my life - already

I have been reading other people’s blogs, and I get the impression that these are supposed to be thrilling records of one’s personal life – got up, went to the toilet, that kind of thing – rather than just one’s thoughts on the Beatles or Tamla Motown (or Tampa Midtown, as Microsoft spell check would have me write). So here goes.

My problem is that I don’t really do anything much of interest these days. I sit at home at my computer, turn out a sport-on-TV article for Guardian Sport, a fortnightly piece about radio for the Guardian media section, and a weekly general sports column for The National, Abu Dhabi’s award-winning daily newspaper.

Once a week I go round to my mate Edouard’s gaff over the other side of Leeds and record my piss poor podcast, and most Tuesday nights I take part in topical comedy night in the Comedy Cellar at the Verve bar in Leeds. I try and make amusing observations about items in the news, while the young stand-ups on the panel take the piss out of me for being so much older than they are, and try to embarrass me by mentioning sexual practices that weren’t invented in my youth - or at least if they were they never made it to North Manchester.

I’ve only just come to terms with round tea bags, let alone felching and dirty sanchez.

Point is, apart from Tuesday night downstairs at the Verve, Merrion Street, Leeds – next one 8pm, March 17 – and a lunchtime coffee with Edouard in Street Lane, my life is one gay round of putting the kettle on, getting myself another couple of digestive biscuits, watching a bit of sport on TV, and trying to think of the odd joke or felicitous phrase for one of my columns.

I take my youngest daughter to school most days, and pick her up in the afternoon, and we often go swimming on a Saturday. Nothing so far to have Hollywood falling over itself to make a film version of the blog.

Fortunately, most of my friends who blog are passing the time equally pointlessly, while they wait for the grim reaper to come and do his stuff. The interesting ones, I guess, are just too damned busy to blog.

Good to see my old mate Simon Donald, co-founder of Viz, falling into the former category. His blog tells how he was interviewed by young Lauren Laverne recently for a culture show special from Newcastle, and never made it to the final cut, about which he got very amusingly pissed off.

His thoughts on the place in Newcastle’s cultural fabric of Viz Comic, he complained, were jettisoned in favour of the apercus of one Stuart Maconie. After all, Simon only founded the comic, and has lived in Newcastle all his life, whereas Stuart Maconie likes to go walking in the Lake District.

Macca’s contribution was reminiscent of one of those Monty Python arts show spoofs, as he earnestly placed Viz in a “northern tradition” that includes Alan Bennett, Morrissey, and some other random approved Culture Show name. It was all as outré as Mark Kermode’s hair, but it was good of Macca to fit the show in between his furniture ads. He always does a bang-up job when Paul Morley isn’t available.

(I know it’s not really Maconie on the furniture ads, but, hey, never let the facts get in the way of a good sideswipe).

The good news is that I am in London for a couple of days on a charm offensive (with the emphasis on the offensive), so I expect to have more of interest to report, and blow me if the fun hasn’t already started.

I met my old boss Keith Skues in Euston Road. He was on his way to a preview screening of The Boat That Rocked, the Working Title take on the pirate radio years. Apparently all the old pirate djs had been invited, and obviously transport was standing by to escort them all back to the old broadcasters’ nursing home, Dunjockin.

On which topic, I praised Keith for Pirate Radio Skues, his programme on BBC local radio in the Eastern counties playing all those songs you thought – or possibly hoped – you had forgotten. He told me that he had received a call from the numb nuts in charge of Radio Norwich telling him the show had been axed.

This is just the kind of dynamic management for which BBC local radio is famed. Timing, you see. Just as the pirate stations are back in the spotlight, get rid of the guy who was actually there, and is playing the music they used to play. Anyway, Keith accepted their decision with good grace, the Mail On Sunday did a piece in which he resisted the temptation to shoot his mouth off, and he got a reprieve.

“How’s your Radio Leeds show going?” he asked, and I had to tell him I have not been doing it for nearly two years, and in contrast to him, I had not accepted the fuckwits’ decision with good grace, and left to the sound of burning bridges. “I operate a slash and burn policy,” I told him, “You should know that, you used to be my boss.”

Skuesy tells me he is 70 later this year. I think that might be too old to still be calling yourself Cardboard Shoes. After all, even Francis Rossi has cut his pony tail off.

(Followers - ooh, I feel like L. Ron Hubbard writing that - from now on the blog will be at http://www.martinkelner.com)

Diana Ross, yes. Jonathan Ross, no.

BBC4 is almost worth the licence fee in itself. I wrote in The Guardian about the fantastic football documentaries on the channel recently, and today I have been catching up with some of the Motown programmes broadcast to mark the 50th anniversary of the greatest label in the history of pop music.

A few thoughts struck me, especially after Motown At The BBC, a programme compiling performances of the label's artistes on the BBC from 1964 to almost the present.

I could not help being impressed by the professionalism of people like The Temptations and the Four Tops, used to being backed by the Funk Brothers, having to sing live with the house bands on those light ents shows so popular in the '70s, fronted by Lulu, Julie Felix, and other acceptable light music figures. There were fine musicians in those bands without a doubt, but not what you would call groovy. The Motown people undoubtedly struggled, with the god-like Levi Stubbs playing it for laughs quite effectively on I Can't Help Myself on, I think, the Lulu Show.

Gladys Knight didn't struggle, though, in a 1973 performance of Midnight Train To Georgia (actually made for the Buddah label) on Top Of The Pops. I had forgotten how truly brilliant Gladys Knight was. She may have had the most soulful voice on Motown - with the obvious exception of Levi. Her original of Heard It Through The Grapevine defines commercial funk.

It was the best thing on the show, and in complete contrast to the typically self-indulgent staging of Heatwave on Jools Holland's show, with Jools himself tinkling the ivories, various other luminaries on the jam session, and cutaways of Al Murray in the crowd. Martha Reeves, bless her, who does so much to keep the Motown candle burning brightly, was just not at the races.

If you want to recapture the rush of excitement you had when you heard Heatwave for the first time, try Joan Osborne performing it with the Funk Brothers in the film Standing In The Shadows of Motown (also on You Tube - what isn't?).

It's one of the sexiest performances ever captured on film. If you look up the meaning of the expression "up for it" in the dictionary, you'll find a picture of Joan. She has a child by one of the Grateful Dead with whom she toured for a few years, but says she enjoys sexual encounters with women as well. I just throw that in for all my one-handed readers.

Thanks to BBC4 for bringing all this joy to an old man, and let us not forget BBC3 either, home of Family Guy. These are the two jewels in the BBC's crown, alongside Radio Four and Five Live - mainly for Fighting Talk.

Not much use for the rest of it, I am afraid. Radio Three used to get my custom on a Sunday night when Andy Kershaw was there, and I thought BBC local radio a useful service when it employed me.

Frankly, since I left I have only ever listened by accident, or for the purposes of my Guardian radio column. Not to say it did not perform a useful public service in keeping people like Anne Diamond (Radio Oxford) and Henry Kelly (Berkshire) off reality TV shows, and enabling people like me to entertain a tiny coterie of followers with filth and quirky opinions late at night. But now it is no longer providing a life support system for the careers of people like me, Terry Christian, the great James H Reeve, and others, it is time for local radio to be handed over to the community, to the pirates, to anybody who isn't going to play Holding Back The Years while pleading with the dwindling band of listeners to text in with their favourite flavour of crisps or what the first car they ever owned was.

This is not something I have dealt with in detail in my Guardian column because there are some hugely talented people who work in local radio, and I have some good friends still clinging to that wreckage.

It is the publicly funded, hugely overpaid, entirely unnecessary layer of management, dreaming up national strategies - Dave and Sue anyone? - for what started out as, and should still be, local services. However many focus groups are consulted, these grand plans always come down to the same thing; Simply Red records "for the ladies," and bright and interactive speech breakfast shows (text us or email us now with your favourite biscuit).

Why not a proper, intelligent, non-patronising oldies station, playing genuine r 'n' b, the several thousand Motown records that never get played, the Beatles tracks the GMG stations don't even know exist. Bitter? Well, of course. Why not? It's a potent fuel. Why do you think Craig Bellamy invariably scores when he returns to a former club? If we all sat back, and just respected the opinions of the fuckwit who sacked us - "Yeah, he's probably right. I am shit." - none of us would get anywhere.

As for BBC6 Music, the Guardian has been receiving a fair bit of mail from disgruntled message boarders, and have asked me to do a piece, so I have been listening. I tend to disagree with the demonisation of George Lamb in a lot of the messages to the Guardian. He is clearly a funny guy, something of a force of nature in fact. He reminds me a little of Danny Baker, in that ideas, notions, jokes come tumbling out, often too quickly to make a mark.

What he lacks, though, is warmth, which is quite important on the radio. Sarah Kennedy has it, and Wogan. Kenny Everett had it, and was funny as well. I think Lamb would be better if he slowed down a bit. But what do I know? The key issue is what is the justification for 6Music being publicly funded? Frankly, I have to admit you've got me there. Guardian Media section in a couple of weeks for more on this.

On the subject of forces of nature, by the way, the funniest thing on TV remains Harry Hill's TV Burp. Harry's performance is phenomenal, particularly the way he uses facial expressions almost as catchphrases. The last comedian who did that to any great effect was Tommy Cooper, with whom Harry bears comparison. But it is the gag writing and prodigious research that lifts the show to a higher level. Take a bow, my friend Paul Hawksbee and colleagues.

Finally, and sadly, another once fine show is now withering desperately on the vine. I refer to the emasculated Jonathan Ross on a Friday night. Since the Andrew Sachs incident, a haunted look has been ever present in Ross's eyes. He is trying to be cheeky like before, but something has disappeared for ever, and what we are left with is a sad, unfunny husk, a truth cruelly underlined by the sycophantic laughter from his house band, and the cutaways to the guests giggling, as the dead man, Ross, strokes them.

His fifteen masturbatory minutes with James Corden - and when was it decided he was the funniest man in Britain? I missed that meeting - were excrutiating. I could recommend he remove his tongue from the fundament of his guests long enough to be funny, but I don't think it would work at the moment. He should leave now, give the BBC their money back, and go and work for Absolute Radio until his mojo returns.

Not sure about this blogging business, by the way. Samuel Johnson said, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." The subscription service starts any day now.

The Fifth Beatle....

....is one of the enduring figures of popular mythology. Like the second assassin, Mick Jagger's Mars Bar, and Jim Morrison's cock, the Zelig-like figure bashing a tambourine, arranging a photo call, or procuring a strumpet for Paul, is a figure without whom the landscape of the Sixties would not be complete.

Nobody talks about the fourth Bee Gee, or the third Everly Brother, but since the Beatles split up nearly forty years ago, there have been numerous people connected with the band, however tenuously, who have either elected themselves, or been nominated for the title of Fifth Beatle.

And lo, this week, two more candidates emerge. Step forward PR shark Max Clifford, and the enviably prolific journalist, novelist, and biographer Hunter Davies.

The two have been sparring entertainingly in the letters page of The Guardian over their involvement - or more specifically Max's, Hunter's is not in dispute - in the early days of the Fab Four.

It started with a profile of Clifford in The Guardian of February 21st. Interviewer Stephen Moss noted a 1962 photo in Clifford's office, showing the young PR man with the Beatles and George Martin. Clifford told Moss how he was working in the EMI press office as a 19-year-old when the company signed the lovable mop tops, and went into a well-rehearsed anecdote (he told it to me in a radio interview five years ago) about the EMI marketing director telling him: "Don't waste too much time on this lot, son. They've got no chance."

Clifford left it at that in the interview, but the implication that he, Clifford, had somehow ignored his boss’s reservations, and ploughed on with his plan to propel the boys to chart domination in Britain, a successful invasion of the United States, two modish films for the cinema, several groundbreaking albums, and eventual acrimonious break-up - and had possibly tried to dissuade them from recording Maxwell’s Silver Hammer into the bargain - was too much for official mop top biographer Davies.

During his 18 months spent with the Beatles in the 1960s researching his encyclopaedic tome, wrote Davies in a letter to the Guardian, Clifford’s name did not come up once. Davies doubted Clifford played any part at all in the Beatles' story. The well-known collector of memorabilia – as featured in Guardian Weekend – added that the name of Clifford is also conspicuous by its absence from the “500 Beatles books, and 2,000 magazines, programmes and articles about the Beatles” lovingly preserved in the Davies attic.

Back came Clifford saying the anecdote was not meant to imply anything other than that “I was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time.” He went on generously to ascribe the Beatles’ worldwide success to the talent of the boys themselves and the management nous of Brian Epstein, and less generously to hope “Hunter Davies’s biographies are more accurate than his references to me, and trust that he enjoys and benefits from the publicity he has achieved by misrepresenting me.”

Putting aside the doubtful publicity benefits of having a letter published in The Guardian, let me try and build a bridge over these troubled waters (wrong act, I know, but right era).

First of all, Hunter, cut the boy a bit of slack. Max is in the PR business, where spin and flim-flam are more or less built into the job description. Nor is he the only person to try and derive a little reflected glory from the Fab Four.

Murray the K, a New York disc jockey, was, I believe the first to call himself the Fifth Beatle, when he interviewed the band a few times during their 1964 tour of America. George apparently used the term sarcastically, because Murray (or do I call him "the K?") was shadowing the band all over the city, and the boys couldn't shake him off.

Not that the egregious disc spinner is the most unlikely Fifth Beatle. Robert Crampton of The Times tells a story about interviewing Jimmy Tarbuck on a golf course in the Algarve, when the terminally unfunny comic and occasional Fighting Talk host ("worst host ever," as Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons would say) claimed that he (that's Tarby, not Crampton) was the Fifth Beatle on the very solid grounds that he came from Liverpool, was about the same age as the Fabs, and had a mop top of his own.

George Best was also once called the Fifth Beatle based on nothing more than the fact he shared with the boys a taste for whisky and Coke and shagging a lot of women, and a newspaper headline, reading "El Beatle," printed when Manchester United returned from a European triumph and Georgie emerged from the plane wearing a sombrero.

The whole Fifth Beatle conversation was revived last year with the death of Neil Aspinall, the former roadie and assistant who was with the boys throughout their career and remained with Apple Corps until 2007.

In terms of longevity, and a Zelig-like ability to be there - and yet not be there - every step of the way, from the leather jackets and DAs of the Merseybeat scene to the exploiting-the-back-catalogue era of the new Millennium, Aspinall is a good call. He saw everything, and took the secrets with him to the grave. If anybody knew where the bodies were buried it was Aspinall, and he never told.

Musically, though, the true Fifth Beatle has to be George Martin, possibly the greatest record producer of all time, given the technology he was working with. This, remember is the man who not only produced Revolver but also I'm Walking Backwards For Christmas by The Goons.
And let us not forget the late Norman "Hurricane" Smith, recording engineer on all the Beatles albums up to Rubber Soul, and later hitmaker himself on "Don't Let It Die" and "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?"

There were also Fifth Beatles actually in the band; the tragic figure of Stu Sutcliffe, of course, who with his girlfriend Astrid can lay claim to have invented the look of the band in the early '60s, Pete Best, drummer and custodian of garage in which to practise, Pete Shotton, member of the Quarrymen, Jimmy Nicol, who toured with the band when Ringo had his tonsils out, Billy Preston on "Get Back," Tony Sheridan from Hamburg days, Eric Clapton, who played guitar on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," and helped George greatly, although he didn't tell him to nick "He's So Fine" from The Chiffons. There will be others I have omitted.

And let us not forget Brian Epstein, the visionary without whom..... They are making a film about Brian, and it would be nice to think it could be as rich, and redolent of its era, as David Peace's Brian Clough book. But if the history of Beatles projects is anything to go by, I do not hold out a lot of hope. One word: Backbeat.

Oh, and before we leave the subject of Fifth Beatles, I read a travel feature a couple of months ago about Portugal in which the writer wrote of the holidays he had spent in his property there with at least one member of the Fab Four. The piece was illustrated with a picture of the writer together with Paul McCartney. The writer was Hunter Davies. Hunter's biog of the boys, by the way, is a fantastic read, as is his book about Spurs.

The thing about the Beatles was that they were the most photographed and interviewed band ever, before or since. No band nowadays would ever let you get as close to them as the Beatles did. All sorts of people have pictures of themselves with the band.

A photographer friend of mine from the Sheffield Star took loads backstage at the Sheffield Gaumont or Odeon when the boys played there, and I dare say similar things happened at theatres up and down the country and all over the world, during the brief period the boys were touring. Every person in every picture probably has a story to tell. Some will be embellished, but that is to be expected.

I like to think Max's anecdote goes on to find him outside the studio where the Beatles are recording Love Me Do. He turns to the marketing director, and says: "You're wrong, you know. These boys have got something. They may be raw now, but with the right PR, they could go all the way to the top."

The camera closes in on Max, and we go into a montage sequence, but instead of shots of the Beatles' triumphs, we get newspaper headlines, and shots of Max with Freddie Starr, Rebecca Loos, and that bird David Mellor was shagging, until his ultimate triumph; selling the story of the 13-year-old kid who has fathered a baby, and choreographing coverage of Jade Goody's terminal illness.

You can understand why the guy might want to claim just the merest suggestion of a whiff of the glory of She Loves You.