House call

There is probably a medical term for an aversion to medical dramas on television.

Whatever it is, it has steadfastly kept me away from Casualty, Holby City, Grey's Anatomy and Chicago Hope, and were it not for Sherry Stringfield and Julianna Margulies I might never have glanced at E.R.

Even though Scrubs and M*A*S*H provided acceptable yuks amongst the yuck, hospital dramas contain just a little too much human frailty for my liking. Which raises questions about what drew me to House.

On paper - actually, in reality - I should have shied away from it. The premise of a crippled misanthrope with Conan Doyle allusions (yes, we get it - he lives at No. 221 and he pops pills) should have had me running for the hills. An English actor - Hugh Laurie - playing an American, replete with American accent to boot, should have had me screaming on my way to the hills.

But having caught one, and discovered that Laurie's blues-loving, dysfunction-seeking, manchild bad boy doctor was actually one of the funniest characters on TV, I soon managed to lose my hangups about both medical dramas and English actors trying to do American accents (don't worry, Americans trying to do English accents is an even faster accelerant to my temper), and have become hooked, like a Vicodin addict, on House.

Via iTunes I have been ploughing my way through the seasons, blissfully ignoring the fact that, structurally, every episode is the same (lead patient with hard to diagnose condition; quirky second patient; gratuitous references to Cuddy's cleavage; mention of Lupus in every diagnosis discussion; Wilson apparently the only other doctor on duty in the hospital;).

But though House made an international star of Laurie, not to mention the highest-earning actor in American television, his name can still draw a blank. But say "Dr. House", and there will be an instant flash of recognition. The same applies to Laurie's Blackadder co-star Rowan Atkinson: "Mr. Bean!" has replaced "Bobby Charlton!" and "Benny Hill!" as the standard term of appreciation of all things British for those with no grasp at all of the English language.

So, hats off to Hugh. Over eight seasons of House, Laurie has animated one of television's most memorable creations. And, if you notice the occasional flashes of his musical talents - House playing blues on the Princeton–Plainsboro's lecture theatre piano, or cranking out the Ritchie Blackmore on his Gibson Flying V - you may also notice that it is Laurie himself performing.

House undoubtedly provided Laurie with a platform for his 2011 debut album Let Them Talk, a genuinely loving homage to New Orleans blues and jazz, with contributions from the Crescent City's own celebrity doctor, Dr. John, as well as Tom Jones, who is not known for his medical skills but does have a deep voice, copious chest hair and the ability to collect women's underwear while performing on stage.

Quite rightly, Let Them Talk garnered good reviews, out of surprise, perhaps, for some reviewers, caught unawares that a mostly comic actor could also be a very accomplished musician (as WWDBD? noted in Criminal Records, the history of album-making actors isn't a happy one). And thus Laurie - now post-House - returns with a follow-up album, Didn't It Rain.

The formula hasn't been changed: it's another collection of entries from the blues and jazz songbooks, but with somewhat less emphasis on the Big Easy sound, and a little more flavour of the blues found further up the Mississippi, such as Jelly Roll Morton's I Hate A Man Like You, and covers of Dr. John's Wild Honey, Alan Price's Changes (once the tune accompanying a building society advert, if I recall) and Georgie Fame's Yeh, Yeh.

Conversely, the opening track, a cover of WC Handy's St. Louis Blues, is pure Dixieland trad, much the same, in fact, as Laurie's treatment of Changes. Kansas Joe McCoy's The Weed Smoker's Dream - last breathily aired by Jessica Rabbit… - is authentically faithful to the original.

If there's one real complaint about Didn't It Rain, however, it's that it doesn't feel like Laurie has stretched himself as much as you feel he could have done. When Laurie does let go of the safety of tradition, the impact is noticeably better. On Unchain My Heart he brings the 80s FM radio stodge Joe Cocker made of it to something closer to the stabbing soul of Ray Charles' version. Yeh, Yeh, on the other hand, feels like no more than a party piece added onto the album for good measure, but then with Laurie such an exceptional blues pianist, he's entitled to show off a little.

Produced again by Joe Henry (another roots auteur, the 'new' T-Bone Burnett and the man responsible for Billy Bragg's excellent Tooth And Nail), Didn’t It Rain is a tad undemanding. Maybe it's the material, maybe it's the treatment.

Let It Talk felt genuine, a sincere tribute to a genre Laurie clearly adores. The blues is a broad church, and there have been plenty of mainstream rock and pop acts who've produced their own blues covers albums wthout anywhere near the personal love of the form Laurie brings to bear. And, to his credit, he has avoided the obvious reference points of Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters, and stuck to his somewhat eclectic interest in the New Orleans branch of the blues line.

On this follow-up, the sincerity doesn't come across anywhere near as strongly and does feel like more of the same. Some tracks, too - while proficiently performed - are a little too perfectly formed, giving parts of Didn't It Rain the feeling of a West End musical soundtrack. These are, it must be said, niggles. Laurie's recording career has thus far proven to have cogency than many, if not most, albums made by stars in their ascendancy, even if - to British television audiences at least - Laurie's star has been ascendent for a very long time.

In A Spin

Tonight, this afternoon, or tomorrow morning, depending on where you sit in the world, the music industry will amass at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles to celebrate what is boldly tagged "Music's Biggest Night" - the Grammy Awards

Like all televised American awards shows, it will be a glittering, glamourous affair. A red carpet roll-up for the photographers. Artists - those appearing, performing, presenting or simply sitting in the front row - have been issued with explicit instructions on how they should dress. In an attempt to prevent anything too rock'n'roll at the music industry's equivalent of the Oscars, an e-mail is alleged to have been sent out warning:

"Please be sure that buttocks and female breasts are adequately covered. Thong type costumes are problematic. Please avoid exposing bare fleshy under curves of the buttocks and buttock crack. Bare sides or under curvature of the breasts is also problematic. Please avoid sheer see-through clothing that could possibly expose female breast nipples. Please be sure the genital region is adequately covered so that there is no visible 'puffy' bare skin exposure."

It's possible that 'puffy' might refer to the dress Jennifer Lopez wore to accompany P Diddy to the 2000 Grammys. Anyway, I digress. At the end of the day, the Grammys represent the suited, still-or-sparkling-sir? business end of the music business, as far removed from guitars turned up to 11 in suburban garages as it's possible to be.

British interests this year are solidly represented by the usual suspects: Adele, Adele and Adele, as well as newcomers like Ed Sheeran, plus Muse, Mumford & Sons and the venerable McCartney.

Even my friend Steven Wilson - criminally overlooked elsewhere by the British music press despite being one of the industry's most industrious artists - is in with a shout for his Surround Sound production work on his own musical collaboration, Storm Corrosion, with Mikael Åkerfeldt of Swedish prog-metalists Opeth. It's his third Grammy nomination, the previous both for his production work on his band, Porcupine Tree's Fear Of A Blank Planet and his debut solo album, The Incident.


Eight miles and a fifteen-minute burst up the Hollywood Freeway from the Nokia Theater is one of the last vestiges of what probably got a good two-thirds of the audience at the Grammys into music in the first place: LA's last big record store: Amoeba Records.

With the demise of Tower Records and the Virgin chain, both of which had prominent outlets not far away on Sunset Boulevard, Amoeba is something of an anomaly. A vast but funky record and video retailer, with its own underground car park and spillover parking lot around the back, it is clearly the place where Hollywood - the geographic neighbourhood, rather than the showbusiness idiom - comes for its Saturday afternoon fix of physical media.

And long may it stay that way. Browsing around Amoeba's new and second-hand racks one Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago felt like a copious, beer-fuelled, riotous reunion with an old friend. One of those record stores with endless potential for serious credit card damage: out-of-stock CD specialities, budget-priced vinyl rarities, DVDs and even VHS tapes. And given its location, you never know quite who you might run into. Certainly no shortage of 'in the business types', if anecdotal testimony from both LA-resident and visiting musicians is anything to go by.

You could, though, hardly say that Amoeba, and it's Californian sister branches in San Francisco and Berkeley, are thriving. Busy, yes, successfully surviving, even, but the world beyond their front doors is cruel and getting worse.

In recent weeks we've the brand-franchised Virgin Megastore chain has announced its closure in France, including their delightfully massive branch on the Champs-Élysées; and, of course, there is the ongoing disassembly of HMV in Britain. All are the latest victims of the same epidemic: people are falling out of love with physical media, and if they do, they're buying from Amazon or at the supermarket. Or simply avoiding physical formats altogether.

Which means we, IKEA 'Billy' bookcase-attached, CD and, perversely, retro-vinyl collection-building media junkies are becoming a shrinking minority. As much as we pretend to ignore the obvious, our supply line is drying up.

This afternoon, Virgin in Paris was thriving, likewise its near-neighbour FNAC. But if you looked closely at what the locals and tourists were buying, it was heavily discounted sale items - DVDs for a handful of Euros, '4 for €20' CD deals, Blu-ray releases for €15 and half-price box sets.

Amoeba, back in December, was just as busy, but it was hard to separate those shopping in the nearly-new budget aisles and those browsing the brand new. Still, if this was an expiring patient, the 20 checkouts in constant use were vital signs of a pulse.

Sadly, the prognosis is not good: new figures from the BPI, the British music industry body, say that now almost one-in-five consumers (19.6%) prefers downloads to physical media formats. In 2012 well over a quarter of all music was bought either as a dowload from an online store like iTunes, or streamed via Spotify or YouTube.


It would, though, be wrong to assume that the record shop is in terminal decline, however. Yes, digital will continue to grow and, yes, sadly more record chains will close. But the idea that they will disappear altogether is ill-founded.

"We must do all we can to serve music fans who love CDs and vinyl," promises Geoff Taylor, CEO of the BPI. That remains to be seen: a third of HMV's 239 UK's outlets are to close in the next two months, which, while no fatal blow, will still deprive cities like Blackburn, Durham, Luton, Watford, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Wrexham of a mainstream music and video retailer.

HMV's decline will no doubt push more people onto services like Spotify and iTunes. And Amazon will continue to benefit as well as, depressingly, the supermarkets. But anyone who thinks that clicking on a website and then waiting for a package to drop onto the doormat, or picking up a CD from a tiny selection of Top 10 offal, while doing the weekly shop, is not music buying - even if both the mail order giant and the supermarkets can offer whopping discounts.

Graham Jones, author of Last Shop Standing: Whatever Happened to Record Shops? - ironically, for sale at Amazon.co.uk for a discounted £11.66 - claims the independent record stores are even getting better terms from record shops, especially as the fading chains, download sites and mail order companies fail to serve smaller record labels.

Independents like Kingston's Banquet Records (in my teenage years, Beggars Banquet) remain the last haunt of the vinyl junkie, or the CD junkie, for that matter. People still want to touch, inspect, examine and appreciate their records, even those now old enough to need reading glasses to study the sleeve notes on a CD. And for those who really care, there is the return of vinyl - even if you now pay double for a 12-inch piece of crackly plastic.


Rather than decline like the big chains, the independent are finding their own place in the market. Spencer Hickman, co-organiser of the annual Record Store Day initiative says that there are even new independent shops opening up: "It shows that there are still music lovers who want to buy physical music from people who are just as enthusiastic as they are. There are lots of people who still want music as an art form not just a download."

"When I wrote Last Shop Standing," adds Graham Jones, "I thought I was writing the obituary for the independent record store. It turns out that may have been premature."

The Grammys may be a world away from stores like Banquet in Kingston: but while the music industry comes together tonight to gorge itself on the meagre pickings it claims it is raking in from selling its whares, I hope the assembled suits raise a glass of San Pellegrino to the retailers still doing their bit to make buying music as enjoyable as taking home your purchase and actually listening to it.

A high-definition Christmas

By this time next week it will be all over. I’m not talking about the world, however, as that is not due to expire until next year.

No, by next Thursday Christmas will already be a fading memory and life will be returning to some semblance of normality after the annual orgy of food and wrapping paper.

I know it's all meant to be about the Nativity, but let’s face it, thanks to the consumer insurgency we all buy into, it has become a desperately anti-climactic festival of spending. Right now many of us are in a state of belligerent defiance mixed with blind panic, but in a few days from now, all that preparation and the weeks spent agonizing over the perfect gift which you then wrap with the precision of a master bomb maker, will have dissolved into a flurry of ripped paper amid fleeting hope passing rapidly into barely disguised disappointment.

In case any members of my family or diminishing circle of friends are reading this hokum (and apologies to regular WWDBD viewers for the apparent break in service – November appeared to have exhausted my writing mojo), all I want for Christmas this year is shiny, circular, measures about 12cm across, and can rightfully be described as the last physical media format I will ever own: Blu-ray Disc.

Despite having played a part in the launch of Blu-ray Disc in a former life - and the format itself being on the market since 2006 - I have hitherto resisted its charms. DVD, for the most part, has been a perfectly adequate format to enjoy movies and TV series in fantastic quality at home. The arrival of high-definition digital TV services and even the availability of HD movies via iTunes has also dented any urge to start building up more shelf-swamping content in a new physical form.

I know I’m not alone in this view – Blu-ray clearly has yet to become the true high-definition successor to DVD it was touted to be. I have happily embraced renting movies online as a means of ensuring my film collection doesn't end up occupuing another post code. In fact this time last year I was completing a significant rationalisation of both my CD and DVD collections, and I’ve maintained a notable abstinence this year in building the pile back up. Dangerously, perhaps, iTunes has made it easier to buy film and music on-spec that I probably wouldn't have bought had I gone to a shop. That said, in the process I’ve come across some gems.

So what tipped me over the edge and dragged me into my local FNAC to buy a Blu-ray Disc player? There were two factors: firstly, my ageing DVD/SACD player was suffering from wear-and-tear, and it was time to buy a replacement. The good people of a particular Japanese consumer electronics brand were helpfully put on the market a Blu-ray player that also played SACDs, so my investment in that format wouldn’t be forfeited. Secondly, the price of even a decent Blu-ray player has commoditised so sharply in the last five years that it was a steal.

There was a third factor: Mad Men. Walking through one of the few remaining HMV stores in London recently I saw a box set of the first four Mad Men seasons going for an absolute song. Knowing that amongst the many things Mad Men had been hailed for was its vivid, Technicolor art direction, it seemed a perfect match for the high-definition richness of Blu-ray Disc. I plunged in.

I wasn’t disappointed. It did, however, dawn on me, as I gorged on the glorious depiction of amorality in a 1960s Madison Avenue ad agency, that it created a paradox: here I was watching a TV show in pristine high-definition picture quality which is set in an era when television was a largely grey, fuzzy and intermittent affair. Then it didn’t have so much as an ‘interactive red button’, programmes didn’t communicate via Twitter, and changing channels involved getting off your arse and turning a dial.

The other irony about Mad Men is that I doubt if any of the characters would actually be alive today. For a start, no scene seems to be possible without everyone lighting up a cigarette, pouring a large measure of scotch or both, which means that most of the employees of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce would have dropped dead long ago from some variety of cancer – lung or oesophagal, take your pick. Mad Men’s Olympian levels of smoking was established early on. Indeed Page 1 of the script of the very first episode starts thus:

Alone in a red corner booth is DON DRAPER, early 30's, handsome, conservative, and despite his third old fashioned, he is apparently sober. He is doodling on a cocktail napkin.

He crosses something out, puts down his fountain pen, and taps a cigarette out of a pack of 'Lucky Strike'.


The BUSBOY, a middle-aged black man, too old for his tight uniform, approaches.


BUSBOY: Finished, sir?


DON: Yeah. Got a light?


The busboy pulls out a pack of matches from the back of his 'Old Gold’s' and lights Don's cigarette.


DON: Ah, an 'Old Gold' man.

(inhaling)


'Lucky Strike', here.

Man Men’s high consumption of tobacco and Johnny Walker’s is matched only by the number of notches on the bedposts of the principle characters. There is more shagging going on at SCDP than even the members of Fleetwood Mac entertained with each other during the 70s and 80s. Most – if not all – of the agency’s male staff would have succumbed to some unpleasant disease of the genital district long before AIDS came along.

But I digress. Blu-ray Disc is having to co-exist with television and the Internet unlike any other format before it. In principle, it wins hands-down on the quality front, something film director Ridley Scott recently put forward in a blog article he wrote for the Huffington Post.

"Technology will need to make many more huge leaps before one can ever view films with the level of picture and sound quality many film lovers demand without having to slide a disc into a player," Scott wrote. "The technically sophisticated Blu-ray Disc, of which I've been a supporter since its inception, is the closest we've come to replicating the best theatrical viewing experience.”

The director of Alien and Blade Runner maintains that, while iPads and smartphones have become as much a part of personal theater as the big screen TV, we must continue to maintain shelf space for Blu-ray Disc and DVD box sets.

“Physical media has years of life left," says Scott, "and must be preserved because there is no better alternative."

I’m not so sure: as Internet bandwidth improves all the time, and video technology continues to be refined further and further, it’s only a matter of time when the quality of Blu-ray Disc will be completely superceded by something which doesn’t require packaging and shelf space. And actually having to get off your fat arse to change discs when gorging on a whole season of Mad Men in one go, as that’s what WiFi is for.

He's got a lot of Eminence Front

Ever since Dylan went electric, pop music has been riven by a supposed rift between, well, not many people, actually, and those who have a passionate belief that music's life and soul rests not at the top of the charts but deep in the weeds. As much as I personally think that X-Factor and its excremental clan have all the artistic merit of toothpaste, there are those who believe with equal advocacy that music can be only regarded as valid if it is racked in the converted milk crates of an independent record shop or squeezed into the corner of a pub by a progressively-minded landlord pursuing his belief in promoting live music.

Taking at least one foot out of the stirrups of my own high horse, if there is one good thing to both the TV "talent" shows and the continuing existence of independent music outlets, it's that they are both still, in their own way, promoting the idea that becoming a musician is a sound aspiration that you can actually make a living out of.

The fate of the independent record shop comes into sharp focus this week in the UK with the opening of Sound It Out, a documentary by film maker Jeanie Finlay about Sound It Out Records, the very last record shop open in her native Stockton-on-Tees in north-east England.

Premiered earlier this year at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, this "accidental" film, as Finlay calls it, has been acclaimed, both for its depiction of smalltown English life, but also for its championing of the independent vinyl retailer - and the genuine eccentrics you're likely to meet there.

It is, says Finlay, "A distinctive, funny and intimate film about men, obsession and the irreplaceable role music plays in our lives. High Fidelity with a Northern accent." Shops like Sound It Out Records are dying at an alarming rate of 30 a year. This is partly due to the general decline in ownership of music in physical formats, but partly because a loophole in VAT has allowed the big online music retailers to operate offshore, VAT-free and offering cheaper retail prices (and without the overheads of a bricks-and-mortar operation).

"I’ve confirmed what I always suspected," she adds, "it’s so much more than just music and records. Vinyl holds memories and maps the soundtrack of people’s lives. You probably can’t remember when you downloaded an MP3 but I bet you can remember where and when you bought your first single, or the LP you fell in love to. People gravitate to the shop for a number of reasons, for [manager] Tom’s expertise, for the music he stocks and to just simply hang out in a place where they fit in."

Earlier this week, Pete Townshend - The Who's principal songwriter, windmilling guitarist and perennial Mod - delivered the inaugural John Peel Lecture, in itself a tribute to the legendary DJ who was as much a curator of the sort of music you'll find in Sound It Out Reords as radio personality playing it.

Peel, Townshend argued, represented a behaviour under-served today by mainstream radio's reluctance to abandon formula and go off range in the way the late DJ did. Peel played what either intrigued him, amused him, moved him or provided the perverted satisfaction of baffling and challenging the listening audience in equal measure.

"Peel was not a musician," Townshend said. "He was a listener, a patron of the arts, a broadcaster with almost no censorial mandate or agenda. He only played what he thought deserved to be played. I don't think it always mattered that he himself liked it. In China in Chairman Mao's day he might have been sent to prison if only for being the first to play Jesus and Mary Chain, the Undertones or the Proclaimers – all of them were a little bit political, but also radical and outspoken."

The lecture wasn't however, meant to eulogise Peel but to raise the flag - hoisted so often in recent years - about the new digital music culture and its impact on musical income, creativity and the somewhat hippyish ideals of what he called "John Peelism" - i.e. the free love of any form of music without condition. Sounding dangerously Luddite for a musician who has always been fascinated by new technology (the arpeggiated and synthesised organ on The Who's Won't Get Fooled Again was well ahead of its time), Townshend hypothesised that in the iTunes era online music services were simply providing a distribution and royalty collection model which was denying artists essential services.

"Music publishing has always been a form of banking," Townshend argued, "but – in cooperation with record labels – active artists have always received from the music industry banking system more than banking." He said that by essentially acting as nothing more than a brokerage for music, services like iTunes were denying artists the ecosystem that they would have traditionally been a part of, with labels and publishers providing editorial guidance, financial support, creative nurturing, manufacturing, publishing, marketing, distribution and royalty payments.

It is certainly true that with the disappearance of legendary impresarios like Ahmet Ertegun, and the replacement of music-minded record company CEOs with lawyers, investment bankers and similar forms of besuited chinless wonder who might consider Michael Bublé cutting edge, new artists today might lack the patient tutorage their ancestors enjoyed in the pre-digital era.

Today, Townshend said, the iTunes only offered a distribution and royalty collection platform. Taking his banking analogy, you could agree that the High Street bank - where a friendly (or unfriendly) bank manager might offer you a personal approach to managing your finances  - has disappeared, and that banking today revolves around an impersonal experience of ATMs, direct debits and online banking whereby there is little human or emotional involvement.

Hiding behind the semi-fictional persona of "the inner artist", Townshend laid into Steve Jobs (annoyingly and, I suspect, quite deliberately pronouncing his name as the Biblical "Jobes"), branding  iTunes a "digital vampire", a headline-friendly provocation if ever I've seen one.

Apple - and iTunes - came up with a workable model for online content distribution. It may not be entirely equitable to the artists, but I'd vouch that there were never any record labels or music publishers who designed contracts to be philanthropically beneficial to the artist.

This is not the first time, however, that iTunes has come in for criticism from an artist: AC/DC still refuse to distribute their music via the service on the grounds that it caters for people who want to download individual tracks rather than complete albums. One American blues-rock legend I ran into last year complained to me that the process of negotiating a distribution agreement with Apple is frustrating, to the extent he felt that he was being offered one of those "it's this or nothing" deals.

But for others, more pragmatically, they consider it to be an essential distribution mechanism, "a no brainer", another artist recently told me. It's there, people use it, you get money from it. Job done. As Michael Corleone famously told his brother Sonny: "It's not personal. It's strictly business". Pop music has always had its hardball types, and Apple is no different to any record company or music distributor that has come before. You still need to promote an album, you still need to perform live, you still - for the time being - need to have the means to sell CDs via High Street retail outlets.

The worry is that today, the music industry as a whole appears to have forgotten what it was that turned music into the predominant youth culture of the late 20th century. At least Steve Jobs, the archetypal Baby Boomer with his love of The Beatles, got it and did something about it. The music industry, frankly, took too long to embrace the digital age. When labels like EMI were still farting around appointing 'Executive Vice-Presidents of Digital Development' simply to "explore" the potential for digital music distribution, illegal file-sharing services were already in their prime and the horse was so far out of the stable that the stable door hinges had rusted away.

In branding iTunes a vampire, Townshend diminished attention for the more interesting argument of his thesis, that iTunes should do more to promote new artists. In this, I couldn't agree more. If I am to reluctantly give up the Saturday afternoon pleasure of browsing the racks of my local Sound It Out Records for browsing with a mouse (actually, it's now an Apple Trackpad), then at least do something to editorially draw my attention away from the FMCG brands like Coldplay and create attention for the emergent and the interesting. To Townshend's point, iTunes needs its own John Peel, someone who's curatorial mind can see potential whereas others might only see a long haul with limited return. Peel, while he bludgeoned on with patronage of bands like The Fall - such was his whimsy - had also been unafraid of championing the likes of Pink Floyd, The Faces and Roxy Music when they were regarded as either too avant-garde or simply unfashionable in their earlier years.

Rock stars - especially wealthy ones, pontificating over the inequalities of the "Wild West frontier", as Townshend somewhat anachronistically referred to the digital domain - will always appear to be arguing a fairly thin position. Although he "doesn't give a shit about money", as The Who's principal songwriter, his well-appointed mansion in East Twickenham (in a street backing on to where I used to live, if you must know) has been paid for by the likes of me buying original Who albums and then, in moments of weakness, buying them all over again when the box sets and digital remastered versions emerge.

I admire his passion for championing the need for iTunes as another element of the music distribution landscape to do more to keep the wolf from the door of those struggling to get on or up the ladder. But in the outcome, Townshend's lecture came across as no more than another old head bemoaning the march of progress.

Oddly enough, there's a box set containing a remastered Quadrophenia heading for your local record emporium. Just in time for Christmas.

Why Apple is, for now, up in the clouds

The age of instant gratification hasn't been helped by Apple. Every time they launch a shiny new bauble, we want it now. Actually, we want it yesterday, and can't come to terms with the fact it won't be available until next week.

Steve Jobs, bless him, is to blame for this "I want it, and I want it now" mindset. The medicine shows he performed to announce his latest iElixir were always slick productions of front-of-cloth magic. Usually we were enticed by the wares he had to offer.

In June he told us: "We are demoting the PC and Mac to just be a device and moving the digital hub centre of your digital life to the cloud." This came more than ten years after he declared the Mac to be hub. That's progress for you.

The day before Jobs' death, Apple unveiled iCloud - the latest incarnation of its 'storage-in-the-sky' philosophy (predated by iTools, .Mac and MobileMe) - promising an end to the apparent frustration we experience to keep our music, videos and photos synchronised on the myriad devices we now own.

Personally I've never had a problem with keeping one set of albums on my iPhone and videos on my iPad, as I rarely - if ever - want to watch a movie on my phone, and only listen to music on the iPad when I'm sat on a plane or a train. And I'm quite happy keeping the variety of music different on both.

But when Apple finally launched iCloud, plus upgrades to iTunes and its iOS platform to accommodate it, the Apple fan community rushed like lemmings to download it all. Here the first wave of vexation wafted in, for it took - I kid you not - the entire night to download and update both the iPhone and the iPad. Furthermore, I still needed to connect these devices to a Mac to transfer the new software. This was, Apple told us patronisingly, the last time we'd need to physically hook up these devices to a computer.

Then it became apparent that most of my paid-for apps were missing on the iPhone, along with most of my recently purchased albums on iTunes. Not to worry, Apple assured us, as visiting iTunes and the App Store would enable me to download everything. Laboriously, app-by-app, album-by-album, and even song-by-song. Having spent an entire night acquiring the applications in the first place - and this via a relatively fast home Internet connection - I still needed a second evening getting back stuff that had been on my devices to start with!

This may sound like curmudgeon but the expectation of any Apple product is that it should just work. It's what has made us such slavish Apple devotees. They have a knack for making something you might not have considered important, indispensably good.

Now, I'm happy to say, it's all sorted. My initial fears about how iCloud would work when you have a storage disparity between iTunes content living on a Mac (my MacBook Air has a 128Gb hard drive which is stuffed full), and the smaller capacities of the iPhone and iPad (32Gb each), have been allayed by the fact that the much-vaunted automatic synchronisation can be controlled. 

I am, though, left with the feeling that the absence of a USB cable between phone, tablet and PC is only a marginal improvement. Before, I ripped a CD, then hooked up my iPhone and there it would be, emporter, as the French might say. Now I need WiFi. Something presumptuous there.

I still don't have a huge need to keep everything synchronized on every single Apple device I own, but perhaps that's just me and the compartmentalised manner with which I regard the iPhone, iPad and MacBook I use.

True, the photo synchronisation is a very smart aspect of iCloud: take a picture on your iPhone and it's instantly shared with your other Apple devices.

All this, however, does make the assumption that you have either access to WiFi, or an accommodating 3G mobile provider. Carriers are increasingly imposing data limits on downloads and uploads, which raises questions about how viable a ubiquitous service like iCloud will be as such economies increase. And clearly you won't want this to be active when taking pictures on holiday.

The iCloud story is not yet finished, either. To come is iTunes Match, with which for a fee, Apple will miraculously scan the iTunes library on your home computer and 'add' the same songs to your iCloud content, regardless of how this music was acquired in the first place.

On this I remain sceptical: when you have somewhere over 1000 albums on a hard drive as I do, of which some are not widely available commercially or came off the front cover of a music magazine, I doubt very much that iTunes Match will be able to find them. More worrying is that as the service is based on your paid-for storage capacity, to maintain this wonderful idea will cost $25 a year on top of the additional iCloud storage you need to buy from Apple to accommodate it - and that could cost up to $100 a year for a maximum of 55Gb more (which is not enough, clearly, for all the content I might be storing in the iCloud).

There is much to like about iCloud's intentions. It can be a minor annoyance when you download the Bombay Bicycle Club's new album to your Mac on a Saturday and forget to add it to your iPhone before heading off to work on a Monday morning. But it is only a minor annoyance.

The cloud story is not yet ready for prime time. True, relying less on huge and breakable hard drives to store your content (that's right - you own it, you paid for it) is a good idea. But, like Google's idea of running laptops on cloud-based apps, it assumes that we're always on, and always connected.

When I can't get a decent 3G signal in the centers of London and Paris, let alone find a WiFi hotspot that doesn't cost an arm and a leg for just an hour's time online, the idea of ubiquitous access to content is still somewhat far-fetched. For now at least.

Has Apple gone from darling to demon?

I'm not sure what the statute is on a blog post's length, but for this one, I'll confess up front to making this a lengthy discourse on something that's troubling me: is everything OK with Apple?

Last month's launch of the iPhone 4 turned out to be a larger-than-usual seismic event in the Apple chronology. It came with foreshocks and aftershocks which continue to generate acres of newsprint - yes, that quaint old thing - examining and exfoliating Apple and its messianic CEO Steve Jobs.

Given that Apple's own epicentre, Cupertino, lies almost on top of the fault lines than run the length of California, it's ironic that the company has been the source of more tectonic activity in the consumer landscape than any other in the last 12 years or so. Few are as admired and revered amongst myriad industries as a shining example of How To Do It Right. However, the tsunami of think pieces and op-ed that has followed the iPhone 4’s arrival must have given even the most seasoned Apple PR reason to reach for the painkillers.

As with all Apple launches, the noise began long before anyone had parted cash for product: but more than normal, there was the somewhat heavy-handed hue-and-cry over the alleged 'theft' of a prototype. The hullaballoo was enriched further by murky tales surrounding the phone's Chinese manufacturer. Then, no sooner had the first handsets been snapped up by the customary snake of people outside Apple Stores than the first murmurings of disquiet emerged over the phone’s reception quality. All this led to the sound of Apple masticating on humble pie as Jobs admitted: "Of course we're human, of course we make mistakes”, followed by a giveaway of $1 rubber bumpers to fix the problem.

At the same, hastily convened press conference, a clearly flustered Jobs opined that: “We're not perfect. We know that, you know that.” The trouble is, many believe Apple IS perfect, or at least, has perfected the art of revolution to the extent that it positively mass produces game-changing products.

For the last two decades I’ve watched Apple with awe and amazement, not to mention a little pride. Like the Dylan fan who maintains he liked Bob before he went electric, I’ve seen Apple evolve from a vendor of nice but expensive professional computers for professional creatives, to the world’s largest technology company by value. When, as a journalist, I first sat before an Apple word processor 23 years ago, I had little idea that by the turn of the century I’d be buying into an Apple-shaped 'digital lifestyle'.

In buying an original iMac - my first ever personally purchased computer - I became hooked like a dime bag addict on the Apple proposition, becoming drawn into a world of seemingly endless creative possibility. It appeared to be pretty groovy in Apple's domain of digital self-expression.

That first 'Blueberry' iMac was a genuine revolution - forged by the brilliant design simplicity of a Londoner called Jonathan Ive and Steve Jobs' geeky bravado. It not only laid the cornerstone of consumer technology for the following decade, but a core element of culture, too. Creative types bought up the funky blue icon in their thousands; Adland and Cool Central became peppered with its cheerful lines and near-perfect proportions. It dared to be shown off, not hidden away under a pile of blankets in the spare room.

Most importantly, it simply wasn't a computer. It was a "digital hub". And it made it OK to like technology. It brought an acceptance to technology ownership comparable with the renaissance we football fans went through in the mid-90s thanks to Nick Hornby and Britpop (Heysel and Hillsborough, you might recall, made admitting to being a football fan an acute form of social suicide). No sooner had football replaced property prices as the dinner party discussion du jour, than people were openly admitting to making iMovies without fear of a public stoning for being so uncool. Apple's digital hub had triggered a perfect, bloodless revolution.

Now, as Thomas Jefferson said, every generation needs a new revolution. Apple, clearly felt one revolution wasn't enough, however, and no sooner had it turned the letter 'i' into the prefix of the modern era, it tore up the rule book yet again with iTunes. Rarely had a software launch been delivered with such pizzazz and baby-boomer knowing. Compressing music into audio files was not new, and nor was turning a personal computer into a digital jukebox. But just as the iMac made the computer attractive and simple to own for mere mortals (rather than those with an advanced engineering PhD), iTunes made a subtle but significant difference to the idea of digital music management.

When iTunes launched in early 2001, I had just moved to Silicon Valley. I appreciated good quality hi-fi. I appreciated the difference speakers, cabling and amplifiers made to the enjoyment of music, but not, you understand, to the extremes of those heads who profess a love for the smell of vinyl in the morning. File sharing and early MP3 players like Diamond's Rio and Creative's Nomad, were, to my dinosaur mind, the preserve of the Tuesday lunchtime Science Club. I just didn't relate digital music to the musical experience I knew and loved, which began with opening a packaged disc, studiously pouring over the sleeve art and notes, and then putting needle to groove or CD to 'play'. iTunes made it more acceptable, novel and convenient and, well, fun.

Apple's next revolution came even sooner: the iPod’s launch in October 2001 was a muted affair. Coming just five weeks after 9/11, America was numb and the world still dazed. Really, you couldn't have picked a worse time to chirpily offer "1000 songs in your pocket". Naturally it generated the usual wave of excitement in the technology world, despite it being an audio product made by a computer company, and therefore not all that good. The despondency of the times, though, didn't make allowance for the Apple effect.

Got the iMac? Bought into the lifestyle? Then your experience won't feel complete without one. So I had to have one. Apple's narcotic brand appeal worked its wonders again. I had to have an iPod. Just as I had to have a Nano. And a new iMac to service them. And then another Nano with video. And a new MacBook. And an iPhone. And I will want an iPad (when it gets a video camera, note to Product Development Dept.). Oh, and don't forget all the accessories - the Bluetooth keyboards and mice, the docks and headphones, the power chargers and...finish the list yourselves.

"Cocaine," Robin Williams once brilliantly reflected, "is God's way of saying that you're making too much money." It's easy to draw the same opinion of the Apple junkie. Like coke, Apple products will give you an inflated sense of your own cool while blowing a hole the size of Lake Geneva in your bank balance. It’s also easy to regard Apple as a religion, with Steve Jobs some black turtleneck-clad Messiah. He's not.

There are those who dote on Jobs' every word, who queue for days outside San Francisco's Moscone Center to hear his keynote, and who line up through fair weather and foul to own the subject of his latest announcements. This doesn’t a religion make. Apple is just a very clever company. Driven by fanatical focus to delivering experiences from a relative handful of product lines and platforms, each conforming to a unique and singular view of what people want or aspire to owning.

Long before it became the giant it now is, Apple was frequently dismissed as an exclusive irrelevance, with their computer products struggling to break out of a market share of less than 5%. There were those who dismissed Apple, unwisely as it turned out, on the basis that it’s a PC world and get used to it. Now who’s laughing: Apple, now valued at $237 billion, has eclipsed Microsoft’s market cap and is second only to Exxon in America’s corporate league table.

Apple’s dominance of what you and I enjoy doing most – enjoying music and movies, taking pictures, surfing the net and engaging with our fellow human beings – is undeniable. And credit to them for doing so, for coming up with products so brilliant and so exciting that even opening the packaging of an iPhone or iPod is virtually an erotic experience.

There is also plenty of innovation left in the tank. Will the iPad and iBooks service do for publishing what the iPod and iTunes did to music? My view is 'yes'. Most major record companies were taking the Canute approach to online music until the iTunes model convinced them otherwise. The publishing industry has been doing the same. It all sounds very familiar…

So why should I worry that Apple might be losing it? After all, its handling of the iPhone 4 issue was a fiasco, but hardly a PR disaster, or “a BP” as it’s now known.

If anything, it’s added a degree of humanity to the company. Apple certainly isn’t losing its business, and despite his grumpy press conference on July 16, Steve Jobs certainly won’t be losing that much sleep. What lets Apple's reputation down is things like the secrecy around Jobs’ health issues. The PR diffusion may have maintained share price stability, but it struck a discordant note in Apple’s otherwise resplendent shine.

Apple is still, though, exceeding expectations. In the second quarter of 2010 it earned $3.25 billion profit from almost $16 billion in sales. It sold 8.4 million iPhones in the year to June, a 61% increase on the previous 12 months. And despite the ‘Attennagate' furore, it still sold well over two million iPhone 4s in its first month on the market. The iPad – Apple’s latest revolution - has already sold over 3.3 million pieces in its first three months on sale, and continues to be on back order with a promise of "weeks" before shipping to eager owners.

Such numbers are the making of sniping, envy and suspicion – just look what happened to Microsoft. And while my glasses may appear to have a rosey tint, one has to acknowledge that Apple's products simply ARE good. Its consumer loyalty has been justifiably earned by coming up with stuff that works better and looks better than anyone else's.

Recent events may suggest a blemish on the shine, and it may only be a matter of time before Apple's cocky swagger is knocked asunder by an issue more damaging than how to hold a phone. But for now, all the time it continues to create desirable consumer experiences like the iPhone and the iPad, Apple can still do no wrong.

As Jobs himself commented: "I look at this whole 'Antennagate' thing and say 'wow'. Apple's been around for 34 years. Haven't we earned the credibiity and trust from some of the press to give us a little bit of the benefit of the doubt?". He’s got a point.