Howard Jackson

These are the words of my father, ‘At the end of the day, it’s a ball bouncing around between two onion bags.  I wouldn’t line the cockloft with any of them.’

Translated into English it means, ‘ The progress of any football team is much more dependent on luck than observers acknowledge.   Footballers and their managers are nowhere near as competent and worthy as they like to pretend. ‘

Dalglish was a great footballer and probably the best who ever played for Liverpool.   Certainly, Dalglish was the best buy that the club made.  He was a great team player, was consistent and rarely missed a game.   The perfect target man, he ensured the ball almost always went from him to another Liverpool player.  He could do this without relying on the pass back unlike many other strikers.  His passes either went sideways or split defences.   He is, for many football fans in Liverpool, the ultimate hero.   But this does not mean that he would be suitable for the cockloft.  No man is a hero to his valet.  Spend ten minutes with a taxi driver in Southport and you will often hear a different perspective about the great man.

Adrian Beecroft has proposed that sacking people in Britain is too difficult.  It appears that you need a reason and thinking of one is just too confusing for our great entrepreneurs who supposedly have the ability to lead us to a new high definition economic plateau.   This proposal should make us all angry but this week the sacking of Dalglish has occupied fans more than the erosion of their industrial rights.   The annual salary for Dalglish necessitated six figures.  The compensation payment is rumoured to be several millions.  Supposedly, he was offered an alternative post within Liverpool Football Club.  He chose the compensation payment instead.  There has been little indignation about the Adrian Beecroft proposal from football fans.  Without any flattering smiles from attractive young women, Vince Cable, who is also a member of the Coalition Government, described the proposal as ‘completely the wrong approach.’   This means that he disagrees with it and it will be dropped.   We have been fortunate.    The single parents who will have to register as unemployed as soon as their marriage explodes into fragments are not so lucky.

Meanwhile, sacked Dalglish has become for too many fans their Diana.   His response to the Hillsborough disaster when he made it a personal responsibility to attend as many funerals as he could should never be forgotten.  He demonstrated real valour and worth.     But the dismissal of Dalglish has happened now.   He is not a victim.   Not because he is a bad man but simply because of how the economics of this society work.    There are those who receive rewards that can never be justified.   It may not be his fault and, admittedly Dalglish only belongs in that category because he was exceptionally talented, but the winners are invariably overpaid and are always able to move on.   The ordinary people in low paid jobs whom half the Government want to be able to sack without a reason, they call it ‘no fault dismissal,’ will find themselves in Job Centre gangs chasing part time jobs.   In a couple of months, King Kenny would be welcomed on any TV show as a football commentator.   Actually, I think he will be better than that and resist the offers.   His hostility to the media which has been criticised and may have lost him his job is one of his more admirable qualities.    And, no, I am not defending his handling of the Suarez affair.

Football is becoming a dangerous distraction.   True, I have been preoccupied with rock and roll for all my life.   But I hope that these challenges demonstrate that a love of Elvis music and rock and roll can be combined with a sense of political responsibility.   The fans who believed that football was important because of its working class roots and the solidarity it created need to open their eyes.   Season tickets at a £1000 each have nothing to do with working class unity.     Some working class people can afford them but many cannot and the numbers of the disenfranchised are increasing.

But this is the point argue some of those that have bemoaned the loss of Dalglish.   Liverpool Football Club is not like Chelsea.  It had socialist values.   This is nonsense.  The connection to socialism was always remote.  That marvellous working class hero and its most famous manager, Bill Shankly, voted Labour and assumed he was a socialist but he was more a class conscious populist with strong and somewhat dangerous meritocratic sympathies.   His phrase ‘First is first and second is nowhere’ is not redolent with egalitarian compassion.   Many Liverpool fans are anti-Tory but the club has always been a business.   Football was about money from the very beginning, even when clubs were not allowed to make a profit.   God, those were the days.   Brian Clough, our other working class hero, was certainly interested in the green stuff which is why he was so interested in heavy brown envelopes.

The difference today is that business is more ruthless and calculating.   Now, it is either about getting super rich or gangsters and despots using their money to buy success.  Who was it who won the Champions League and the Premier League?  Well, yes.   The only hope that Liverpool fans have is that the owners, Fenway Sports Group, are competent at running businesses based on sporting competition.  They clearly know how to get wealthy from hedge funds but I have never been convinced that millionaires are cleverer than the rest of us.   Rich people queued up to buy overpriced Facebook shares.    The face of John Henry which appears to be far from authentic makes me uneasy.   I never wear them but if I had to have dinner with him I would feel safer with a cravat around my neck.

Still, we all want success?  I am not so sure anymore.   People have accused Elvis of becoming fake showbiz in Vegas but compared to the patronising rituals Manchester City fans had to endure in Manchester the other week Elvis looks like a man who was determined to honour his roots.  (Actually, I think Vegas Elvis was a lot more faithful to his working class roots than people realise but if you want an argument you will have to buy the book.)

I am in the half of Liverpool fans that believe Dalglish should have been sacked but like most of them I would have been happier if he had accepted to stay with the club in another capacity.  The debate about what his record last year justifies will never be resolved because a football team is always a work in progress.  Half the fans were convinced by what they saw and half were not.   I belong with the latter.   In a world where we appear keen to sack people with a no fault clause there should also be some financial responsibility or sense of proportion.   The £100m that was squandered has to have significance.   And like my father I do not believe in the myth of the manager ‘who turns it around’.  They can exist and Shankly and Clough are fine examples but success often requires other factors such as infrastructure, opportunity and good old fashioned teamwork and support.  Maybe our millionaires and football heroes should remember that when they vote for governments who want to fire people without a reason.

If you want to read about Elvis, rock and roll and much more click here.

If her Guardian column on Monday 14th May is an indication, Polly Toynbee is becoming the Joe Louis of the left.   There is something inspiring about a tough two fisted heroine.  And since the Coalition Government, Polly Toynbee has been slinging punches faster than we thought possible.    Meanwhile, Ed Milliband is a different kind of fighter, the kind who prefers the monotonous jab.   We have to be hesitant about being convinced by Milliband but if he does eventually triumph and claim a place in history he will not be the first defensive jabber to be underestimated.    The rest of us scream from the other side of the ropes and demand a punch that will knockout Cameron.    But we are impatient spectators.   The trainers at the side of the ring understand the rigours of a championship fight.   Jab and keep your guard high and do not let the opponent get close.

‘What about hitting him with some policies, coach, you know, show him we have ideas?’

‘Just keep jabbing, son.  You’ll be all right.  His nose is bleeding and his eye is opening.’

There was a time when Polly was a jabber.   She always had compassion which she proved by taking routine and unpleasant jobs but she believed pragmatism rather than idealism had to prevail.    Thatcher had that effect on many of us.   When a leader preaches hatred and contempt for half the population and the other half respond by cheering then your ideals suffer.    In an odd way, Thatcher did shift the political opinions of almost everyone to the right.   Much has been made of the massive majority Labour had in 1997 but many people voted Labour back then without any real expectation of reform.     There is an irony.   Blair and New Labour deserve all the condemnation that they have received because they continued with Thatcherism.  But if their initiatives did nothing about the gap between rich and poor, the progress made in the NHS and the impact of tax credits was more significant than most thought possible in 1997.   The problem for New Labour was that Thatcherism did not work.   Industries vanished and Brown felt that he had no choice but to support an economic system based on finance and debt.   He was clever enough to know it was flimsy but lacked the one virtue he admired, courage.  His remark about abolishing boom and bust was misunderstood.   He had abolished it, his policies were designed to maintain spending and growth at a steady rate and they were feasible providing that there was no wholesale financial collapse.   Unfortunately, greed was not quite as good or as beneficial as some had promised.

The plates stopped spinning but long before the crash Toynbee had re-invented herself as a malcontent.   She wanted to do more than jab.    Note that the word radical has been avoided.   Her social democracy values demanded efficient management from left wing governments and when Labour returns to power she will no doubt repeat her pleas for responsibility and efficiency.    Somewhere and at some point, though, Toynbee became disgusted by what she saw in the elite of Britain.   She acquired a quality that is hard to resist when it spills out on to the keyboard.   Toynbee discovered the joy of loathing.  This has been missed by her left wing critics.  The lady who back in the eighties deserted Labour for the SDP has never been forgiven.  Yet the world and people change.   Toynbee who campaigns in The Guardian today on behalf of the poor and who exposes the callous greed of the rich is unrecognisable when compared to her predecessor, except the previous incarnation was also a battler.

She must be doing something well because the right wing hates her so much.   This is how motor mouth Boris Johnson describes her; she “incarnates all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess of Blair’s Britain. Polly is the high priestess of our paranoid, mollycoddled, risk-averse, airbagged, booster-seated culture of political correctness and ‘elf ‘n’ safety fascism.’     In other words, she is concerned about social justice.   Boris who managed to be re-elected as Mayor of London without promising any reforms that might improve the lives of ordinary Londoners presumably thought that thinking about the human hardships within his city constituted ‘elf ‘n safety fascism’.

Polly Toynbee angers the rich and powerful because her background means that she knows and understands them.   In the British class system that pretends to be a society the word background is sometimes changed for pedigree.   Because she knows them she can spot stupidity with the precise eye of an expert rifleman.   And on Tuesday in The Guardian the repeater rifle was loaded and she took aim.  I know she will not be flattered by the comparison but it reminded me of Elvis in Vegas when he used to do impressions of his rivals and then sing the song in his own voice.   ‘And this is the real thing,’ he would say.    He was right if arrogant.  Like Elvis, Toynbee understands that the grinning upstarts who think they can brush aside others and avoid scrutiny and accountability will always justify contempt.

This Tuesday, she described the Government as ‘unwise’ which she soon demonstrated was sarcastic understatement.   If that sounds oxymoronic read the article.   Admittedly it has been a week when her opponents have stood like imbeciles next to the shooting targets but nothing defines present day economic absurdity better than her sentence, ‘iron laws set by bankers whose grotesque pay flows from bailouts by states they impoverished’.   While the rest of us were still gobsmacked by cabinet ministers, William Hague, Phillip Hammond and Eric Pickles, arguing that economic growth would only be achieved if everybody worked harder she quickly held them all to account.  She soon found opinion within the Chambers of Commerce and the CBI to remind the three not so wise men that economic growth requires a strategy from government.   Swatting three ministers would be enough for anyone and any article, but Toynbee also battered Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, Gove and Duncan Smith.   This is impressive even though she is correct, ‘the bungling and dogmatism are unrivalled in post war Britain.’   1500 words and seven victims later she sneers at the end of the column.   ‘You Gov yesterday reported Ed Milliband polling higher than David Cameron who with every passing day looks increasingly like the prime minister of a one term government.’   The reader can almost hear Cameron splutter his breakfast over the kitchen table.  We cheer, hope and wait.   Loathing and contempt have to be managed but when Duncan Smith talks about disabled people ‘festering’ he actually means eating and surviving.  He deserves every blow that two fisted Polly lands.  So does Michael Gove whose empty head supposedly yearns for a working class for whom ‘deprivation need not be destiny.’   Presumably the deprivation is fine; it is just the destiny that is embarrassing.   Gove does not last long and is soon felled by blows from Toynbee to the head and the body.  Clegg is the easiest target; he is knocked out with a direct upper cut.

Not everybody approves of the detours that this blog takes into politics.  But rock and roll and Elvis grabbed me at an early age and insisted that I was entitled to heroes and fighters, especially those like Elvis who know a life that values consistency over growth is mistaken.   The two fists make a difference.

If you want to read about Elvis, rock and roll and much more click here.

All rock and roll careers are littered with mistakes and what usually happens is that the fans drift away as soon as the mistakes cause them to lose their money on redundant albums.    Elvis was the same but different.   If the soundtrack albums and sweetening of his material saw his record sales collapse, there were many fans that stayed loyal.  The addicts who needed the next fix, and who hoped that the next purchase might contain a high similar to what had first caused them to be hooked, hung around because they had no choice but to remain.   John Lennon was wrong when he said, ‘Before Elvis there was nothing.’   In England, though, it felt that way and you stayed with Elvis because you remembered what nothing was like.   The addict always expects more of the same.   He is not interested in variety and diversity.   Only after the death of Elvis were music critics able to look at some of the more unusual material and realise its strengths.     When he was alive few thought it possible.  Inevitably, revisionism occurs and somehow Elvis was saved by postmodernism or, if that is too fancy, the playing lists of the iPod.   But because those early highs required supreme examples of rock and roll they also acted as the measure of what could and possibly should have been achieved by others.

Not all regard Elvis as the barometer.   Some will think of Dylan, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix or others.   They will look for people who are as clever as Dylan, can produce hooks like The Beatles or have the dexterity of Hendrix.   Elvis addicts, though, are usually condemned to search for someone who can add heart and drama to a song.  This means certain people appeal rather than others.   For me, they are the great black vocalists like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Solomon Burke and Bobby Bland.     The white alternatives to Elvis although interesting usually register lower pressure on the barometer.    The best records of Elvis have an irresistible groove that contains power, grit and charm.    ‘A Mess of Blues’ is a fine example but there are many more.    There are few white performers who can make the needle on the barometer thrust its way into the high pressure zone and keep it there like Elvis.

Dion, though, was a genuine exception.   In the later phases of his career after he had recovered from heroin addiction he became introspective and his songs were contemplative and restrained.   At his best, though, there was nothing clever about Dion.   He sang his early hits with the tough guy authenticity and musical command that rock and roll should insist upon.   Supposedly he has compared his life to the ‘The Sopranos’ TV series except that his story had reform and a happy ending.   He is probably right.  We need Tony Soprano but a good guy Tony with fists that hit the right notes as hard as anyone.   I first saw Dion in the movie ‘Twist Around The Clock’.   The film was released in 1961 but I had to wait until 1963 when it appeared in the local flea pit.    The world was different then.   I saw it with a mate called Geoffrey Cresswell.    In those days, in the North of England people had names like that.  Today, the Geoffrey would be reinvented as Jeff.   Then, we thought English people saying words like cool, and talking like Americans was silly.   We assumed that if we did that then people like Dion and Elvis would laugh at us.

In Britain, Dion had two big hits which were ‘Runaround Sue’ and ‘The Wanderer’.   The latter which has been subsequently traduced by inferior performers started life as a B side which indicates that the machismo lyrics were always tongue in cheek.   Both records were funny but powerful.   The extravagant claims in ‘The Wanderer’ are matched perfectly by the moral condemnation of the school flirt in ‘Runaround Sue’.    The line ‘she goes out with other guys’ which Dion sings with incredulous horror is irresistible.

In Brazil, there was a bandit called Lampiao.  He waged war on soldiers and terrorised the small towns and the villages of the backlands.   He had his admirers but there were occasions when he would have his gang rape a girl in the village if he discovered that she had consorted with enemy soldiers.  The same man would also castigate young women who wore their hair too long and their skirts too short.   Obviously, he was difficult and he has to be condemned.  But if he had been alive in the fifties he would have been a Dion fan.

The very best record by Dion, though, is the extreme ‘(I Was) Born To Cry’.   Compared to this the nihilism of the other great cynical classic, ‘Is That All There Is’, by Peggy Lee sounds sentimental.  It is not, of course, merely that ‘(I Was) Born To Cry’ is so extreme.   In the song, Dion reveals a vulnerable moment when he thought he had a friend but he soon confirms that the friend later stamped all over his face.   Oh dear.   Elvis is very good at implying anger and despair.  In ‘(I Was) Born To Cry’ Dion does more than imply.  He describes what it means for him and he has no inhibitions at all about sharing his bleak contempt.    Cornell Woolrich was a great American thriller noir writer.   He wrote the short story that inspired the classic Hitchcock movie, ‘Rear Window’.   He once said, ‘First you dream and then you die.’   Like Lampiao, Woolrich would have liked Dion.   Maybe Dion was dreaming when he became a heroin user at the age of fifteen and maybe he needed a life that somewhere contained a recognisable death and rebirth.   Some have said the heroin addiction explains his demise but his commercial decline began before the addiction led to a not too prolonged absence.

In the sixties, Dion made what appeared to be an obvious choice for a man whose vocals were so powerful.   He sang the blues.    These records are not as successful as his previous triumphs promised.   Dion was tough and urban.   He is right.   Dion belongs in ‘The Sopranos’.  Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf may have made their classics in Chicago but their roots are rural.   Dion is an incredibly powerful singer but he is not primal.   He did make some great R&B records but they proved that he was more suited to urban wise guy attitudes.  His cover of ‘Drip Drop’ by the Drifters is a success.  He triumphs because he has urban authenticity and superiority.  It is in all his best records.  Dion is most impressive when he is on the street corner sneering at everyone who walks past.  We listen because he is slick and entertaining.  Suddenly, the street corner does not quite feel so cold and boring anymore.   Well, that was how it felt to me and Geoffrey Cresswell in that northern fleapit all those years ago.

We have to be pleased that Dion made personal progress, even though he abandoned the rock and roll street corner that some of us still use and need.  Now he works to prevent addiction in others and to help addicts repair their lives.   He is still making records and if none capture the glory of the three mentioned above they are definitely worth buying.   The man was never invited to appear in ‘The Sopranos’.   They probably realised that to give him sufficient respect he would have needed a whole series.   Now, there is an idea.

Listen to the great Dion DiMucci

To read more about Elvis, rock and roll and a lot more click here.

Howard Jackson has appeared on another BBC Radio show, discussing ‘Treat Me Nice‘, Elvis Presley, and his forthcoming book ‘Innocent Mosquitoes’. You can listen to the interview by clicking on the link below, skip to 34 minutes in to hear Steve Yabsley playing Jailhouse Rock, the interview follows after.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00r23md/Steve_Yabsley_04_05_2012/

Take a breath everyone.  This next sentence is not quite what it seems.  Every time I look at Jeremy Hunt I think about sex.  See? People are already jumping to conclusions.  No, not that.  The people who lust after Jeremy belong to a rare category of probably damaged human beings and I am glad to say that it does not include me.   First, Jeremy makes me think of sex because he has that empty headed fervour that reminds you of sixties hippies who believed that all they had to do was take off the clothes and make love to everyone and communal bliss would follow.  Hunt has the same naive faith in neo-liberalism.  What we need to do is remove employee protection and health and safety regulations and we can all walk naked, our muscles bristling with economic purpose, towards fulfilment.   The fact that some bodies do not bristle quite as attractively as others does not matter.  It is his own that concerns him which may be why this narcissist spends so much time jogging and dancing the lambada.  Second, he is a reminder of how the male libido can have unintended consequences.   We all know that, before he met Cherie, Tony Blair was a vacant extrovert without any real interest beyond being famous and popular.   A woman and his own sexual urges led him almost without thinking towards left wing politics and a position where he could finally indulge his talents as an insincere performer.   So, sex is important when we think of Mr Blair, as anybody who has read ‘Ghost’ by Robert Harris will know, and it is the connection between Blair and Hunt that makes me think of sex.   I never see Jeremy Hunt without thinking of Tony Blair.

If Blair is the corrupt individual that haunts every left wing soul with a conscience, there is now some compensation.   Jeremy Hunt is what Tony Blair would have been with a less complicated libido.  Hunt is what a Tory Tony Blair would sound and look like.   These are men whose only concern is personal glory, men who somehow think they can romantically sweep away all social problems.  Tony Blair talked about the welfare state as if he could abolish sickness, and he dreamed that equality could be resolved simply through education.  The plan was that after 15 years of Tony nobody would ever be weak or fragile again.  It was baloney, of course, but Tony prayed to God and he had faith and the sun even shone on that fateful day in 1997 when he shook so many hands.

Dangerous romance is invariably rooted in a too strong attachment to adolescence.  It was obvious in Blair and it defines Jeremy Hunt.    These are men who will struggle to grow old.  Hunt, of course, was head boy at Charterhouse, so his attachment to his own adolescence is understandable.   And, presumably, there would have been some sunny days on its cricket fields.   Romance would have been in the air on more than one occasion.  Unfortunately, this romance festers on exclusivity and privilege.  If it inspired some of the more fluent passages in ‘Brideshead Revisited’ it was also responsible for some of the silliest writing of Evelyn Waugh.  Despite its popularity ‘Brideshead’ is far from being his best book.  This is ‘A Handful Of Dust’.   Waugh was a brilliant cynic but his intelligence floundered when he became sentimental.    Hunt, of course, is no Evelyn Waugh.   All he had in his vain dreams was neo-liberalism and self-serving economic theory.   And he needed to be popular.   We all know how Head Boys and Head Girls are not inclined to rebel.   This is why we do not like them.   It is why rock and roll and Elvis became so entrenched.   He and the other rockers were the alternative.  You could either become a teacher’s pet or grow sideburns.  Later, rock and roll raised the stakes.  Sideburns were insufficient and wild coloured hair and facial jewellery became essential.  But if the rebellion has sometimes been silly, remember what the rebellion is against.  That’s right, people like Jeremy Hunt.

The good news is that a Tory Tony Blair is so much worse than a Labour Tony Blair.    If Hunt has a redeeming feature it is beyond most commentators.  The assertion by David Cameron that Jeremy Hunt was doing ‘a good job as Culture Secretary’ sounded like it belonged in an episode of the TV series on the Titanic.  Admittedly, these are difficult times and Rupert Fosters Confucius Murdoch is a loose cannon but it takes an awful lot of wrong-headed incompetence to fail as a Culture Secretary.     No doubt there will be people who think Cameron has been unlucky in his choice of friends and that he has been let down by someone whose judgement is not as sound as his own.   But what did he expect, appointing, to evaluate impartially the bid by Murdoch, a man who described himself as a cheerleader for BskyB.  Well, guess what, he was not impartial, or as David and his look alike Captain Pugwash would say, ‘Shiver me timbers.’    The notion that a special advisor would send 150 emails without the minister knowing is simply absurd.   My own career as a Civil Servant was modest but I did occasionally meet mandarins from Whitehall.   These people are programmed not to say more than two sentences without using the words, ‘The minister says/thinks/wants/believes etc.’   Remember the number, 150 emails, and think of what Cameron claimed.   ‘He is doing a good job.’   This is the best comedy show on the TV.   Is satire dead?  I would hate to have to listen to its bronchial tubes.   The sound of suffocation is too eerie.

Perhaps, Jeremy Hunt has strengths.    He may be pitifully weak on compassion for those less fortunate but there is always a chance that the ideals of Charterhouse left him with a strong sense of integrity.   Well, he refuses to resign or walk so I can only assume he did not captain the cricket team.   Those who are generous also overlook his placing of Naomi Gummer, his former Parliamentary Assistant, within the Department for Culture, Media and Sport after Hunt had proposed departmental cuts of 35-50%.   Notice their jobs are not cut, merely those of the rest of us.   He also had to refund parliamentary expenses that he had incorrectly claimed.   If his errors were modest compared to some MPs he stands condemned because of his attachment to high minded romance.   A man who eschews pragmatism should not expect it in return when his failures are being accounted.

Finally, we are left with a man who decided that the Hillsborough disaster was the result of football hooliganism.   What qualified him for this opinion? Well, nothing because he never researched the subject.   Blog readers will know that I am a Liverpool football fan.   So, if this blog has been more personal than some perhaps readers will now understand why.   You can take the boy out of Charterhouse but you cannot take Charterhouse out of the boy.   Head boys?  If he was a rock and roll star he would be in The Bay City Rollers, smiling according to instructions.  No, give me Elvis instead.  That’s why he was invented.  We will always need our alternatives to pious, corrupt courtiers who when they are not passing glib judgements on the rest of us are bending at the knee.

On Monday Howard Jackson did a live radio interview on Ed Stagg’s BBC show, talking about his book, Treat Me Nice and Elvis.

In case you missed it, you can listen to both parts of the interview here:

Howard Jackson will also be appearing on BBC Radio Bristol this Friday May 4th at 12:30pm. You can listen to this live here.

The name is good.  Buddy is friendly and Holly suggests yuletide celebrations, optimism even.   Of course, the celebrations at Christmas are always short lived and before the week is out the death of another year has to be acknowledged.  The British deal with this as they do with all unpleasant existential truths.  They turn their back on it and get plastered with alcohol.   So, the name Holly made sense for friendly Buddy, brief happiness and success before a wintry death in snowy February.   The big difference between the death of Holly and the bleak conclusion that occurs at the end of every year is the inevitability of the New Year.  Time passes, rock and rollers lose hair and put on weight and years end.   The heroes who die before they reach twenty four years are unusual and unlucky.   The man deserves plenty of sympathy and he has had it.   He provides the rock and roll tragedy that was imitated so brilliantly by Diana on behalf of the establishment.  Okay, that is too cynical but you know what I mean.  It is difficult to discuss objectively the merit of either individual because for so many real grief intrudes.   The death of Elvis was different.  He died when he was forty two and there were elements in his death that were self-inflicted and there were also compensations in his short life.   Holly was a rock and roll star for a mere eighteen months.  He met a nice girl and married.   At least, Elvis had a sex life that more than a few young men would have exchanged for longevity.

The obsession of Elvis and Holly fans is similar but their attitudes are different although I tend to avoid discussion with those fans of either who value themselves according to their loyalty.   Holly made some great records and my favourites are ‘Rave On’, ‘Not Fade Away’, ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’, ‘That’ll Be The Day’ and ‘Maybe Baby’.   But I was never as convinced as his loyalists.   It is interesting that this challenge has come from Nigeria.   I suspect that over there they can evaluate Buddy Holly more accurately and objectively than in the UK or than I can at least.   The culture here is rich and the British remain passionate about music, drama and literature although we are less well read than we were fifty years ago.  Supposedly, our Prime Minister avoids reading.  He is an expert on TV programmes.  Considering the record of his Government we should not be surprised.  Anyway, like Cameron, in Britain art and culture is always tainted by class.   This does not mean the triumphs are any less spectacular.  They exist in books, on the stage and sometimes in the movies.  But the taint is there.   What should be taste is often snobbery or aspirational identity, at least.

Buddy Holly arrived as an alternative to Elvis and although like everybody else I thrilled to the early black and white clips of Holly singing ‘Rave On’ I never quite identified with the clique that surrounded him.   There is an axis in rock and roll that travels from Elvis towards Dylan and that passes Holly and The Beatles.   Elvis was possible when rock and roll was dominated by the working class.  The rockabilly of Sun is the sound of rougher bars than that of Holly.   Americans with more understanding of their social milieu may dispute that but that was how it sounded to me as a young man.  In England, it felt like Elvis was listened to by the kids in the secondary modern schools, Holly was for the grammar kids who wanted to impress their teachers and Dylan was for the adolescents who attended University.  This is an unfair generalisation and has little to do with the talent of what were in all three cases exceptionally gifted performers.    But these three musicians all needed a market to be successful.   The hype which is fed by the media may be desperate to tell us different but nobody conquers the world.   For everyone, the world remains indifferent.   Scott Fitzgerald recognised in ‘Gatsby’ that human beings were too self-obsessed to worry too long about the worth of others.  Massive success and widespread ignorance are compatible.  The record company BMG has tried for years to place Elvis CDs in more than 10% of UK households.   So far they have not succeeded.  90% of households do not have one Elvis CD and, of the 10% that do, 90% of them have no more than one.   This is what is odd about fame, the famous wallow in glory whilst having to endure widespread contempt.    Success requires appealing to a limited number of individuals whose identity your music, books, paintings or movies either support or, at least, do not threaten.   Some people, of course, become obsessed with their heroes and reshape themselves in the image of those they adore.   Most of us, though, merely draw on what is available and take what is on offer when it suits.  Perhaps this is why the famous, faced with being patronised relentlessly, are obliged to turn a little crazy.

In his biography ‘Blue Monday- Fats Domino And The Lost Dawn Of Rock And Roll’ Rick Coleman argues that Dylan colonised rock and roll on behalf of the middle classes.  Listening to Dylan fans at University I suppose that was also how it seemed to me.    The triumph of Dylan felt like a defeat.   Progress that had been gained by people like Elvis was being lost.   But it may have been nothing to do with the middle class colonisation that Coleman describes.  Elvis, Holly, The Beatles and, finally, Dylan were also a consequence of  how the British working class spent more time being educated and progressed through grammar school to University.    Rock and roll has always been redefined by subsequent generations.   Elvis was an innocent who prospered when innocence was not only required but constituted protest and integrity.   Like Christmas celebrations, innocence rarely prevails, even amongst the innocent.    Holly was needed because rock and roll had to reflect grammar school certainties, the belief in the cerebral creative talent.   Much has been made about how Holly was the first rock and roll auteur.  Dylan suited the intellectual aspirations of undergraduates and his fans compare him to Shakespeare.     The music changes and something is gained but, inevitably, something is lost.

No doubt, Holly was influential.  The Beatles may have been Elvis fans but the model for them was Holly.   The vocals of The Beatles were modest compared to Elvis but like Holly they worked hard to give the songs a hook.   Holly was unusual amongst white rock and rollers to put so much emphasis on percussion and The Beatles or George Martin imitated this from the very beginning.   Listen to ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ which Elvis would play to his friends to show them what he wanted his own records to sound like and would have if RCA and Parker had not doctored his music against his wishes.

It is all a matter of taste.   I can spend an evening listening to Elvis without being bored.   Holly fans are the same and no doubt are happy with half a dozen tracks of Elvis like I am with Buddy Holly.   Some people take Holly seriously because he wore glasses; some find his image a real shortcoming in a rock and roll star.   If our passions reveal our craziness, our indifference too often exposes our superficiality.   There, I have convinced myself.  I need a box set.

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Click the clip to bop:

First, thanks to Random Nytrgg for choosing The Elvis Presley Challenges as the best Elvis blog on the web. Random writes a highly distinctive blog that mixes Elvis with all kind s of issues, both personal and political. She is prolific and always worth reading and has had plenty of praise. I have also forgiven her for beating me to write the quickest review of the box set ‘Young Man With A Big Beat.’

Second, I will be appearing on BBC Radio Nottingham at 9.30pm on 30th April 2012 and BBC Radio Bristol at 1.30 pm on 4th May 2012. This is a big week when I should really be preparing for a Cup Final on the Saturday. For those interested, yes I do have a ticket. Readers of the blog who are outside the broadcasting range should be able to listen to the podcast on the BBC website. If not, I will see what I can do and whether this blog can include links in the next couple of weeks.

Third, the second edition of Treat Me Nice is still selling and we expect to move on to a third edition before the end of the year. I am hoping to have different distribution arrangements for the third edition so it is available in bookstores outside the UK. Meanwhile, if you do not want to wait for the third edition you can order direct from this website. Click here.

“Mr Murdoch, you must be the first mafia boss in history who did not know he was running a criminal enterprise,” so said Tom Watson to James Murdoch of News International at the Parliamentary Select Committee hearing last November.   At the time not everybody approved.    Alexander Chancellor in the Guardian was quite sniffy.  He described the remark as silly and concluded that James Murdoch was safe.    Tom Watson had been unable to resist playing to the gallery and had failed to master the forensic talents of skilled interrogators.    These are my words not those of Chancellor but they summarise what his critics said.    Not surprisingly, Sky News was not quite as concerned about the adversarial skills of Watson.    They were more interested in the spiritual redemption father Rupert had experienced in the back of his limousine on his way to the hearing.  Rupert Murdoch, the man who prefers to think of days as being humble rather than himself.   If the Tom Watson wisecrack was not to the taste of everyone at least it was grammatically accurate.  God knows who taught Rupert Murdoch how to use English grammar.  Perhaps he lost his grammatical grip while managing his empire.   ‘It was the Sun wot done it,’ may be a half decent excuse.

Well, James Murdoch was not safe and News International is now rocking and will rock a little more after this week and the publication of the Tom Watson and Martin Hickman book ‘Dial M for Murdoch.’   The book reveals that members of the Parliamentary Select Committee were put under surveillance by a ‘crack’ squad of News International reporters.  The objective was to find secrets about the committee members.    At the London Book Fair this week, Watson made clear to all those who listened that his lawyers had read the book and insisted on corroborative evidence.    To use the tortured language of Murdoch, ‘Dial M for Murdoch’ had more than one corroborative day.   So we can believe the story is true, just as we can accept the allegations about the once Director Of Public Prosecutions, Ken McDonald, being wined and dined by News International editors and Chief Executives.   And if dirt had been found then threats would have followed.     ‘Fix the jury and buy the judge?   We’ll do our best, Mr Capone.’  True, there is no evidence that either the Select Committee or the Director of Public Prosecutions responded to the behaviour of News International but all this proves is that Capone had superior influencing skills.    Whatever the Foster adverts might say, Australian villains are no match for authentic Chicago gangsters.

Watson has predicted that his book ‘Dial M for Murdoch’ will be the most attacked book this year.   Trevor Kavanagh at the Sun is already leading the way but it would take a better man than me to summarise the opinions of that particular hysteric.   His journalistic style consists of disconnected slurs and random resentments that avoid argument and defy logic.   Somewhere in his prose, though, he mentions that Watson is an intolerant bully and, worst of all sins, is even a socialist.    When Tom Watson was interviewed by Jonathan Heawood of English Pen last Monday the response of the audience at the London Book Fair was far more appreciative.   Many of those listening dwelled on more serious matters such as how close Murdoch had come to owning all of BSkyB and controlling rather than dominating the British media, and how members of the Government were determined to help Murdoch undermine what are the pathetic remains of British democracy.  The catastrophe was averted in the same way Kevin Costner sorted Robert De Niro in ‘The Untouchables’ or Alan Ladd blasted Jack Palance in ‘Shane’.  For once, the good guys won and it was impressive how Tom Watson at the London Book Fair resisted praise and glory.   The Kavanagh caricature was not present.  Indeed, Watson several times stressed the contribution and importance of others.  The work done by Martin Hickman on the book ‘Dial M for Murdoch’, and the moment when Ed Milliband decided he would fight elections without the support of Murdoch.   We will all have a view as to what constituted the McCarthy moments that punctuated the sordid saga of News International but only lost self-centred souls would deny Tom Watson praise and respect.   He made a difference and that is the best epitaph there is.

I was older than many of the audience on Monday.   I can remember the Murdoch version of the Sun being launched in Britain.  Prior to this there had been tabloids but not tabloid culture.  Newspapers reported the news and news meant politics.  Newspapers had something else besides dirt and gossip.   But once Murdoch outlawed serious news from his papers he drove arrogantly into his own cul de sac.  Of course, he always intended to finish in a cul de sac but what he envisaged consisted of a dumbed down population that would mindlessly vote for the powerful simply because they were supposed to be glamorous.    He missed the second dead end, that with nothing to write about but dirt and gossip he was obliged to dig deeper and deeper into personal lives.   The empire of Murdoch did not go into decline or lose its way.    The mistakes Murdoch made were inevitable and the seeds were sown forty years ago.    The dirty tricks were the consequence of the trashy tabloid culture that Murdoch created.   The elite of Britain should have treated the bad taste of Murdoch with contempt.  Instead, they embraced it like the corrupt policemen you see in a cheap Hollywood ‘B’ movie.   Make no mistake, this scandal will run and run.   Our elite is shabbier than ever.   When Watson resigned his post as Government Minister he was condemned by Tony Blair for being disloyal.  Tom Watson had had the temerity to state the obvious, to remind Blair that his leadership was the reason long standing Labour voters were abandoning the Labour Party.  The avarice and war mongering of Blair had gone out of style.  Some have claimed that Watson was a puppet of Gordon Brown but after the performance I witnessed at the Book Fair I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt.   Nobody else, in quite the way Watson did, challenged the most repulsive leader the Labour Party has ever had or stood up to Murdoch.  Let us give credit when it is due.

And, of course, Tom Watson is a suitable topic for an Elvis Presley Challenge, more suitable than most as it happens.  He is not only an Elvis fan and has a potentially great rockabilly hairstyle but he has the same birthday as the supreme rock and roller.  We all know the scene in ‘King Creole’ where bar sweep Danny Fisher stands up to the gangster bully Walter Matthau.   As Elvis sang in this great movie and later resurrected brilliantly in his ’68 TV special, ‘if you’re looking for trouble you came to the right place.’  Last Monday, we listened to Tom Watson describe how resistance eventually led to the Leveson enquiry into a corrupt press.  The London Book Fair felt like the right place to be.     Enjoy the clips.

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More than one woman has explained to me why men never grow up.    They say it is something to do with privilege and power.   Men are indulged and respond like children.   Those men who are perpetually indulged remain children.  Some merely have moments and head without caution towards infancy for brief escapades.   If the movie ‘Beyond The Sea’, directed by Kevin Spacey, has not been quoted as evidence for this argument it should be.   Spacey was given the option to take control of the movie when the planned director Barry Levinson abandoned the project.   Spacey, a Darin fan, not only directed the movie, he sang the songs on the soundtrack as well.   He may have more brains than the average Elvis impersonator but the familiar adolescent fantasy was revealed to be as deep rooted.   Spacey was not an awful singer and most of the time he did a decent impersonation of the vocal performances by Darin.   There was an irony in the movie that somebody as bright as Spacey must have realised.   Spacey was impersonating the man who was perhaps the greatest mimic of them all.  Okay, the mimicry of Big Al Downing was important because of the way he straddled various genres and acted as a missing link but nobody is as versatile as Bobby Darin.   Well, there is one obvious example but regular readers of this challenge do not need me to mention his name just yet.   The versatility of Darin became obvious in the film.  Spacey is required to perform a version of the big Darin country tinged hit ‘Things’.   The song is used as backing material for a poignant scene.  The intention is that we do not listen to the performance too closely.   Spacey may be comfortable with the swing and folk music that Bobby Darin performed but country music and the subtle performance of Darin was beyond him.

When Robert Matthew Walker broke ground from most critics and in the 70s analysed seriously the musical catalogue of Elvis he insisted that only one singer could match Elvis for versatility.  The singer he named was Bobby Darin.   These comments were made in the early 80s.   Both Darin and Presley were dead and nobody was especially interested.  The memory of Darin was on its way to being neglected and there were too many awful 70s Elvis albums still on the shelves of record stores.   Nobody was interested in Elvis as a barometer of anything.   Both men were underestimated and both remain that way although fans are persistent and people like Kevin Spacey for Darin and Peter Guralnick for Elvis have emerged to defend their heroes to those prepared to listen.

I was disappointed when Matthew Walker compared Elvis to Bobby Darin.   I suppose I wanted somebody cooler, someone who would be more impressive to people of my generation or, if I am being honest, my antagonistic friends.   Not long after the book by Matthew Walker was published, the songwriters Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber appeared in a radio show hosted by a DJ called Brian Matthew.    The format of the show was a steal from Desert Island Discs.  The guests had to pick their favourite twelve records.  The difference was that there was no desert island and the guests were music stars and not Radio 4 worthies.   Rice and Webber picked an Elvis song called ‘The Girl Next Door Went A Walking’ because one of the songwriters was called Rice.  As Tim Rice explained, how can you pick one Elvis song above all the others?   He also selected a Bobby Darin song.   This was  ‘18 Yellow Roses’.  Rice laughed about how often Darin impersonated others and asked the listeners to note how the performance was a copy of the cowboy style of Marty Robbins.

This is what is odd about versatility.  There comes a point when people stop taking you seriously.  There is a famous tale about the British entertainer Roy Castle who was obliged to appear at the Glasgow Empire, a theatre famous for its hostile and unforgiving audience.  Castle revealed his usual repertoire.  He sang songs, told jokes, performed magic tricks, danced, played a bewildering number of instruments and did impressions.   The audience was always restless and one member of the audience who was perhaps less patient than the rest admitted before the end of the act that he had endured enough.  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he shouted, ‘is there no end to the talent of the wee —-‘.

You can work the obscenity out for yourself.  Note that, like the Glasgow accent that uttered the heartfelt plea, it was harsh.    Roy Castle did not return to the Glasgow Empire.  Later, he was quite successful hosting a show about record breakers, the man who could eat the most boiled eggs and so on.  It suited him perfectly.   He could talk about people like himself, people whose talents were extreme but inconsequential.

Bobby Darin had hits in Britain but for most British rockers he was a rock and roll version of Roy Castle.  He lacked consequence and failed to offer the excitement of the real rebels.  Today, this view appears to be harsh.   We now realise that some of his records are exceptional.   ‘Mack The Knife’ is a great record but it is easily surpassed by ‘Beyond The Sea’ which is probably perfect.   It not only swings irresistibly but has relentless vocal invention.   Similarly, the career of Darin is underappreciated.   Not only did his music cover various genres he had a movie career that made real demands of a substantial acting talent.  Darin won the acting awards that Elvis could only dream about.   He wrote songs and played several instruments.  Amet Ertegun, the founder and President of Atlantic Records, worked with the great Ray Charles and other fabulous black talents but he was always prepared to single out Bobby Darin for praise.   Darin even managed a classic double A sided single, ‘Irresistible You’ and ‘Multiplication’.   The sides were actually reversed in Britain.    Like all great musicians he had exquisite timing and by sharing it with his audience he was able to add dynamism to his stage show.  On stage, he was not like Roy Castle.  Bobby Darin was not a dull performer.   He was great.

But as marvellous as some of his records were – the hilarious ‘Bullmoose’ is another fine example – he was not the equal of Elvis.  Inevitably, the versatile are obliged to produce moments that are not always compelling.   No doubt some people will look at the music of Elvis and say he suffered from the same limitations but they misunderstand his history.   Elvis was mismanaged and became self-destructive.   Listen to him at his best, on the four CDs that document his career in the fifties on the still available box set ‘The King Of Rock And Roll’.   Nobody has combined that degree of versatility with consequence and consistency.   This is why he appeals to the adolescent in us.   He made us feel privileged and indulged and without thinking our generation followed him into infancy and innocence.  We chose simple rock and roll and excitement.   Darin was talented enough to do everything but was always happier with sly sophistication.  Although he should not be dismissed, his reach was more limited.  The versatility had less consequence than that of Elvis.  It explains why his career took him to Vegas, well before Elvis was finally dumped there.

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Bobby Darin sings Beyond The Sea: