, it’s fun, it’s specific and it’s all about now. It’s self-defining. And if anyone old enough to be these children’s parents is still using Pop Music to define themselves, I suggest they get themselves into therapy pretty damn quick.

© Simon Fellowes 2009

A friend of mine sent me a link to a website today (http://vimeo.com/2245449). On it, a bunch of guys have posted a home-made documentary called ‘How to Fix the Music Industry’, a hoary old subject and one I have written about before and yet still seems to provoke passion and debate (mainly amongst people who work in the Music Industry - the rest of the world doesn’t give a damn).

The documentary itself took a laid-back approach, positing the question of the title to various movers and shakers within the industry before letting them witter about their own particular area of expertise with nary a comeback question, challenge or follow-up.

This approach may well have been intentional - let the buggers hoist themselves by their own petards - but only really works if you have an informed audience who have a take on the matter. Most people are quite happy to sit passively and let others decide for them. It became clear during the film that no-one was going to do very much deciding at all, the only merit of the piece was that it illuminated the fact, as if it needed illuminating, that the music industry is floundering like a wounded seal while everyone comes up with their own self-centred prognosis but with little joined-up thinking.

In contrast to the Industry figures who felt some sort of responsibility to at least come up with some burbling response, members of the public when asked, either had no idea or didn’t give a fig either way; apart from some Jack Sparrow look-a-like who declared the best thing would be for music to return “to the 1800’s... or some shit”.

And the reason? Like I said, it’s because they really don’t give a damn. As far as they’re concerned there’s a surfeit of music, loads of the stuff, coming out of every radio, Ipod, stereo-system, TV-show, phone, shop, movie, car, airport lounge, elevator... why should they think there was anything wrong with the music industry?

The original question is in fact disingenuous. The real question that should have been asked was, “How do we keep getting paid?” Because at the heart of the matter, this isn't really a question of music, it's a question of money.

If all the record companies in the world folded tomorrow would music go away? Of course not. Kids would still be playing it. There would be gigs, smaller of course... weekend ‘hops’, people gathering to see and hear a word-of-mouth band. Perhaps more folks would return to playing musical instruments themselves, as without a vast machine promoting and marketing music through every possible outlet, there wouldn't be so much of it freely available. People might then feel a need to fill the void themselves; a Saturday night gathered around an old Joanna perhaps?

Maybe I’m being too romantic, but music as a communal experience is already returning to the fore, the rise in attendances at live gigs the proof. The solitary soundtrack one builds for one’s own life only comes into its own when you are able to share it with like-minded souls, even if that only turns out to be one other person... the person you probably end up falling in love with.

Of course now that the Internet is here there will still be downloads and websites... plenty of avenues through which musicians will make themselves heard and eventually, slowly, we’ll return to a pattern of filtering, much like the record companies of old. The average member of the public neither has the time or the interest to plough through a myriad of channels to search for the music they love. Instead people will provide that service. The public will grow to trust in these arbiters of taste and therefore, as they have done before by tuning into a specific radio station or buying a particular music paper, they will pay a fair price for them.

I get bored of listening to the Music Industry bleating. It does it every ten years or so until it manages to come up with a new way of fleecing the public and replenishing its coffers. The last time it managed to do so was when it convinced us suckers to replace our vinyl collections with CD’s. If only they could come up with another must-have technology now. The funny thing is someone else did, and in doing so, the Ipod blew a hole right through the recording industry’s model.

The only way record companies can maximise their revenue these days is by signing bands to an overall deal, demanding percentages of live ticket sales and merchandising rights. To compensate for this loss, the bands and agents ramp these prices to a ridiculous level. As a musician friend pointed out to me the other day, remember when going to the gig was cheaper than buying the album? Well that’s all changed now.

I suppose what annoys me most about the music industry is the overriding sense they send out that somehow they have been hard done by, that they’ve been caught out, blind-sided, had the carpet pulled from under their feet. It’s as if they’re a special case, a pouting adolescent moaning “life’s so unfair”. Yet when you look around, far larger and far more established industries than music are finding themselves under the cosh.

The banking world as we know is currently imploding. This seems to be down to the same frailties found in the music scene; greed, arrogance and stupidity. The City felt it was infallible, and while money poured in, despite all the warning signs, ignoring any doom-mongers, they maintained their corrosive business practices and partied like it would forever be 1999 (...when I see the number of Award shows the Music Biz still enjoys, I see a strange similarity).

The American Auto Industry is also heading for meltdown. Why? Because it has been building the wrong type of products for the last 15 years. It is being brought down by its own lack of foresight, having whipped the public into believing an SUV or 4X4 was the only vehicle worth driving through those rocky canyons of the flat American suburbs. In the 1980’s the US car industry nearly went to the wall because of low-fuel-consuming Japanese imports. When the economic good times returned, they tossed that model out of the window, went Supersized and wilfully created another disaster-in-waiting. Thanks to the volatility of oil prices and the credit crunch, their erstwhile market has suddenly disappeared, forcing Chevy, Ford and GM to look for a 25 billion dollar Federal bail-out, on top of the $25bn they have already received to fund belated research into hybrid models.

Will the Music Industry be looking for government backing as well? Because if you analyse their business practices over the last 15 years, you can see that their investment was also in all the wrong places.

During that time the music business treated the public with contempt. To them they were sheep to be bamboozled and battered. The industry genuinely feels that if you hammer the public’s consciousness hard enough - multiple plays in heavy rotation, TV prime-time, wall-to-wall poster campaigns, expensive videos and magazine covers - they will always succumb. And it’s true. More often than not they do. Simon Fuller and Cowell have built entertainment empires on just such an approach. But note, these are entertainment empires, not music. Their forte is understanding that once the public tires of one of their products, they can immediately replace it with another.

Looking back on their dominance of the last decade in British Pop, these men have essentially, for all the tens of thousands wannabes, brought the world two acts - The Spice Girls and Will Young (for me the jury is still definitely out on the longevity of Leona Lewis). But then the top end of the music business hasn’t really been about music during the last ten years. It’s been about cross-platform selling, product placement, hitting demographics, market share... creating and selling a brand.

Once the major labels began to be bought out by global media conglomerates in the early 1990’s, music itself became no more than one small piece of the overall puzzle. Artists were signed as much for what they could do for the label as what the label could do for them, not just in terms of sales but in terms of profile. Labels were prepared to take a market loss on an act if, having them signed, it positioned the label optimally in the eyes of the paying-public. This was a ludicrous position and one the music industry had wilfully put itself in: sign two types of acts - those that sell, and those that make you look good. One would have thought that if instead they had concentrated on finding bands that managed to cover both requirements, the world of music might have been a hell of lot more interesting over the last ten years.

For too long the companies got away with selling inferior product in the knowledge that thanks to a marketing blitz, the kids would impulse buy. And with the economy strong, discovering that the CD you had bought for £14.99 contained only two decent songs, was no great loss.

But thanks to Steve Jobs and individual track downloading, the arrogance which that propagated went out the window. Kids realised they’d been shafted and now had a way out. Besides, since the demise of vinyl, there was no artwork worth owning either (who the hell stares at a CD cover?) so what was the downside of downloading? 

So what’s to be done?

Bottom line it’s about being smart. Whether that means predicting new markets (culturally & musically), forecasting trends, innovating products, spotting and nurturing great talent... those with the imagination, knowledge, taste and wisdom will always rise to the top. 

In my opinion those characters within the business still exist. 

There’s nothing wrong with the music industry apart from the fact that than it has grown too big and is subsequently over-staffed with people who are in it for the wrong reasons (money & lifestyle). Because of its size, it is forced to sign numerous mediocre acts simply to give its bloated workforce and all its knock-on industries, Radio, TV & Film, which the parent company also owns - something to do.

Four great bands on the label - you only need a small staff. Make it forty - of which only fourteen might be any good - and the costs rise exponentially.

So my prescription? Downsize. Music isn’t going to go away just because of massive lay-offs and less record labels. Let the kids form bands. Let them form their own labels. Let them play for years, scrimping and saving, not going to some automaton Brit School. Give them time - on their own - to get good, to build up their songwriting, their stage craft, their stamina. Stop signing these numbnuts straight out of school.

If any of them really are any good, it’ll become clear. They’ll have built up a following through their own ingenuity, through their own talent, through their own self-belief.

At which point one of the handful of record companies that still remain could offer to take them on, for a fair deal, and bring them to wider, perhaps global audience. 

At which point the artist themselves might actually be good enough to create something worthwhile.

In the overwhelming surge of global delight which has followed Barack Obama’s success in the US election, other decisions made by the American public on polling day have received slightly less coverage here in the UK. That is to say they haven’t been accompanied by 12-page colour supplements and wall-to-wall Media analysis.

While I am sure decisions made on funding for local police and taxation for eco-projects all had serious import for their respective communities, the specific proposition put to the citizens of California, Arizona and Florida, was possibly the most contentious.

It dealt with the issue of same-sex marriages.

Proposition 8, the most publicised of these, largely due to the amount of money spent on its support, sought to overturn California State Law sanctioning marriage between individuals of the same gender. On the day of the election it was passed with a slim if definite majority. Many who voted for it came from the same Afro-American community who voted for Obama and his promise of Change. However this same demographic, being deeply religious, found it impossible to go against the words of The Bible, disappointing thousands of gay Californian couples legally wed since June of this year.

This notion of gay marriage has exercised me for some time. Perhaps it is down to my own inability to find a suitable wife of the female persuasion. In fact at times I begin to wonder whether a domestically-obsessed house-boy might be a better option as old age and infirmity set in.

But what has troubled me more than any notion of two men or two women living and loving together - to state the obvious, that doesn’t bother me at all - is the appropriation of language. This may sound like a somewhat pretentious way of looking at things but I have to admit I do find it troubling. The fact that words which have meaning - meaning which Society as a whole understands, acknowledges and accepts - can simply be re-worked and re-defined because of the will of a large if motivated minority, somehow sits awkwardly on my shoulders.

“They’re only words, pal. Get over it,” I hear you say. But if they were only words, why would the various minorities, feeling put upon by the use or lack of use of such words, make such a fuss about them in the first place? And once these words, these terms, are called into question, how come the majority, for so long quite happy in their understanding of what certain words mean, not only get up in arms about them, but spend millions of dollars to protect what they perceive to be their meaning.

So I guess words are important.

When this religious debate first kicked-off over same-sex marriages, and mark my words it is a big deal, a big enough deal to create schisms within the Anglican Church, I thought the Bishops and Archbishops had missed a trick.

Following the advice of their crucified champion, I would have thought a turn-of-the-cheek approach might have been advisable, if employed with a certain wiliness. Let the gay community take the word ‘marriage’ and simply come up with another term which suits your needs more completely. I was thinking ‘Lord-enjoined’ perhaps. As in “Are you married? No, we’re Lord-enjoined”. Whether that means diddly-squat would largely depend on the degree of your religious leanings. The gays get their marriage-tag, the God squad feel suitably blessed. Everyone’s a winner.

But something nagged at me. In a way this all seems to be something of a moveable feast. As it is, the gay community has seemed to vacillate in recent years when it comes to their choice of self-description. Since the 1970’s the term ‘Queer’ was seen as pejorative. Up until then, before the term political-correctness had even been coined, homosexuals were abused and taunted with every name under the sun. It was thanks to a vociferous and politicised movement that Gay Lib came about and with it a new vocabulary.

Without much of a shrug, the wider world accepted that a word which had previously been associated with girls in summer dresses, pastel colours and a lot of skipping and jumping, was now a rainbow-coloured umbrella for a section of society, certain members of which enjoyed night-time shenanigans which to a God-fearing heterosexual at least, seemed anything but gay. Pictures of muscular men in SS caps, leather shorts and handle-bar moustaches challenged all previous notions of the meaning of the word. Nevertheless, the world learnt to live with it. As long as ‘they’ weren’t doing anyone any harm. Well no one who didn’t want any harm done, that is.

And so we now have a similar debate about ‘marriage’.

You can see the Conservatives hunkering down once more. “What more do these people want?” they ask. “Give them an inch and they always want more.” And that is something which is undoubtably true. Ahem...

But do these traditionalists have a point? Is this a vocabulary land-grab we should sit back and allow?

Ultimately I suppose it comes down to what you consider marriage to be about, what you consider it for.

Is it for promulgation of the species? Strength in the family unit? Protection of the community? Child-bearing certainly does seem to be an essential ingredient of marriage, which isn’t to say couples who are unable to conceive are any less married. But the only reason they can’t conceive - should they wish to - is because of a medical condition, or old age.

A man and a man cannot conceive for obvious reasons. Nor can a woman and a woman unless they get a little outside help. It’s not an aberration of nature, a medical mishap, it’s the way we as animals were made. It’s biology. A fact of life. Now whether this has anything to do with the institution of marriage is another matter. Plenty of people manage to have kids without being married, although society seems quite happy to state that this is not an optimal state of affairs.

So are we prepared to cloud the issue further in order to keep a minority happy?

No one seems to be questioning Gay rights. Okay some people are, but not the majority who voted for Proposition 8. Civil partnerships, shared rights under the law, complete parity in all matters social and financial... that’s surely unarguable. We’re all equal human beings after all. Right?

Gay opponents of Proposition 8 state the issue is about dignity; for their relationships to be seen in the same terms as Straight couples is a matter of decency and Human Rights. Yet I still wonder whether this positive outcome and shift in perception can be done merely by the stroke of a judge’s pen.

So what’s the answer? Who gets to decide what someone is called? The person who feels they are being discriminated against, or the majority who blindly continue calling someone something they have no idea is offensive.

We’re beginning to see the same difficulties arise with the success of Obama.

In America the term ‘Black’ has come to be seen as a somewhat ugly term, hence the use of the catch-all phrase ‘Afro-American’. Yet here in the UK, describing Obama as America’s first Black president causes less than a ripple. It’s only when morons like Silvio Berlusconi chip-in with what they consider an amusing remark that we notice just how far certain parts of Europe lag behind on the path towards inclusivity.

But it does seem to me that we are presently lost in a forest of words. Should how people wish to be perceived always dictate how the world perceives them?

‘Nazis’ was an abbreviation for National Socialists. If the far right in the US hated Nazis as much as they seem to hate Socialism we might be getting somewhere.

So what’s the best answer? A popular vote? God help us. We know full well that in the UK that would probably bring back capital punishment. Some things are simply not safe left in the hands of the great unwashed, and by that I mean the rabid reactionism of the opinion-stirring tabloid press.

When it comes down to it, language evolves. You can’t force new terminology on people. Even if they know they are supposed to say something in a different way - Bi-Racial, Special Needs, Gender-Neutral - if it doesn’t come naturally to them it only re-enforces the original prejudice, causing resentment that personal thoughts are being forcibly subjugated, self-censored, only given free reign through the mouths of ‘dangerous comedians’ or whispered behind closed doors.

Perhaps all we can do is let life evolve. The more society comes to terms with long-term gay relationships, the more used society is to seeing them succeed, the more likely it is to perceive them on parallel and equal terms.

One thing we have seen this week with the inspiring success of Barack Obama, is that when the world is ready, change is both sweeping, dynamic and powerful.

When that happens, nothing can stand in its way.

An addendum:

An older friend points out to me that back in the 70’s, the term GAY was actually an acronym for ‘Good As You’, and was first seen on a banner beneath which homosexuals marched at Stonewall.

Attention must also be drawn to the recent track by songstress Katy Perry ‘You’re So Gay’ where the term is used in a fashionably derogatory manner. Radio One DJ Chris Moyles, listened to by millions of UK youngster every morning, has been doing the same for some time without any censure from his BBC employers.

One man’s name seems to be coming up with surprising regularity during this current economic whirlwind. That’s the author of ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ Tom Wolfe. His coining of the term ‘Masters of the Universe’ to describe the Wall Street investment bankers who bestrode Manhattan in the mid 1980’s devouring all around them like King Kong colossi, has once more been pressed into service thanks to the small number - 250 or so - of extremely avaricious men who have let their egos run away with them and in doing so ruined the World’s banking system. 

But ironically it is not only Wolfe’s 80’s satire that feels so prescient. His novel ‘A Man in Full’, examining the absurdities of the new American art market and its collusion with big business, also feels more than a little relevant in the light of the well-timed if highly dubious open auction of Damien Hirst’s left-overs at Sotheby’s two weeks ago, the day the stock market crisis finally hit. And just to complete the trilogy, it could be said (and don’t get me started on her - if nothing else, the Prime Time talk-show awaits) that Sarah Palin’s attack on Barack Obama’s tenuous links with former member of ‘The Weatherman’, Bill Ayers somehow echoes Wolfe’s denunciation of the half-baked liberals cosying up to Huey Newton and ‘The Black Panthers’ in his essay ‘Radical Chic and the Mau-Mau Gang’.

All these ideas seemed to dovetail into last night’s private view of an acquaintance’s first Art show. A self-proclaimed artist is always something to see (to paraphrase John Lennon). Much like the Victorian hobbyists, anyone who on a first outing prices each piece somewhere north of a grand, must be said to have a somewhat inflated sense of themselves. Family life is put on hold, often to some cost, while the artist struggles with his demons, determined to make something useful of their life, to make a mark, to lay claim to their own existence. It reminded me of Jackson Pollock, another painter who dabbled in the abstract. But these paintings, unlike Pollock’s, exhibited no emotion, no rage, passion or wildness, something that might reflect our turbulent times. While Pollock’s huge abstracts reflected a reconfiguring of the American Dream, a sense of Existentialism - man alone, trying to make patterns from the swirling mass of chaos which surrounds him - the paintings that hung so neatly on the walls of the large private house turned - very successfully - into a make-shift gallery, felt no more than decorative squares of abstract obsessiveness, differentiated only by their choice of colour.

They consisted of a series of dots painted on dots painted on dots. Thousands of them. Tiny. Microscopic. A blue dot overlaid with a lighter blue dot, overlaid with a white dot. And so on. One stared at them hoping something might arrive... a dolphin perhaps, or, in a pink version, a word in 3D spelling ‘LOVE’. But nothing did happen. The paintings just lay there politely, not accusingly, not even drawing you in. Just a small splash of rice-krispied colour, guaranteed to brighten-up that don’t-know-what-to-do-with cranny. 

It was if someone had taken a Seurat and blown it up macro-sized, as if to examine the side of a cheek perhaps, a turn of a sleeve, a piece of tree bark... one inch blown up to a two foot square. And then, on each of Seurat’s dots, another dot had been painted, and on top of that, another. It was no more than pointless pointillism. 

But away from it all, I began to ponder its possible significance.

It was while the great and the good gathered to admire and support their friend’s work, that I had been first reminded of Wolfe and his society of furiously paddling swans, chaos lying just beneath the surface symbolised by a wrong turn into a bad neighbourhood. Here the smooth bravado belied the unhappy marriages, the thwarted careers, and now more than any time in recent memory - even more than after the collapse of The Twin Towers - a sense of ‘fin de siecle’. The economic chaos which ebbs and eddies like starlings in flight seems unfathomable even to seasoned economists, their predictions veering wildly from one day to the next. In the meantime the rest of us peons are left to batten down the hatches and wait for the bomb to explode over our heads.

This had been coming we had been been repeatedly told. But the boom was so compelling, along with everything it brought, we stayed at the table, continuing to roll the dice because we couldn’t stop winning. What real gambler ever quits while he’s ahead?

But as this fiesta slowly came to an end - the houses now bigger, the holidays more frequent, the restaurants, the clothes, the private memberships all increased - the painter whose work I saw last night, decided to abstract himself, the years of decadence and indulgence finally becoming too much. So he shut himself away and painted dots. Dots upon dots upon dots.

That’s all that was left when the party was over... when the the brain was left so mangled from the pounds of MDMA ingested over two decades... nothing but meaningless semi-autistic renditions of pebble-dashed emptiness, a brain filled with microscopic blobs of decorative bubbles. A brain exploded like the heart of an atom. 

And as I looked around the rooms of the make-shift gallery, people chattered and drank and ignored the pictures on the wall, unsure what to make of them. 

Possibly fearful of what they might be saying about the painter’s mind.

Or maybe afraid of what they might be saying about themselves.

He first came to my attention two years ago. I was wandering around Tate Britain marvelling at how much my taste in Art has changed as I’ve grown older. Paintings which once filled me with glee and satisfaction - the thick set morbidity of Frank Auerbach, the big cocked expanses of Franz Kline - I now passed by with nary a glance. That’s not to say I dismissed them, they simply felt like over-familiar friends whose personalities I had now exhausted... like certain songs by The Beatles you know you never have to hear again - The Fool On the Hill, Can’t Buy Me Love, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds - songs you once adored but have now been played to such an extent that never hearing them would only feel like a microscopic loss to one’s cultural life.

As I drifted past these iconographic paintings of my youth, I thankfully found myself brought up short by pieces of Art that had once struck me much like a grey day in Debden, something to be noticed without actually being drawn to. Such an example were the Victorian sculptures, particularly Antonio Canova’s The Three Graces on loan from the V&A. They turned me on in a way I could never, and would never, have imagined. Whether this is down to the fact that I am now ageing and the opportunities to feast my eyes upon such youthful pulchritude become less frequent, the poise and beauty of the work, the delicacy with which the women were draped around each other, I found both erotic and tender. It reminded me of my heterosexuality and strangely - although the two are probably inextricably linked - it also made me think about God. The notion of anything, any great power, being able to create something, some body, which can then engender such emotions simply by the implication of form felt somehow profound. Perhaps it can simply be put down to Dawkins’ selfish gene and all its latent urges, but to feel such delight in something carved out of marble surely implies something more than mere self-perpetuation.

Before I made a complete fool of myself - so tempted to touch, to caress - I moved on, and it was on my journey back towards the museum’s exit that I caught sight of it... a portrait of a woman in a simple black dress standing in an austere, sparely furnished room, her back to the viewer, hair tied in a bun. There was little if no hint as to her personality or identity but there was something strangely mysterious about the picture, something melancholic, somehow lonely, but nevertheless full of poise and calm. It was at that moment I first entered the world of Vilhelm Hammershoi.

Time passed, but the memory of the painting, its muted pewters and greys, stayed with me. I mentioned the artist’s name to a few friends but drew a complete blank. I researched him on The Web and found that he was an acquired taste. Unsuccessful during his career in the late 19th century, Hammershoi was rediscovered only as recently as the 1980’s. One of his great champions is the broadcaster Michael Palin who, like me, had stumbled into his work when on other matters, in his case a travelogue around Denmark. I felt quite proud of my discovery. It was like being a teenager again, finding a band no-one had heard of - a Prag Vec or Thomas Leer. But all that was to change twelve weeks ago.

Much to my surprise I learnt that the former Python and I weren’t the only aficionados to harbour a special interest in the moody Scandinavian. The Royal Academy was about to put on a major UK retrospective of Hammershoi’s work. Why on earth now? I asked myself. Was it something I said? Yet despite my amazement - once more considering Plato’s theory of floating ideas - I didn’t rush down to Piccadilly to see the show. As is my usual wont, I kept putting it off until the exhibition was about to close. I finally hurried to Green Park last Saturday lunchtime, fearful of potential crowds but thinking who the hell’s going to turn up to see an unknown painter from the dark side of Christianshavn?

Plenty it turned out. And as I found myself jostling for room space between Home County harridans and earnest Germans with large headphones clamped to their ears, I asked myself, why the unexpected appeal? And this ultimately is what I came up with.

These are tough times we’re living in, as if it needs to be pointed out. We’ve reached a post 9/11 era where nothing seems to connect. Wars are being fought in our name, the justifications for them changing seasonally. A generation of Baby Boomers have grown up to see their 60’s optimism slowly overwhelmed by a sea of empty materialism, ungrateful kids, failed marriages and insecure jobs. What’s more, their friends have begun to start dying around them. The new century promised so much. Technology would, we were told, make life more liveable. The Soviet threat had long gone, Europe was one big happy family and America was thriving. How swiftly that has changed.

In its place drifted in a seemingly-permanent cloud, a general malaise, a sense of dissatisfaction. All the stuff that was supposed to work, that was meant to make you happy, wasn’t paying off. Commentators like Oliver James and Alain De Boton became bestsellers as the public found themselves turning to someone, anyone, who could explain why this was happening in the hope that once understood they might be able to do something about it. But the remedy suggested by such writers was to scale down, return to a way of life more akin to the period after the Second World War.

That of course made little sense to a generation brought up on the belief that everything they have worked for, everything they have been told will make not only their lives better but the world a better place to live, is actually having the opposite effect. Giving up a hard-slaved for life of creature comforts in order to get in touch with yourself may look good on paper but the reality is another thing altogether.

Instead people began to retreat into their own little worlds. Whether through the Internet or the cubicle-sized society we have built for ourselves, people hid away in their bedrooms, their personal work-spaces or garden sheds. There they could sit with their own private thoughts wondering how they were supposed to make sense of it all. Concepts of community no longer rang true because at the end of the day we were still left with the nagging sense that none of this was really worth it, certainly not as rewarding as we had been led to believe. Besides which, we no longer knew who our community was.

And now the credit crunch. After five years of watching the axis of the world wobble furiously and all the philosophical indulgences of the 60’s & 70’s replaced by fundamentalist considerations we thought long left behind, we are now being forced to consider a new way of life, a downsized, more modest way of life we seemingly have no choice but to embrace. People unsurprisingly are mighty concerned about it. Beyond the fact that it doesn’t really appeal, there is also an overriding sense that we have been sold a pup. What have we spent the last 20,30,40 years working for if it’s all going to be taken away because of matters beyond our control?

Except they were in our control. Global warming and rapid population growth are completely down to us. The de-regulation of the finance industries we voted for... if any of us had bothered to read the small print. So we can’t wring our hands, stamp our feet and say it wasn’t our fault. Because it was.

But what has any of this got to do with Vilhelm Hammershoi?

Looking at his paintings of people standing alone in empty, cold rooms, one realises the work is less about the geography or the details - the porcelain serving dish, the bare table, the perfunctory decoration on the walls - but more about a state of mind. There is a willing austerity, a cleanliness of space, no clutter, no fuss, a pre-Ikea interior. The rooms are left sparse in order to give room to the thoughts on the mind of either the character pictured in the space or, if the space is empty, then the viewer themselves. And the relationship with this spare, meditative, restrained - almost ‘Huis Clos’ - type of environment seems enormously prescient in the current climate.

All the junk we have bought to fill up our lives suddenly seems irredeemably useless. It’s not working... it’s a fraud. And looking at Hammershoi's unoccupied rooms and desolate streets we are both reminded of that fact while being left with nothing but our own relationship to their sobriety. They feel barren, post-apocalyptic, as if some terrible virus has come to rid the world of its self-made ills.

All that remains is a place to exist... a place to reflect... a place solely for oneself.

The first time it came to my notice was in Bergen New Jersey. I was watching the summer blockbuster ‘Independence Day’ accompanied by an English colleague of mine, a man of relatively gentle disposition. As the American President on screen exhorted his fellow countrymen with a speech of some bluster, a speech of which the ex-real-life President Ronald Reagan would have been proud, the crowd around us took a moment to put down their jumbo crates of popcorn and bucket-sized cokes and holler their approval.

This in itself wasn’t unduly alarming, although I did notice a sideways look of terror on the face of my compatriot, as it came at the apex of a continuous and unrelenting babble which had begun pretty much from the moment the lights in the theatre had begun to dim. In fact as the film progressed I noticed that the audience felt it appropriate to talk at exactly the same time as the characters onscreen. It was as if some social nicety was being observed. “Ladies and gentlemen you may now chat freely amongst yourselves...”

Of course this was in an era before the ubiquitous mobile phone, so all conversations involved the people in the room rather than the limitless opportunities for communication afforded by a buzzing, chirping handset. But what stuck me, if in truth such conversations taking place weren’t taking their lead from the behaviour onscreen, was the notion that they were occurring because, in the eyes of the audience at least, the scripted speeches only served to signify that nothing of dramatic interest was taking place. This wasn’t some sub-conscious notion of manners, the filmgoers feeling it rude to eavesdrop. No, they simply felt that the concept of characters talking was of no import, no relevance to their enjoyment of the film whatsoever. Onscreen yakking was seen as marking time, filler before the next moment of action grabbed their emotions and gave them a good shake.

Since that fateful day in the American suburbs I have witnessed this type of behaviour more and more often, so much so that I have learnt to avoid Multiplexes at certain times and days of the week. But more profound than a simple re-arrangement of my social habits is the influence this kind of public reaction is having on Film itself.

In the days of its infancy, Film was a silent medium. It was then that the building blocks of its language were formed. These obviously evolved with the influence of sound but the fundamental expressions of technique and story-telling had been laid down. With the influx of sound, dialogue became a necessity. The audiences wanted to see their movie stars talk. The fact that several careers hit the buffers - the alto squeak of a barrel-chested leading man revealing his true predilections, the raven haired beauty’s Russian dialect proving as impenetrable as her personality - were a small price to pay. Besides, there were hundreds if not thousands of plays which could be cheaply put up on screen. Playwrights, often from New York, were paid to put words into the mouths of the more adept actors. Writers who had come from a verbal and character-driven medium (after all, what is most theatre except for people conversing in a room?) took the coin and moved West. The best of them sometimes directed - Billy Wilder, Joseph Mankiewicz - and in doing so produced some of Hollywood’s classics.

But times have changed. Television, once seen as Film's poor cousin, has in recent years raised its game. Writers who want time and space not only to develop more complex story-lines but deeper, more involved characters can now, thanks to the lead shown by HBO, find a more welcoming and appropriate stage for their work. They also for once receive due kudos (something they never got before) their work becoming if anything more entrenched in the zeitgeist than a film struggling to compete in a saturated market-place.

Meanwhile movies themselves seem to be travelling inexorably in an opposite direction. The only real money-makers are the ‘tent-pole’, franchise, star-driven pics aimed at the 15-25 year old demographic (the chatterers), a post-MTV generation who have developed the attention span of gnats. Childhood years spent being dumped in front of TV screens forced to imbibe hundreds of thousands of 30-second narratives have given them the ability to comprehend, retain and process a story-line far more effectively and quickly than their forebears. Talk has thus become unnecessary. Everything can be ‘said’ without words and a generation now growing up without reading but 'txt-speak' has no love for language. Words become the sole preserve of ‘Juno’-type freaks and geeks.

At the same time, Television, because of the size of the screen, always lending itself more graciously to the concept of talking heads, has undermined Film’s role in regards a more verbal form of storytelling. Unless it’s one of the great icons of the day - a Brad Pitt or Keira Knightley - no one wants to spend money to look at an anonymous nobody chuntering away.

So what’s the long-term prognosis? I like others, see Film returning to its roots. In an article in last weekend’s Sunday Times, the author Jonathan Coe quotes Hitchcock as saying, “The art of cinema does not consist of taking photographs of people talking.” Coe goes on to set down the thoughts of Irish critic Fintan O’Toole: “What we’re now seeing is the beginning of a return by cinema to its own distinctive essence - moving pictures.” O’Toole cites the 20-minute wordless sequence at the beginning of Pixar’s Wall-E, the silent first act of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, and the long, dialogue-free sequences in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men.

CGI and other spectacular means of presentation (3D & Imax) in which the studios seem to be investing heavily, imply that the movie-going experience will, like its early days, return to something of a more visceral, whizz-bang experience.

So if you want to see stories about human relationships you’ll find yourself forced to survive on small-screen fodder and the film screenwriter, with a passion for intricate, witty, sometimes moving dialogue, will be nor more than a relic of history, peddling software deemed well past its sell-by date.

I’m recovering from two sleepless nights. Political junkie that I am I found myself waking up at some ungodly hour of the morning to hear the lead speeches from the Republican convention (I’d done the same last week for Obama).

Of course the trick is listening to what is being said between the lines, sometimes hard to do as in both cases the respective audiences have been whipped into such a state of frenzy they holler like an army of cheerleaders on adrenochrome, no doubt concerned that anything less than a rabid appreciation of their candidate will play badly on Prime Time.

The speeches naturally play up to the crowd, the rhetoric carefully orchestrated to whip up already trigger-haired emotions. But beyond the difference in party politics - big and small government, high and low taxes, pro-life, pro-choice, more war or jaw-jaw - something else struck me last night, or should I say the wee hours of the morning. It was the continued reference to America being the greatest country on earth.

This theme was hammered repeatedly. It was used to justify everything from foreign policy to the reason the candidates first became involved in politics itself. “Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country” has become the core idea beating at the heart of American politics.

America still sees itself as an idea as much as a nation. It was a country created rather than one that slowly evolved. And this sense of self-definition and self-justification is what drives it. Because at its centre, I believe, is a sense that somehow it is not a country in the way the rest of the countries of the world see themselves. America will forever be the new kid on the block, a nation of immigrants, rejects and runaways who stole a nation from indigenous people to create its own slice of heaven.

Hence this relentless self-assurance that such a dream was worth it... that the American people truly are living in the greatest country on Earth.

I considered this I lay in bed watching the first glimpses of dawn peek through the curtains. And I asked myself whether the people of my own country Britain thought of themselves the same way. The last time it seemed that we were asked to do so was way back in the 1940’s when Churchill exhorted the populace to remain both steadfast and loyal. But looking back at those wartime speeches it is salient to note that he never spoke of Britain in isolation. While professing an abiding love for this sceptred island he knew our future could only be secured with the aid and support of our friends and allies. We were always part of bigger picture, whether fighting the Nazis or later, Communist totalitarianism.

Even if we could have afforded it, Churchill knew we couldn’t go it alone. But more importantly, he wasn’t presenting a Great British way of life as a model for the whole world to follow or adhere to. He had travelled far and wide in his youth and was worldly enough to realise there were other nations who felt their own way of life was of equal worth and value.

This is an idea with which America seems to struggle.

The recent Olympics in Beijing proved a salutary reminder of how other people can also feel passionately that what their country represents is the strongest and most powerful model in the world. The Chinese after years of censorship and repression find it hard to acknowledge that what they have been told by their leaders about themselves might not always be the truth. Their table-topping medal count no doubt went a long way towards convincing them they are once more a major player on the World stage.

Russia too, smarting from its post Soviet break-up, while having to accept its lowlier position on the Olympic rostrums, now finds itself gripped by a fever of hero-worship as Putin re-awakens their sense of self-respect after twenty years of disillusion, confusion and loss by invading former Soviet territories, throwing America’s diplomatic arguments back in her face, installing its own army of ’peacekeepers’ and proving itself to be both a belligerent foe and a wily political animal, the likes of which haven’t been seen for half a generation.

As for us - Team GB - while revelling in our record medal haul - discovered on returning home that we are anything but a United Kingdom, instead increasingly seeing ourselves as four distinct countries.

While the English struggle to define their identity, media commentators spending thousands of words on the subject, at once self-mocking, self-hating, more often uncomfortable and bemused, our Celtic counterparts have no such qualms or confusion in knowing who they are. Welsh, Scottish, Irish first - British a very definite second. But for the English to declare the same is seen as a dark form of Nationalism and by proxy, racist. The Little Englander, the Middle Englander, Mondeo man, Colonel Blimp... is seen as a figure of embarrassment, of fun. The solid stock, the Yeoman of old, has disappeared, to be replaced by white collar workers in call centres, consultancies, sales-reps. We’ve become a nation of David Brents.

Nevertheless, when I hear American politicians barking on about their country being the greatest in the world it still leaves me perplexed. Do the Dutch feel the same? The Danes, the Swedes, the Norwegians? European states have long recognised that it was this way of thinking which nearly caused their annihilation half a century ago. There is no longer any appetite for such posturing. Only the French maintain a pretence, but they are so consumed with their own crisis of identity even they know it is only for domestic show. The Germans accept they are still not allowed such utterances and the Spanish and Italians recognise that for all their bluff and posturing no one will ever take them that seriously.

The most belligerent form of self-aggrandisement comes from The East. China, as I have already described, is finally waking from its own self-imposed nightmare. India, for so long tethered to the yoke of its own mumbo-jumbo and spiritual madness, also feels it is time for a share of the cake. Sadly if any nation is likely to kick off a nuclear conflagration it is them, its petty and adolescent relationship with Pakistan a continuing worry to the rest of the world. And let’s not even get into the bonkers posturing of the Middle East.

But as Westerners, we look to our closest allies for a sense of understanding and wisdom when it comes to the global picture. We need to feel that like us, America appreciates that such self-absorbed sabre-rattling and dick-swinging gets you nowhere. There is no right way to live. There is no blueprint. Democracy sure, freedom of speech, equal rights... then leave it for people to determine their own sense of personal values. As long as no one’s getting hurt - then live and let live.

John McCain seems to me something of a confused character. To a degree he’s an outsider, a leftward leaning Republican, and as such disliked by many in his party. Outside of his military leanings and his attitude towards tax & spend, much of what he says could easily fit beneath the Democratic umbrella. Perhaps those beatings he took in Hanoi made him take a right turn. His running mate Palin is a small town ignoramus. Unworldly and untravelled, she’s a woman whose understanding of the world reaches as far as the state line. And as such, she is similar to a vast number of her fellow Americans. She is also similar to vast number of Russians, Indians and Chinese, people who also see the world only in their own terms, through their own particular and reactionary prism.

This type of small-mindedness, to me at least, feels like the last thing the world needs right now. We don’t want nations governed by fear, but by hope. We need to find our commonalities, not our differences. We need to reach out to other, break down the prejudices, whether perpetuated by religious maniacs from all sides of the spectrum, or nationalistic leaders stirring emotions for their own political and power-hungry ends.

The old line, though over worn, still rings true today. Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. And after the stupidity and chaos of last eight years, it should also be the last thing on the minds of either political party or the American people themselves.