My heart’s beating faster. I’ve been completely immersed in pop music all week. Spent the days playing bass with Blur in a rehearsal studio complex, a dozen or more sticky soundproof cells right next to Pentonville Prison: overhearing The Pretenders, Ash and Feeder on my way to the bog; unidentified waterfalls of soul and volcanoes of rock billowing and erupting from windowless corridors. After ripping through 40 songs at high volume on Tuesday I went to meet my music publisher at the café by the Serpentine.
Well, he was full of beans. Always is: the music industry runs on a mixture of enthusiasm, gossip and serendipity. We sat in deckchairs in the shade of a willow yammering 19 to the dozen as the sun went down. ‘The talk’s not great on the Florence and the Machine album,’ he said. ‘Shame. Mark Ronson and SuBo, though. That’s what everyone’s talking about today. That, I would pay to go and see.’ Then he listed half a dozen brilliant demos he’d been listening to that afternoon: a Mariachi band from Texas, a synth pop duo from East London, a singer whose name eludes me. Still, it’s hard at the moment. The big crisis facing the industry is not the internet. The internet is good for business, ultimately. The bigger problem is that music used to be the focus of all youth culture. It’s not any more. Celebrity is. Still, we can dream. I’ve got an orchestra that I’m not sure what to do with. My publisher’s not, either. They are like stately homes or churches, orchestras: magnificent anachronisms. Nobody knows what to fill them up with, or use them for any more: more fantastic as structures than anything that’s happened since I was born, but what to do with them?
Apparently, skateboarding is now very popular inside Canterbury Cathedral. ‘What about doing The Great Escape “March”, with the orchestra for the next World Cup?’ I suggest. ‘We’ll do all the rabble rousers, but really posh versions?…We’ll get some fat blokes to sing? Maybe do the Grandstand theme as well, that’s a cracker…’
We both like Stricken City, an unsigned band from London. They were second on the bill at the ICA and we wandered over. A huge queue outside, but it was for another event in the building, someone signing comics. Stricken City have almost everything. If they had just one knockout song then the queue would be for them. As it stands they all have unusual day jobs. The singer gives head massages in a casino. We think she is good, a star. Stricken City have the best audience I saw all week. All the young hipsters: an ad man’s dream. There was a feeling anything could happen in that room, that we might see what was going to happen next. A good feeling. It’s like deep-sea fishing, going out with an A&R man. You never know what you’re going to catch.
We were out again together the next night at the Royal Academy for the Summer Exhibition. A much bigger production, a much less savvy audience. ‘Who is this?’ a lady asked me by way of opening a conversation. We were watching the band warm up for the cameras. The lady’s dress probably cost more than Stricken City’s album did. ‘It’s Beth Ditto,’ I said, and wondered how she could be there and fail to know. After SuBo Beth Ditto is the most recognisable new face in music, plus it was written on the ticket. Still, it’s always a good do, the Summer Exhibition, like going to church at harvest festival. This year’s crop is just as bountiful as last year’s, even though the price of the grain has dipped a little. Beth Ditto? Well it’s just SuBo doing disco, really.
On Friday at the Commercial Radio awards, I caught Aha, the Scandinavian proto boy band from the Eighties. Still going, still massive in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, and still selling millions of records. A strange thing about getting older is that any music I can connect with my youth, even stuff that I hated at the time, I now find quite moving. A kind of elixir. I was almost in tears by the time they’d finished ‘The Sun Always Shines on TV’, a song I distinctly remember being appalled by when I was a teenager.
In terms of being moved, though, nothing could compare to what was in store on Saturday night. Strange to relate, I saw President Mikhail Gorbachev performing a Russian love song in memory of his late wife. I sat in a tent, watching open mouthed, rapt, as accompanied by a guitar player his sweet baritone gripped all present until he became overcome with emotion in the third verse and took a bow to a standing ovation: what is known as a moment. J.K. Rowling was there, too, and I’m sure she would agree that music is the strongest, strangest magic of all.
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