Whatever Happened to this Likely Lad? A meditation on Andy Partridge and his Fuzzy Warblings

It’s a shame about Andy Partridge. He could so easily have been one of the songwriting greats of all time, a charismatic leading man in the theatre of pop. Instead, he settled for a walk-on part, a Dickensian comic cameo with a suitably bucolic accent and a penchant for ‘I’m not bald really’ eccentric headgear. For almost thirty years, Partridge and his erstwhile band, the artist formerly known as XTC, have been missing from the arena of live music, and more than ten years have elapsed since the band’s last studio album. There is, of course, a very good reason for this lack of activity. In fact, there are ten reasons, and they’re all called Fuzzy Warbles.

Back in the mid 90s, Andy became aware of a voracious trade in XTC demos which had somehow sidled out of his garden shed and into the public domain. Deciding, quite rightly, that he’d like a piece of that fanboy action for himself, he set up his own label and embarked on a series of legitimate releases. Instantly, the previously traded bootlegs would be kicked into touch by these ‘as good as it gets’ remastered versions, all of which have been polished up as far as the originals would allow. All very good for business, and it would keep the fans happy until the next ‘proper’ album came along. Only, it didn’t.

Fuzzy Warbles might have kept a few fans happy, but the demo series also seems to have spelled the end for any new Partridge studio albums. Other projects have, of course, taken up some of the last decade, but the dearth of new material has begun to suggest that we’re down to the very last dregs in Albert Brown’s keg of Red Barrel. The continual reissuing and repackaging of XTC and Dukes material is another sign that Partridge may have thrown in the songwriting towel and Fuzzy Warbles may prove to have been his last hoorah.

Although Partridge is without doubt an extremely adroit musical craftsman, he is also a mischevious magpie, dipping into genres and swapping voices as the fancy takes him. Fuzzy Warbles reveals this playfulness, but also suggests at something lacking in the Partridge canon: a certainty about his true musical identity. Is he Sir John Johns, the clock-melting psychedeliasmith, or a vegetarian Captain Beefheart? Which is the real Andy Partridge? The Macca-by-numbers tunesmith or the mellotron noodler? They’re all here, ladies and gentlemen, so decide for yourselves.

What Warbles also reveals is Andy’s dogged pursuit of musical perversity, often at the expense of melody and harmony (Volume One’s Wonder Annual being a prime example of this propensity). His other failing, rather charmingly, is a sort of solipsism that has slowly engulfed the man over the past decade or so. Partridge has become the custodian of his own peculiar dusty museum of musical relics. Via the internet and occasional jottings on record sleeves, Andy has analysed, criticised, interpreted, punned and pontificated on his recorded output (and it pains me to have to say this) to the point of tedium. He’s become the classic pub bore, a Mastermind contestant whose specialist subject is himself.

At first, this analysis was revealing, and Partridge in full flow can be a very amusing raconteur, his mind continually tripping over itself in the search for the next tenuous pun or piece of wordplay. But, like dear old Macca with his ‘Yesterday was originally called Scrambled Eggs’ story, there are only so many times we can or indeed want to hear, in forensic detail, the circumstances surrounding the recording of ‘Easter Theatre.’

The problem here is one of perspective: the musician can’t be the critic of his own work – he’s too close to it to be able to offer a truly objective judgement. Hence, some of Andy’s most beloved tracks turn out to be the least rewarding to the listener: Obscene Procession (on Volume 2) is just unpleasant listening, a tacky gameshow theme tune rendered barely tolerable by Andy’s multi-speeded layered vocals. One can only give thanks that it never made it onto a legitimate XTC album. Warbles’ biggest failing is that it presents the listener with anything and everything left in Andy’s musical locker, the good, the bad and the indifferent, without the usual filtering process of record label, producer and bandmates’ opinions. This is good if you’re an uncritical fanboy, but the long term effect is diminishing to the Partridge mystique.

These ten CDs are evidence of this trend towards self-absorption and self-analysis. Their contents could helpfully have been whittled down to a single CD ‘best of’. What they remind us is how much XTC needed producers (Andy’s demos tend to have a dry and processed sound, often devoid of reverb or any kind of room ambience). They also remind us what a vital contribution was made by fellow band members Colin Moulding, Dave Gregory and, yes, even Terry (And the Lovemen) Chambers. Recent internet rumour suggests that the trio are talking to each other after an estrangement of several years, so there may yet be an Indian summer for XTC. But with Partridge and his fellow members already well into their fifties, the time for new music is running out.

When all’s said and done, Andy has probably been his own worst enemy. He was courted (indulged, even) by one of the biggest record labels of its day, and in the end fell out with them because they refused to go on letting him do things his way. There are two sides to this story, of course. In some parallel dimension, XTC are U2 and Andy is churning out music by numbers to satisfy a global audience. What we got instead, through whatever Quantum accident dictated Partridge’s musical pathway, was a decade or so of shiny pop artefacts that couldn’t have come from anywhere else on the planet. By the end of XTC’s recording career, there were still many more such nuggets lurking in the primeval West Country slime, and with Fuzzy Warbles, Andy has left no stone unturned. Sometimes he reveals only a few woodlice and some decaying leaves. Occasionally, it’s something sparkly.

In the final analysis, the Fuzzy Warbles series have provided a charming, if exhaustive stroll along the byways of Andy’s musical landscape. There are songs here that hint, frustratingly, at albums that might have been. There are, equally, plenty of jottings that should not have been allowed out in public. If Andy Partridge still nutures any musical ambition beyond tending his own back pages, then it’s time to come out of the shed, lock up the demo tapes and get working on some new material. The world needs another fully realised Partridge meisterwerke. Scraps from the master’s table will no longer suffice.

Only the crumbliest, flakiest popstar – Julian Cope and FRIED

Ladies and gentlemen, behold the wonder that is Julian Cope – naked, he poses beneath a turtle shell, a battered toy truck lying discarded nearby. Elsewhere in the sleeve’s sumptuous packaging, he wades through a swamp. ‘Namdam am I, I’m a madman,’ declares a caption. The album is Fried, Cope’s second in less than a year, and its auteur is clearly damaged goods.

In the wake of the dissolution of the Teardrop Explodes, it was easy to imagine Cope as Syd Barrett in post-Floyd freefall, and whilst the first solo outing World Shut Your Mouth offered tightly constructed pop (albeit suffused with Cope’s own brand of madness), Fried is of a different order entirely. Sparse, barely-realised songs recall the fragility of Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs. But where Barrett’s stumbling chaotic performance suggested genuine mental breakdown, Cope remains firmly in control of his material. Even in Fried’s flakiest moments (the ‘talkdown’ sequence from Reynard the Fox), the delivery is tight and assured. Granted, this is the sound of a troubled individual, and that screaming is real – but it’s right on the beat.

Reynard… casts Cope as the outsider, pursued and ultimately taking his own life. The setting for these events is a real place, and was used as the location for the sleeve photography: a spoil heap at Alvecote near Tamworth, hard by the railway line and the M42 motorway. Though of recent origin, there’s something primal and unsettling about the Alvecote mound, and Cope’s obsessive interest was probably the beginnings of his later investigations into genuine neolithic sites.

Reynard suggests at violence and disorder to come, and whilst there is certainly more of the same to follow (The Bloody Assizes, O King of Chaos) nothing else comes close to the naked emotion on display here. It's obvious why this track was placed first in the running order. But Cope will always be Cope, and his devious sense of humour is never far from the surface. He seems to take a perverse delight in following the freakish opener with a throwaway pop song, its jangling twelve-string and backwards guitar reminding us of his passion for mid-60s psych. Lyrically, Bill Drummond Says is a string of the ex-Teardrops manager’s aphorisms strung together: ‘give me one good reason why I shouldn’t win.’ Drummond later got his own back with the ludicrous ditty Julian Cope is Dead on his solo album The Man.

Throughout Fried, Cope makes full use of his vocal range, which extends from fragile choirboy (Laughing Boy) to randy old goat (Sunspots). The latter has Cope gleefully making childish car noises: ‘eeeyyomm – it goes away’ and the subsequent single release includes a picture of a toy racing car on the sleeve, yet another of his obsessive interests.

It’s the quieter, more considered moments on Fried that are the most effective – the chilling sepulchral church organ drone of Torpedo; the curiosity that is Search Party; Me Singing, a clear piece of autobiography, and Laughing Boy, a song that somehow evokes the wintry landscape of Cope’s then home county, Warwickshire.

In between these moments of genuine fragility come some pop belters. Though lyrically obtuse, if not raving bonkers, Holy Love might easily have been a single, and contains one of the album’s most memorable couplets: ‘Who’s that rolling in the hay/ the baby Jesus or the cavalry?’ This, as if proof were needed, makes Cope’s messianic delusions clear for all to see. For further evidence, see the sleeve of St. Julian.

What elevates Fried to greatness is Cope’s delight in what he’s pulling off. Yes, he’s a madman but at the same time he knows exactly what he’s doing. Perhaps his greatest trick of all was in persuading a major label (Mercury) to release this fragile artefact. Fried sounds like something dug up from an ancient burial mound, an album built on fear, supersition and arcane ritual. Cope would not scale these heights again until 1990’s Peggy Suicide. But the fact that he tries and occasionally fails is all part of the Cope mystique.

These days, he seems overlooked, and although communiqués from planet Cope still arrive quite regularly via his own label, it's been years since Cope last troubled the majors. Clearly, he's now found a way of doing his own thing without playing the 'greedheads' games. Recent releases seem to confirm that the transformation begun with Fried is now complete. Cope, the self-proclaimed Arch Drude, is no less than a force of nature. If any pop star is going to come back from the dead (as he predicts on 2007's Hidden Doorways) then Cope's your man.

Back in the 80s, it was perhaps too easy to take Cope for granted, in the presence of so many other intelligent pop artists, yet even then, his peculiar brand of ‘floored genius’ set him apart from his peers. Twenty five years on, with pop music largely in the hands of uninspired and unambitious corporate artists – brands, not bands – it’s clear how much the world needs another visitation from the phenomenon that is – or was – Julian Cope.

Second coming, anybody?

Word are Trains - SWOON Twenty Five Years On

Pretentious is an easy word to use as a weapon. A very easy word if you were a music critic in 1984, in receipt of Prefab Sprout’s debut album, Swoon. Here, for heaven’s sake, was a record whose title was explained as ‘Songs Written Out Of Necessity’. The sleeve note was credited to Emma Welles, but it smacks of McAloonism. McAloonacy? One might well ask what was the necessity that drove him to create songs like ‘Green Isaac’, ‘Cue Fanfare’ and ‘Here On The Eerie’. What is Swoon all about? Twenty five years later does it all make any more sense than it did at the time?

On first listening, those of a shallow mindset might well have seen pretention in the then unknown Sprouts’ pop stylings. Fashionable white funk. Literate lyricism. And, in McAloon, a writer and peformer not afraid of taking chances, some of them dancing perilously close to the precipice of pseudo-intellectualism. But, to his credit, McAloon does not miss his footing, high on his self-appointed eerie. He comes damn close at times, but, like a tightrope walker teasing his audience, he never quite tumbles into the abyss.

Swoon’s opener is the esoteric neo-funk of ‘Don’t Sing’, (typical of McAloon’s skewed approach to songwriting in that the title does not appear once in the lyric). This, no less, is a song based on Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, a conceit that suggests the densely literate references that litter the musical landscape of Steely Dan. As, indeed, does the music itself, as it swerves and dips through chord and mood changes that are both unpredictable and beguiling. Less than four minutes in and Swoon has already nailed its colours to the mast.

But the Graham Greene subtext is, if anything, a red herring, for it is with the second track, Cue Fanfare, that we begin to get to the heart of what Swoon is all about – Paddy McAloon’s fascination with the clichés of romantic love and lyricism. ‘The sweet sweet songs that cloud your eyes – nostalgia supplies’ he sings, in a voice heavy with world-weariness. Throughout the album, McAloon sounds less like a man in his twenties than an embittered forty-something cynic looking back on life’s mistakes. It gets better: ‘Loredo Highstreet buried me… beneath an oak tree.’ Hackneyed phraseology that could have come straight from Hank Williams, if not earlier. McAloon knows his stuff and his ability to weild such authentic phrases alongside a chorus about Bobby Fischer is just one of the many chance he takes here. Musically, the song swoops and dives, flirting with changes of key and tempo, almost daring the listener to make sense of it all. Like the chess grandmaster, McAloon damn near ‘plays us out of town.’

Now he’s softened us up, McAloon is ready to try anything. Like a song that begins with a line that could have come straight from… well, where exactly? John Donne? WB Yeats? ‘Stella Mater, light is fading/ making such a fool of thee…’ The etherial voice of Wendy Smith, who haunts the whole album like a ghostly companion, adds to the unearthly atmosphere before the world-weary McAloon comes down to earth with another killer lyric: ‘This is the time/ I’ve set aside/ from selling old rope/ and telling bad jokes/ and cul-de-sac pride.’ It’s like Frank Sinatra seen through the distorting base of a whisky tumbler. Once again, McAloon returns to Swoon’s ever-present obsession, the uncomfortable cloying clichés of romantic language, as embodied in song: ‘In itself it’s a joy, whether it soothes or annoys, a song starts in the throat.’ And, as if to prove his point out of sheer perversity, in comes the chorus, emerging like a sudden jump into the middle of another track with its unexpected change of mood and tempo and the creepy, inexplicable refrain: ‘And little Green Isaac/ You’re gonna walk backwards through the room.’ Well, of course he is.

From here, Swoon continues to soar, taking ever more daring chances. A bit of cod Shakespeare? Certainly sir, I advise you to try ‘Here on the Eerie’: ‘… the truth well will make you ill.’ Vocally, McAloon pushes his voice to the very limits of its range, delving down to deep bass notes that he can barely pull off. And somehow it works. We’re still only on track four and yet already one feels totally at home in the musical world of Prefab Sprout. The unexpected cadences, the unusual chord voicings, making full use of the tension between bass and guitar parts, the rhythmic dynamics. This is sophisticated stuff and McAloon sounds like he’s been doing it for years. Effortlessly.

But the masterstroke comes in the form of the song that, on the original vinyl, closed the first side. Cruel is a staggering, towering achievement, quite possibly McAloon’s finest song, and in it, he distills everything that’s been bothering him so far during the album’s proceedings. It’s like the conclusion to a perfectly reasoned argument, and in typical bravura style, McAloon nails it right from the start: ‘There is no Chicago urban blues/ more heartfelt than my lament for you.’ There’s a whole novel’s worth of soul searching buried in these densely crafted lyrics. Not to mention an almost painful awareness of what has gone before. ‘My tuppentup friend’ recalls Moon River, or even Porgy and Bess. In the hands of a lesser artist, the jazz stylings on offer here might seem mere shallow posturing. But McAloon, with the gruff, cracked voice of the bluesman he alludes to in the lyric, sounds entirely in command of the situation. The vocal recording, with massive mid-range in the Eq, only adds to the sense of authenticity on offer. It’s here also that we encounter one of the two most beguiling sounds on the whole album – McAloon’s little vocal ‘gulp’ before he essays the line ‘Lordy, what would I do.’ It’s tiny, a nuance, maybe even a mistake, but the fact that it’s been left in is proof of the genius we’re dealing with.

By the time the needle goes down on side two, you’re wondering if Swoon can maintain this level of achievement. Well, the answer is yes and no. The first thing we hear on side two is McAloon's varispeeded deep voice singing a babytalk refrain: ‘Bo…bo bee… bo bee… bo.’ It’s almost laughable. Almost, but not quite. And that’s the point. It’s as if the Sprouts are trying to scare off anyone who still harbours any doubts about this album. This far and no further. But ‘Couldn’t Bear to be Special’ turns out to be one of Swoon’s key moments. McAloon’s delivery swings alarmingly between tenderness and naked aggression. “I couldn’t bear…RIGHT?” This is one of the most in-your-face vocal performances you will ever encounter. And what’s it all in aid of? McAloon is upbraiding his lover for burdening him with unreasonable expectations: ‘Don’t look at me and say/ that I’m the very one/ who makes the cornball things occur.’ Note the use of the word ‘cornball’, too. A knowing nod in the direction of George and Ira? I’d say so. There’s another fascinating piece of audio on offer here, too – a far-off percussive thud suggesting distant cannon fire. This is fast becoming an extraordinary record.

‘I Couldn’t Bear’ is, like ‘Cruel’, an exceedingly hard act to follow, which is probably why McAloon chooses to sequence ‘I Never Play Basketball Now’ at this stage in the proceedings. The song, whilst up there with the best of the Sprouts’ recorded output, can’t quite match what’s gone before, despite some lovely touches like a throwaway guitar figure between the first two lines of the lyric, and is reminiscent of the band’s early singles. Even so, McAloon remains in experimental mood, and the song sounds like an exercise in linearity, as the theme devolves in multiple directions, leaving the listener floundering in unfamiliar waters. And then, miraculously, we’re back at the beginning. What seemed like a random melodic development has, in fact, been meticulously planned. This is the Sprouts' musical modus operandi at work.

‘Ghost Town Blues’, another knowing cliché put to work here as the title, sounds like a novella or short film set to music. Somehow, one imagines 1940s small town America, a tragic heroine and a Jimmy Stewart hero. The listener is forced between the lines to fill in the gaps in McAloon’s glimpsed narrative. Who, exactly is Anne Garland? Does she keep a lonely vigil at the bedside of a comatose lover (‘you can’t call this heartbeat a man’)? Again, the melody continually performs the unexpected, leaping huge intervals, playing games with chord voicings. It simply doesn’t sound like anyone, or anything else. This, truly is the sound of Prefab Sprout, a sound as ungainly in its own way as the band’s name. But somehow, like the randomness of that name, it all works.

‘Elegance’ displays more control and fewer of the bravura effects that Swoon has dazzled us with so far. Even so, there’s still plenty of room for audacity: ‘will you no come assess me’ sings McAloon, sliding incongruously into the argot of Robbie Burns. Again, he looks for comfort in romancticism and finds only empty gestures: ‘because these stardust memories/ fail to please.’ Like Bob Hoskins’ character in ‘Pennies from Heaven’, McAloon wants to believe the old clichés but can’t prevent himself from bursting their romantic bubble.

By the time McAloon counts in ‘Technique’ (a song in four-four time on a count of five – well, of course!), there’s almost a sense of anticipation, a feeling that, having come this far, we can imagine what lies in store. In fact, ‘Technique’ is probably Swoon’s low point. That’s not a very low low, of course, and for many artists, it would be a career high. Yet this tale of infidelity with a woman whose ‘husband works at Jodrell Bank’ doesn’t quite ring true. Even, so there’s still room here for the album’s overarching theme: ‘I loathe the stilted way you make me speak,’ sings McAloon, desperate as ever to find a way to find a way past the clichés of romance.

And for afters? Well, it’s obvious isn’t it? The missing beginning of an earlier song, presented here as the album’s coda, in the form of ‘Green Isaac II’. Though a mere fragment, McAloon’s rich melody contains some gorgeous lyricism. And who, finally is Green Isaac? Why, he’s every naïve fool who ever fell in love.

Truelove's Gutter

It's always disappointing when an artist you respect turns in an album that doesn't measure up to their best. That, for me, was the experience of listening to Richard Hawley's 2007 album Lady's Bridge. After the dark genius of Coles Corner, Lady's... sounded as if Richard's label, Mute, had smelled money and requested something more commercial. If that's what actually happened, Mute can't have been disappointed with Lady's Bridge. Okay, it wasn't commercial in the sense that anything on it was about to set the charts on fire, but it was hummable, melodic, well-produced... and sadly lacking that indefinable spark of genius that made Coles Corner an instant classic. I don't expect Richard Hawley knows any more than anyone else what magical quality it is that makes some songs timeless whilst others are destined to remain good but functional pop tunes. But I suspect he learned from Lady's Bridge, because what I've heard of his latest offering, Truelove's Gutter, out this week, suggests a return to the power and integrity that are the high watermark of Hawley's undoubted genius.

A voice like that demands to be set against something more than efficient rockabilly knock-offs. The Hawley croon (sorry, but there is no other way to describe it) is a thing of darkness and fog, a voice made to echo down empty streets late at night.

I'm not sure whether this is significant or not, but TG is Hawley's first album since Late Night Final not to take its title from a place name in his Sheffield hometown (unless I'm missing something and Truelove's Gutter is just off Eccleshall Road).

I haven't even heard Truelove's Gutter yet, so I'll save a full review for later - but what I have heard, though fragmentary, is impressive... possibly even magnificent.

The trouble with Radio 2

I have just turned off Radio 2. Again. This happens every day. I know, you'll probably tell me I shouldn't have been listening to it in the first place, but it's easier than getting up to keep changing CDs and Radio 1 is just a retrograde step, for reasons too obvious to warrant a mention. And sometimes Radio 2 does manage to play some reasonable and even good music. I heard Heartache Avenue by The Maisonettes last week and that's a classic in my book. Terry Wogan played it. Yes, I know...

Now, at my age (forty...hmmm-hah) I fall nicely into the R2 demographic, plus I'm opinionated as well as being an old git so I tend to see eye to eye with the likes of Ken Bruce (I know... again). But I keep having to turn the bloody station off. Why's that then?

Simple. Their playlist. It's narrow, repetitive and seems to have been constructed in cahoots with the management of one or two undeserving artists, whose music is played constantly throughout the day. The worst offenders in this category are usually songs that are 'current' (as in, they're either out now or they will be soon - so you've been warned). But there are others. Like bloody The Kaiser Chiefs. I'm sorry. I mean BLOODY The Kaiser Chiefs. I don't need to hear "Ruby Ruby Ruby" again, ever and I don't believe anyone else on planet Earth does either. Yet scarcely a week goes by without this infernal song cropping up two, three or maybe more times on Radio 2 - and that's only during the hours when I listen (usually nine to five, though I frequently make exceptions for Radcliffe and Maconie - well, somebody has to).

Why does Ruby get played so much? Well, it's a classic, isn't it? Actually, no. To acquire true classic status, a pop song has to spend a required amount of time in the wilderness, and by this I'm talking about that dry, desolate hinterland of no-radio-play. We, the listening public, need to be allowed time to forget. We need a trial separation, Ruby and I. Then, maybe one day, five years from now, we might meet again on a fairground waltzer and I'll suddenly hear what I've been missing all this time.

All the greats have been to that audio wilderness - in the early 70s, you could barely hear The Beatles or any 60s acts on daytime radio (still less after dark where strange creatures like John Peel held sway). They were old hat, you see. And they didn't get played to death in the way modern music does.

At least Ruby isn't in the charts any more (is it? How the hell would I know - I don't even know if they have pop charts any more). What I do know is what's supposed to be 'current' on Radio 2, for these are, generally, the worst offenders. I'm talking about songs that outstayed their welcome in less time than it takes to play them through once. If they were your friends, you'd hide behind the curtains with the lights out when they came round. But these songs are not my friends. Oh dear me no...

Right now, there are several tracks that are guaranteed to get me up from the computer and across to the 'off' switch. One of them is by something or someone called Hockey (honestly, and I thought all the really crap band names had been done - seems not). If I hear it again, I will throw the radio through the window - of Broadcasting House. The other (we won't even mention Mika here) is by a band with an even worse name than Hockey (if that's possible). I'm talking here about the 'Yeah Yous'. Great name, guys - only sounds almost exactly the same as the 'Yeah Yeah Yeahs.' The music, however, doesn't. What they have out at the moment is a sort of bad eighties knock-off (worse even than the execrable 'Acceptable in the Eighties'). I'm not even going to dignify the offending song by mentioning its title here but it is dreary, processed-production offal lacking in imagination, excitement, daring or any of the other qualities that pop songs once aspired to.

Today, Steve Wrong (in the Afternoon) played these two offenders back to back - as if they hadn't already had enough airplay earlier in the day when I couldn't be arsed to get up and switch them off. That did it for me. True, I should know better than to be listening to Steve Wrong, but, well, I was a bit busy and sometimes it's just easier to let him witter on in the background than making the effort to silence the infernal man.

Now, neither of these songs, taken in moderation (like once, and never again) is really bad enough to cause grave aural offence, but when you're subjected to them hour after hour, day in day out for weeks (weeks? It seems more like years) one can easily lose the will to live. The big problem is, we're dealing with a whole genre of music here that Radio 2 has carved out for itself. I call it 'Radio 2 Lite.' It's like music, but it isn't, and it can swallow up the most surprising of artists - people you used to like until their latest single came out and got carpet-bombed to death on the airwaves.

Once, long ago, I heard Parachutes by Coldplay at a party and thought it was 'quite good' (the best I could manage, in all honesty). How long ago that seems now. Coldplay are top of the offenders register on the Radio 2-Lite playlist. Everything they put out seems guaranteed to annoy you from the word go, from his fey complaining voice to the "oh for god's sake do something else" production. I think they probably started this whole Radio-2 Lite thing going, because it was a Coldplay song (actually I prefer to misspell their name as 'Clodplay') that first really seriously made me have to turn the radio off, like it was an imperative that I couldn't ignore. The song? Well, I don't honestly remember the title, but in it, the very, very wealthy Mr. Martin complained about being 'lost' and having crossed 'lines I shouldn't have crossed.' He was also 'tired and under prepared.' Well dear me! Pop lyricism doesn't come much more tragic than that, does it?

The first few times it got played I barely noticed this song as it seeped from my radio set (I think it was designed to have precisely that effect); but gradually it crept up on me until I realised I couldn't bear that awful man's voice any longer. Now, if you're going to listen to a song four or five times a day for several weeks, the lyrics had better be damn good, because if you're me you start to notice them, and once you start to notice them, you begin to pick them apart. This usually doesn't take too long - a typical Clodplay effort can be reduced to a ball of unravelled wool in minutes. Once the lyrics have gone, there's only the music left. Need I say more?

Let's take this thing by 'Hockey' as an example - the whole song seems to have been contrived to sound as much like Bob Dylan/ Tom Petty as possible - which should be a good thing. Only it aint. This is a song with less than nothing to say, and by definition, a song that didn't need to have been written, still less recorded. "I stole my personality from an anonymous source" sings the singer, as if it wasn't bleeding obvious who he's talking about. Pity he didn't steal the tune while he was at it, and maybe, oh I don't know, an idea or two. The 'melody' (if I can call it that) is mostly linear - which is to say he sings it all on the same note - I think there may be a second note somewhere but I could be wrong about that. And the chorus, as if it's intended to explain anything, informs us that tomorrow is 'just a song away'. Not this song, guys. Tomorrow, the song will be the same, and the day after and the day after that until the wretched thing finally drops off the cliff of Radio 2 and into oblivion. Ah, would that it were as simple as that (as Robert Robinson might have said). For 'Hockey' will surely return to haunt us in the afterlife of the Radio 2 playlists when, in about three weeks time, this disposable pop artefact will have acquired the same (ahem, ahem) 'classic' status as Ruby by the SODDING Kaiser Chiefs.

The world, let alone Radio 2, does not owe any of these bands a living. There's only so much airplay in one lifetime - let's stop wasting it by repeating the same tedious rot over and over again. There are still bands out there making interesting, innovative music and occasionally you'll hear them on the likes of Radcliffe and Maconie (though even this worthy pair are obliged to include a few from the 'Lite' list).

I know I should really be listening to 6 Music. But my digital radio doesn't work. Should I get it fixed, or should Radio 2 get their scheduling fixed? I know which is the more likely to happen...

Thoughts, rants and polemics on the state of music in general

That's what I'll be posting on here - quite a lot of it will be opinionated and offensive to certain artists (who probably deserve to be offended now and again). Not all, mind. I'll also be including reviews and other commentary that will fall under the heading of praise where it's due. These days, I don't find very much praiseworthy in the arena of popular music, and when I do it's usually hidden almost to the point of obscurity on tiny labels or mySpace. There is almost nothing new and worthwhile being released by the major labels, and even most of the smaller labels seem to have run out of steam. And don't get me started on the state of national radio...