Robin Brown

Amazingly it’s the 21st anniversary of the release of Erasure’s The Innocents, with Phantom Bride re-released as an EP and a remastered album to celebrate.

It’s one of my favourite albums and a high watermark in synth pop – though its release was pretty much the last hurrah for the scene – and its anniversary coincides with a mini series on BBC4 on electronic music.

The Innocents is probably one of the first albums I ever bought and, in that way that early albums do, it really has the ability to take me back to where I was at the time. Like any new album bought in those days, it was listened to again and again.

It’s a class of music that’s always been easy to sneer at, but as is mentioned in the BBC4 documentary Synth Britannia, it’s basically soul music on electronic instruments.

It’s an album stripped of a lot of the outrageous campery, posturing and pretension in similar material in the early half of the decade.

Still, it takes some of the social aspects of Depeche Mode, the pop sensibilities of the Pet Shop Boys and the hot-cold duality of Clarke versus a romantic chanteuse – and in doing so creates something greater than the sum of those parts.

Vince Clarke’s driving beats, clever chord changes and impeccable pop hooks contrast with Andy Bell’s soaring, slightly gospel voice – itself juxtaposed with the bleakness of the lyrics.

It’s all bedsits, heartbreak and unrequited love, but there’s a funny symbiosis between the grim and uplifting in most of the songs.

Hallowed Ground, Ship of Fools and Phantom Bride are as downbeat as pop music ever gets; Witch in the Ditch is a strange off-beat carnivale effort’ but overlooked tunes like Yahoo and Weight of the World are well-crafted sweet little songs that match soulful melodies with synth production.

Chains of Love and A Little Respect mine rich gospel seams to stunning effect, but it’s hard to imagine such songs in the charts these days.

Later Erasure albums failed to recapture the same delicate mix between hope and despair, joy and melancholy, Clarke and Bell – and seemed unbalanced as a result.

Inevitably The Innocents was a product of its time, the album is coated in a grimy late 80s melancholy, but it’s aged extremely well and puts the recent synth revival firmly in its place.

That it’s still relevant and fresh is testament to the quality of a duo so often overlooked in British music. The Innocents isn’t just Erasure’s best, it’s one of the best in the entire genre.

For anyone unaware, Radiohead have released a new single called Harry Patch (In Memory Of). Patch, the last remaining British soldier from WWI, died recently at the age of 111.

Rather uniquely for a new single, and for Radio 4, the new song received its first public airing on the BBC radio station this week on the Today programme.

It’s a remarkable, melancholy, eerie and oddly redemptive listen, but the radio interview with Patch – Thom Yorke’s inspiration for the lyrics – are important to hear too.

Delivered in a wheezing whisper, Patch’s distaste for the Great War, and the concept of war itself, are evident.

Having survived Passchendaele, where so many of his friends died, for 80 years Patch did not talk about his experiences, nor did he watch war films.

Only when he realised that the number of Tommies was declining did he speak of his experiences, and he was withering of any notions of glory.

Like some sort of mage from the distant past, Patch’s hoarse prediction of the next war is chilling and affecting.

His is the voice of a man who has seen history play itself out twice before, and grimly, wearily, expects it to happen again.

“They never learn,” he whispers. “The Third World War will be chemical. I don’t want to see it.”

It’s easy to see why Yorke was so affected by the interview. He uses portions of the text from the 2005 segment with Patch verbatim in the music. And it’s easy to see why Yorke thought Patch’s passing worthy of note.

Harry Patch’s words on the utter futility and horror of war are a warning from the past, the like of which we will never hear again. The words of a man recalling one of the most monumental and devastating events in human history – from almost 100 years ago.

It seems impossible, and possibly wrong, to even try to critique the music in light of its subject matter, and wider significance. Fittingly it’s understated, soft and subtle. Patch’s words speak for themselves and Johnny Greenwood’s orchestral score elegiac.

I can’t really explain how affected I’ve been by the music, and by the interview with Patch. I only hope they make other people feel the same way, or I fear Patch’s words will be lost amid the ceremony and noise of a state funeral and accompanying bluster.

“People…the younger generation, can’t image what it’s like. You can’t describe it.”

• All proceeds from the Radiohead track go to the British Legion. It’s a quid well spent. Download here.

So, New Musical Express editor Conor McNicholas has been appointed boss of Top Gear’s online and print presence.

McNicholas was not a popular choice as the new editor of the NME among its readers, and the consensus seems to be that McNicholas took the paper towards a gossipy centre, populated by rather shit new young bands with silly hair and not much besides.

I can’t really comment, as no-one reads NME past the 21st birthday – I still have the last copy I ever bought in 1999 – but from the times I’ve skimmed through it since it’s practically unrecognisable from the publication it once was (it’s described elsewhere as ‘a dishwater-dull industry cum-rag with an editor who resembles a spoon in a suit’).

I know virtually nothing about McNicholas, but pundits seem to reckon he didn’t know a great deal about music. It seems unlikely to me that he knows a huge amount about about cars, though he professes to love cars – either way he has no pedigree that I can find in the automotive industry.

McNicholas has got the gig – as it seems to me – because he’s thought to have a good understanding of taking brands into the digital age. The NME’s roll out of digital coverage across radio and TV stations and the web has been impressive, especially considering the fact that the print version was thought not long for this world at the start of the decade.

He’s the first of what’s likely to be the most famous of a new breed of multi-platform editors who don’t require any specific knowledge or understanding of the subject matter their platforms cater for. In itself that’s no bad thing – I can mix it with the best of them when it comes to digital waffling – but I think it’s bad news when wedded to a financial imperative.

In some ways this should be lauded as forward-thinking, and will probably prove to be lucrative. But the flip side is that Top Gear will lose value as a serious motoring publication. Even though a good deal of its draw must inevitably come from the TV programme, Top Gear writers know their onions and feature writing by some fairly serious names.

I’m a little dubious that the mag will continue in that way with McNicholas at the helm. As with the NME, attempts to capitalise on a brand name must inevitably draw a magazine back to the centre ground, so as not to alienate casual subscribers, readers or viewers.

I didn’t read NME in the 80s heyday, but the 90s paper was packed with serious, funny features and took in some very niche and obscure talents. To my jaded eyes, NME looks more like Heat magazine today.

I think something similar will happen to Top Gear, as with money and resources it wouldn’t take much to turn a global brand into a massive cash cow. A significantly-extended web presence and pushes into podcasts, radio, vidcasts, and multimedia seem likely in a rather more all-things-to-all-men sense.

I find a lot of this fairly depressing, as there seems to be a consensus that to make a publication, or a brand, successful it has be dragged towards some sort of dumbed-down middle ground.

The change in the NME is an obvious example, as are the likes of lads and ents mags these days – Heat used to be a genuine attempt at an ents and culture mag. Where once there was Loaded, which did have its fair share of quality writing under James Brown there are now Nuts and Zoo, which amount to celebrity tit mags.

McNicholas is likely to work some similar ‘magic’ on Top Gear. I find it unlikely that the likes of Clarkson and May will greet this news with much enthusiasm.

As wedded as Clarkson, particularly, is to lots of cash the pair of them are genuine in their fogeyish dislike of the sort of thing McNicholas represents.

I may be midjudging McNicholas, he may be a secret car buff, but with statements (which I understand is genuine) like this I don’t hold out much hope:

“From Arctic Monkeys to Aston Martin, I’m looking forward to being at the heart of another iconic British multi-platform brand.”

If McNicholas thought he got grief from NME readers for not knowing his stuff, that’s nothing compared to what he’ll get from the petrolhead fraternity.

Whether Michael Jackson has or has not died, the most obvious immediate phenomenon of the whole affair is how utterly pointless the rolling news coverage of the affair is.

While there’s a clear benefit to live coverage of breaking political news, I’m unclear as to the point in hearing whether Michael Jackson may or may not have died.

The Sky anchor in the chair at the time the rumours broke was told that the fire department captain would not confirm or deny any reports whatsoever before the interview kicked off, and then went on to ask whether the captain would confirm or deny any reports.

‘A man had been rushed to hospital,’ was pretty much the most concrete factoid offered up.

Later another reporter confirmed that a 911 call in the area in which Jackson lives was rushed to hospital and that the man was in the area of 50 years old.

A man from Sky then confirmed that Jackson was 50 years old and that Jacko has a house in the corresponding area, as if this was absolute gospel that the singer had died.

At the moment there’s ticker tape, live coverage of an LA hospital from a chopper, a still from the TMZ site that has reported the news, a header and sub-header and a voiceover interview with a man ruminating on whether Michael Jackson is dead or not.

The temptation is to speculate about Jackson’s forthcoming comeback gigs, and there’s a vaguely Lord Lucan aspect to the whole thing.

It’s all entirely in keeping with Jackson’s rather remarkable and undoubtedly rather sad life.

But it’s a sign of how inured we are to this sort of things by the very blanket coverage that is reporting the current news that the suspicion remains that it’s all a huge hoax.

EDIT: As if to confirm my doubts about news outlets reporting rumours as fact, several news sites and channels have been hoaxed today with inaccurate reports of the deaths of Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum.

Sadly for Jacko it looks like those particular rumours from TMZ were right all along.

Another daft ‘What if…?’ mock up.

Chamillionaire about to donate £5,000 to a youth club in Swansea