Radio Academy Masterclass, Leicester, 13 June

If you can make it to Leicester on 13 June, have £20 and want to be a radio presenter, come along to this:

All these people will be there:

It will be fun.

A retirement

Yes. And it still works.

That there, is my minidisc recorder. For the technical among you, it is a Sony MZ-B10.

It was given to me by the BBC on the 4 January 2004. I last used it yesterday to record an episode of Amy and Abi's diary for broadcast on BBC Surrey tomorrow.

The latest episode of Amy and Abi's diary is likely to be my minidisc recorder's last professional engagement. Next week I shall be taking delivery of a TASCAM mp3 recorder.

Stuff that works, reliably, durably and unfussily seems to be like gold dust. When you find something that does what it's supposed to do, you hang on to it. Sometimes for more than a decade.

Before I put my minidisc recorder out to pasture, I would like to pay tribute to its usefulness, and the fact it has been my mechanical companion for most of my career as a journalist.

We've had some fun together. I used it to record an interview with a woman who killed her husband (with his permission) and a man who survived the bomb blast at Aldershot barracks in 1972. My minidisc has also recorded conversations I've had with David Cameron, Sir Mick Jagger, Halle Berry, Will Smith, Sir Bob Geldof, Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian Botham, Bruce Willis, Madonna, Eddie Izzard, Christina Aguilera, Nick Cave, Gazza, Simon Le Bon, Jake Gyllenhaal and Keira Knightley among others.

It has never let me down. Every time I press the red button, it starts recording. The recording is always there. Playback is simple. The levels are automatic. The sound quality is good. When I use the external mic the BBC gave me, the sound quality is exceptional.

If I were using it every day I would have got rid of it a long time ago. It can only upload audio in real time. But after 2007, most of the reporting I did was for TV, and when I was at BBC Surrey my main role was as a presenter, so the minidisc was only wheeled out for special occasions. For the last three years it's only really been used at home, to record Amy and Abi's diary.

But it was a good bit of kit, and I will miss it.

Criminals: Caught on Camera - Series 2

I am delighted to tell you I have signed a contract to present a second series of Criminals: Caught on Camera for Channel 5.

We've already put together a one-off which will go out some time over summer, and there are plans for a further seven episodes to go out before the end of the year.

Obviously I can't say too much about the content until nearer the time, but when the press material is ready, I'll get some up here.

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I do have a couple of other TV projects I'm working on at the moment which I can't say too much about (save that one is crime-related, and the other is concerned with yet more shoddy goings on at the Post Office), so I'm using the opportunity to have a bit of fun with the top ten albums thing.

I'm also trying to do something useful with the Nick is Not Drinking experiment, which is hosted on a separate blog to this.

My experiences of the last four months along with some of the literature I've been reading are starting to crystallise into a theory about the way we deal with alcohol as a society, and what we need to be doing better.

I'm exploring these ideas with a leading clinician who obviously approaches the subject from a different perspective, but has a lifetime of experience in the field. It's been fascinating to learn about the effect of alcohol on mind, body and brain and the way it makes us perceive our environments.

We'll see what comes of it, but if you want to find out more, and possibly even donate to some very worthy causes, have a read here.

Finally, a reciprocal plug for the inestimable Ian Fraser who is due to publish his book on RBS next month. Ian has been a key chronicler of the worst of the British banking system's excesses and is a fearless journalist. His first book "Shredded: The Rise and Fall of the Royal Bank of Scotland" will no doubt be a rollicking read and I would recommend pre-ordering a copy.

Top Ten Albums: Floodland

Artwork definitely a case of "could do better"

Before this record came out, I was aware the Sisters of Mercy were a band I should like. At the time, there was None More Goth. The mythic persona of Andrew Eldritch, the apocalyptically doom-laden first album First and Last and Always, and a concert video filmed at the Royal Albert Hall (which apparently exhausted Europe's supplies of dry ice) had already cemented the legend.

I was never really a fan of First and Last and Always. But god knows I tried. I liked the track Nine While Nine, but overall it was just too... gloomy.

So when I finally got my hands on a copy of Floodland it was more in hope than expectation.

I have written in the past about the impossibility of hearing new music as a child. As a teenager living in Germany, it hadn't got much easier. Stuck on a military base in the middle of nowhere meant listening to British Forces radio (not great champions of alternative music), watching Top of The Pops a week late on Services Sound and Vision TV or getting the bus into Mönchengladbach to stand, rather lamely, at one of the listening posts which German records shops used to offer.

These brightly-lit, atmosphere-free music marts would often contain two or three turntables behind a glass counter and a pair of headphones. The shop staff would reluctantly put on records at your request whilst you put on the headphones and stood there like a plum.

As a 14 year old boy I could barely speak English without becoming a clammy mess, so attempting to communicate in German to a stranger was a complete non-starter. Yet I was so desperate to hear new music I would steel myself to undergo the horrendous process of taking a record to the counter. The man behind the counter would glare at me for a while, then with a great show of contempt, he would snatch the record from my hands, take it out of its sleeve and put it on. I had to stand there, attempting to evaluate the life-changing desirability or otherwise of my chosen record whilst trying not to overheat with adolescent self-consciousness.

If the other turntables were being used, you could guarantee that within thirty seconds another customer would walk up and stand two yards away, holding the record they wanted to listen to. As you tried to ignore them you would become aware the man behind the counter had acknowledged the customer and was fixing you with his "well-are-you-going-to-buy-this-record-or-not?" stare, to which you both knew the answer was no, as you had just spent your weekly pocket money on the bus fare into town and a McDonalds.

I soon gave up on it.

The only other source of new music was the RAF record library, which I was given special dispensation to join, despite being underage, and not a member of the RAF.

This opened up a new world. Borrowing a record only cost one Deutschmark. On my pocket money I could borrow five albums a week, tape the best of them and come back the following week for five more. Furthermore, once a record had been borrowed twenty times the library would sell it to you for another Deutschmark, so I was able to start building a proper record collection. The growth of the collection accelerated when I got to know the record librarian who would "notice a scratch" on a record I particularly liked and flog it to me even though it had yet to be borrowed twenty times.

So I'd heard about the new Sisters of Mercy release. I'd read a fascinating interview with Andrew Eldritch, all mirror shades and leather jackets, stalking the bars of Hamburg. I'd read the album review, which, being the Melody Maker, didn't mention the music once. I was ready for Floodland to arrive at the RAF Rheindahlen record library. Eventually, it did.

The cover looked like it had been knocked up in five minutes, but the photo on the lyric inlay  was rather lovely.

Who is More Goth? No one. No one is.

As I have mentioned before, my favoured way of listening to new music when I had the time to do this sort of thing, was lying down, lights off, loud as possible.

I nervously put the needle on the record and walked across the room to lie on my bed as that crackling, anticipatory pause built the tension before the opening bars. You have no idea how much I wanted this to be listenable. Good was too much to hope for.

Much to my surprise, and eternal gratitude, Floodland is a cacophanous, thundering juggernaut of a record. If The Cure's Head on the Door is self-involved indie goth, The Cult's Love is metal goth, Floodland is disco goth, and none the worse for that. In fact it is an arch nod towards the dark camp of the dancefloor, the fluid moment when exuberant physical expression gets locked up in desire. It is also stupendously silly in a deliberate, grandiose way.

I love it. Well obviously I do, or it wouldn't be in my top ten albums, but I still listen to certain tracks on it now, weekly, if not daily.

Essentially Floodland is one, maximum two ideas stretched across 45 minutes. But as Adrian Edmondson (yes him! clang!) once said to me "all you ever need in life is one good idea".

The twin peaks of the album are undoubtedly Dominion/Mother Russia and This Corrosion. Both are parked at the beginning of each side, and both are essentially the same song. Between them they take up nearly half the album.

Dominion/Mother Russia was produced by the same bloke who engineered This Corrosion. This Corrosion was produced by Jim Steinman, who made his name producing Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell. As soon as Eldritch had the idea for This Corrosion (over-the-top grand concept goth with stupid lyrics) he did everything he could to get Steinman on board. Makes sense.



Flood I, 1959 and Never Land are fillers of various quality. Flood II, Lucretia My Reflection and Driven Like the Snow are three excellent pop records. The latter also provides a nice link back to First and Last and Always - elegantly returning to the same subject matter covered on Nine While Nine.

Eldritch's boomy baritone isn't for everyone, nor is the relentless clinicism of Doktor Avalanche, the band's famous drum machine, but two amazing and three very good songs on one record doesn't normally happen, and never on an album I was expecting to be a bit of a dirge.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend seeking out Floodland unless you can get hold of the original tracks as put out with their original durations on vinyl. During the remastering process, (presumably through some misguided notion of adding value) original tracks were extended and extra tracks were added. All the extra tracks are terrible and the extended versions of the originals are irritating, unnecessary and actually just ruin perfectly good songs. The overall effect is to further expose the paucity of Eldritch's ideas on the album rather than bolster them. Shame.

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Other top ten albums:

The Waterboys - This is the Sea
Duran Duran - Rio

The rationale for doing this. With further rationale at the bottom of the This is the Sea entry too, come to think of it.

Top Ten Albums: Rio

This latest entry has been prompted by the discovery that a production office in the Docklands has decided to put my list of also-ran albums on Spotify and go through them one-by-one, no doubt gleefully critiquing my musical taste in the process. Quite an unnerving thought. Anyway - Duran Duran's Rio.

This is very possibly one of the most perfect and perfectly-timed pop albums ever.  Even now I know every lyric, note, production flange and sequencer squiggle on every single song on this record. There was a time when I could probably take you, shot by shot, through every single video made for this album, had you but asked.

Yes I know Simon Le Bon is a terrible lyricist. A really terrible lyricist. Who can't sing. But whilst George Michael was writing boooooring stuff about gurls and relationships and love, Simon Le Bon was spouting monumental bollocks in a way that sounded perfectly adequate to a nine year old boy. Which, funnily enough, is exactly how old I was when I first heard this record.

It has many faults.

It is not fashionable to like it (if, nowadays, anyone has actually heard of it).

I thought re-visiting Rio, track-by-track, after a ten year break, would be disappointing.

It was not.

My main criticism is that Rio, as a strictly musical endeavour, does not bear too much scrutiny. This subsequently makes it hard to explain in any detail why I like it. Everything that made it huge - the band's videos, image and status is etched on the memory of anyone who lived through the early eighties.

Everything has faded now. All we are left with is the music. And that stunning cover.

Yet the record holds up. Rio is still special. It's partly down to the production and engineering, but is also, undeniably, down to the band, who happened to have written, assembled and learned how to perform nine strikingly good songs.

Uniquely with Duran Duran, and particularly on this album, the guitar and synth parts remain on an equal footing throughout. This is put to great effect on Hungry Like the Wolf where the guitar's metallic edge is mixed down into the guts of the song, adding energy and bounce to the poppy, bubbly, melody-driven rythmic synth sequence which jerks and jiggers all over the place. The opening bars are the distilled essence of pop excitement. A girl laughs, an overdriven guitar runs down the fretboard and we're off.

I'm listening to that synth line again on Spotify now. It's just as exciting and just as fresh as it was 32 years ago. Try it for yourself - but close your eyes - the video hasn't aged well:


It's the same for the rest of the album. Compared to most pop songs of the time each guitar riff, bass part and synth sequence on Rio sounds like it was crafted meticulously, line-by-line, section-by-section - and then played without a care in the world by the people who wrote it. The constituent parts are as creative as they can be without detracting from the coherency of each song. It's a very difficult trick to pull off.

I've never thought of Duran Duran as musicians. They were a band, a brand, an image and five individual media personalities within a pop cultural phenomenon. Their songs were the stepping off point for what a generation of people wanted to project back onto them (and this is where the vacuity of the lyrics actually helped).

For a couple of years in the eighties, Duran Duran held up a mirror to every screaming teenager, music fan, journalist, fashionista and factory worker in the country. The tabloid-reading, Smash Hits-devouring, television-watching public saw something of themselves in them, wanted a piece of them or defined themselves against them. The music was almost incidental.

But on Rio, if you shut out all the blether, there is a sense of a creative unit still young, feted, successful and pigheaded enough to believe in their own ability. The result is an extraordinary record which is limited by but achieves greatness through its authors' unique sensibilities.

Highlights:

The whole of Lonely in your Nightmare
The sequencer on Hungry Like the Wolf
The opening synth riff to and chorus of Save a Prayer
The bass playing on New Religion
The chilling, oddball sound to The Chauffeur, perfectly placed at the end of the album
The songwriting
The cover
The energy
The unbelievable good looks of John Taylor

Lowlights:

The drumming
The lyrics, particularly the goddawful second verse to Hold Back the Rain which was never in the original vinyl version of the album, but was on the version of the b-side to Save a Prayer and has subsequently found its way into every bloody version of the main album since. Le Bon is obviously proud of it because he still sings it live. It's terrible.

But the album is good. Go on. Have a listen.

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Original top ten albums post
First top ten album - This is the Sea  (these are being added in no particular order)

Britain's Crime Capitals: Birmingham

Beverley Thomas by the grave of her daughter

The second episode of Britain's Crime Capitals goes out tonight at 9pm on Channel 5 (and, obviously at 10pm on C5+1). This episode focuses on Birmingham's gang culture and the steps being taken to change it.

I met Beverley Thomas, whose daughter Charlene was shot dead in 2003. We spoke at Charlene's grave. As we walked back to the car she pointed out the graves of at least four other young people whose lives had been cut short by street violence.

On another occasion I met an interesting character who was subjected to a sustained machete attack by a group of people he took to be his friends. They left him for dead by a park in Handsworth. We took him back there for the first time since it happened. The resultant interview is worth watching.

I hope you can spare the time to catch the programme tonight, or view it after transmission on Demand 5.

Top Ten Albums: This is the Sea

I was given this album on tape by a boy two years older than me at school. Mackey. His surname was Maclean, so we called him Mackey. He didn't like me very much.

One day he handed me a cassette. "You'll like this." he said. "Ignore the trumpety shit at the beginning. It's good."

Because the album had been copied, I assumed the "trumpety shit" was something that had been imperfectly taped over.

I took the cassette out of his hand. "Why the trumpets?" I asked nervously, for something to say.

"How the fuck should I know!" he bellowed.

"Er, okay. Thanks." I said, as he stormed off, muttering.

That night, I lay on my bed and put my walkman on. When I was a kid I always listened to as much new music as I possibly could prone, and in the dark. Especially new stuff. No distractions.

There is quite a lot of trumpety stuff at the beginning. One minute, twenty-seven seconds in all (I've just timed it).

What follows is the most thrilling guitar riff ever. That first time, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I lay, rigid, my arms by my side, my feet stretched out in front of me and my eyes staring straight up at the ceiling frozen in a kind of goonish ecstasy. What a fucking beautiful sound. How was it even possible to make that screeching, grinding, melodic, electrifying... noise? Sweet Mary mother of Jesus - how good is this?

The brilliance of the opening track (Don't Bang The Drum) isn't matched in sonic terms by the rest of the album, but there were enough gems in there to elevate This Is The Sea and The Waterboys to (nearly) favourite band status for a good few years.

If you have never come across This is the Sea before, here's a quick tour:

Be My Enemy and Medicine Bow are two straight-up roister-doistering this-is-who-we-are-and-this-is-what-we-do pop songs. The music is uncomplicated celtic-soul-rock, made outstanding by arrangement, production and performance. Listening back, the lyrics seem genetically engineered to appeal to fourteen year old boys, which is, funnily enough, exactly how old I was when I first heard them.

Medicine Bow is about going on an epic journey to somewhere epic, whenceforth everything will be significantly better than it has been before:

There's a black wind blowing
A typhoon on the rise
Pummelin' rain
Murderous skies

I'm gonna take my boots
I'm gonna wear my coat
I'm gonna find my scarf
And wrap it around my throat

And you can come with me
Through the driving snow
We gonna ride on up to 
Medicine Bow

Be My Enemy is a fantasy about tracking down someone who is being an almost biblical pain in the arse, and duffing them up. 

I've got goons on my landing
Thieves on my trail
Nazis on my telephone
Willing me to fail
And they were all sent by someone
Obviously you

(...)

Now from the slime on your tongue to the nails on your toes
From the scales on your skin to the stains on your clothes
You're gonna make me have to do something, I do not want to do
But if you will be my enemy, I'll be your enemy too.

Every line is thoughtfully metred and measured, and the result is almost cartoon-ishly spot on. This is an exercise in lyrical rhetoric, and it is up there with the very best.

My hands are tied, nailed to the floor,
Feel like I'm knocking on unknown doors.
Gun at my back, blade at my throat, 
I keep on finding hatemail in the pockets of my coat,

Oh I've been, trying to grow
I have been, cooling my heels
I have been, working on the treadmill
I've been, working in the fields...

And I, can't get to sleep...

And I, can't catch my breath...

I can't stop talking and I look like death,

But I will put right this disgrace.

I will RE-ARRANGE YOU!

('Cos if you'll be my enemy, I'll be your enemy too).

Love it. Trumpets I can take or leave, and I was never that sold on Old England or The Whole of the Moon, but The Pan Within is kind of groovy, and This Is The Sea is a perfect album ender - 12-string guitars and we're-all-flowing-downstream-through-life-and-then-we-reach-the-sea-which-is-when-we-die-but-it's-great-because-we're-all-one-intermingling-of-celestial-energy lyrical gubbins.

As someone who had already happily consumed The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and most of CS Lewis, the album's celtic-leaning spirituality and Yeatsian imagery was perfect fodder at the perfect time.

Once I'd acquired This Is The Sea on vinyl (Mackey wanted his tape back) I dug out the first two Waterboys albums. They weren't as good, but they didn't disappoint. The title track of A Pagan Place is still my favourite Waterboys song, but I don't think anyone would deny This is the Sea marks the band's creative high point, and it just scrapes into my top ten albums ever.



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Postscript:

When I started this project, Max Velody, top TV producer, made the following comment on Facebook:

"A question. Will your top 10 albums be, the albums you think are the best, or, the albums you play the most, or, are they one and the same for you? I ask because whenever I mentally draw up these lists, I am aware that the two don't always match and I wonder, should they. For instance - I don't think Iggy Pop's Lust For Life would make it into my list of the top 10 albums ever, however, I have played it a few times each and every year since it came out, 37 years ago, and I don't think that's true of any other album I own. So maybe it should be in my top 10, maybe it should be number one. I just don't know....."

Which obviously got me thinking. Am I really writing up my top ten albums at all? I rarely listen to This is the Sea nowadays, and certainly haven't at any time over the last 5 years. Musically and lyrically, I've kinda moved on. It is a great album, but it is something of a period piece.

This is the Sea is in the top ten because it meant so much to me at the time. But there are plenty of albums like that. What is the difference between those which meant a lot when I was younger and made it into the list and those that didn't?

The Damned's Phantasmagoria changed my relationship to music overnight. It created a step-shift in my aesthetic at a time when I was frankly floundering and set me off on a journey of discovery which basically opened up The Cure, The Cult,  The Cocteau Twins, The Sisters of Mercy, all of punk, The Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Mission etc to me. But I was thirteen and it is a terrible album. I'm embarrassed I ever liked it and you don't need to hear it.

So I will admit, part of the reason for presenting you a top ten album list is in the hope you will have a listen to them, and this has inevitably had an impact on what they are.

If I had to do a top ten album list based on how much particular records may have meant to me at particular stages of my life, it would be a pretty stringy list. It would also not be a true reflection of what I consider to the ten best albums I've ever heard.

But if I took out all the ropey albums which meant such a colossal amount to me at the time and tried to look objectively at everything I've ever listened to, the result would be even more pointless than it is already because the albums on the list would be there for technical or cultural reasons, rather than personal ones.

So in answer to your question Max, my top ten consists of:

- some albums which meant a lot to me at the time, but in retrospect, aren't objectively that good, or ones I particularly listen to now, but have something in them which is worth sharing.

- some albums I genuinely love but don't really listen to any more.

- some albums I still listen to a lot and seem to be getting closer to as we grow old together.

It doesn't contain some albums which meant more to me at the time than many of the records in my top ten, but which are nowhere near as good as I thought they were, and aren't worth sharing.

If you think this is getting over-thought, wait until we get onto the subject of compilations.

If you have no idea why I'm writing this, please read my introductory piece.