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Elvis Presley: In the Beginning and the Resurrection

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The Sun Sessions
'Some of the sexiest, most electrifying music ever made. If aliens were to find these tracks in the smoking ruins of an obliterated planet, they would have sufficient to clone rock'n'roll all over again...'

The 1968 Comeback Special
'Here he was. Back and magnificent. Elvis Unbound was an act of macho defiance. Let the rest of the world be overrun by feminised fops, here was the real King - dressed from head to toe in mythically charged, kaftan-trashing black leather. His marble-smooth visage, still as beautiful as any Greek god's, was framed by a quiff and sideburns blacker than his manager's heart. 'If you're lookin' for trouble,' his opening close-up went, 'look right in my face.'

The Sun Sessions and the 1968 Comeback Special are key events in the Elvis legend. I wrote about them for Word Magazine in August 2004. Further down is a more detailed account of the 1968 show, this one done for Q Magazine in January 1999.

It was an extraordinary day.

On 5 July, 1954, a shy, spotty youth called Elvis Presley walked into Sam Phillips' Sun Studio in Memphis. With help from a couple of hillbilly musicians, they cut a track called That's All Right which literally changed the world.

By some unwitting sorcery, they had blended black styles with country music, bashed it about and let the kid get jumping like a madman. The sound was like no other. So they tried the same trick again - the very next day came a goosed up transformation of the bluegrass number Blue Moon Of Kentucky. After that there were Good Rockin' Tonight and Mystery Train and maybe a dozen more. These 'Sun Sessions' stand as rock'n'roll's blueprint. They were Elvis Presley's first announcement to the world and they kicked off the biggest cultural upheaval of the 20th century.

This [2004] being the 50th anniversary of those recordings, the city of Memphis and the custodians of the Presley legacy are keen to bang the gong on their boy's behalf and who can blame them? You really need to own the Sun Sessions in some shape or form.

It took entire generations of people to bring about this moment - migrant populations, black and white, all rural and poor, converging on the crucible of Memphis in the Mississippi Delta with their respective centuries of folk history. Add the novel ingredient of radio waves that crossed the tracks that separated those populations and, suddenly, something like Elvis was just about conceivable. But in the last analysis, it was still about something inexplicable - not sociology, but magic.

You'll love the O Brother Where Art Thou? world that Elvis still carried within him. A time of sharecroppers' dungarees and cattle barons' Stetsons, of bluesmen with poetic names like Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup (whom he adored, the author of That's All Right); and the corny humour of country & western song titles: I Forgot To Remember To Forget Her and I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone.

These cherished sessions have been sifted and re-compiled often. The half-dozen most exciting songs are amazing, and if aliens were to find them in the smoking ruins of an obliterated planet, they would have sufficient to clone rock'n'roll all over again. But the core Sun sessions comprise about 16 songs, plus alternate versions, and they aren't all vital. The lachrymose ballads, chiefly Harbor Lights and I Love You Because, are only interesting as evidence of Presley's earliest style, before the muse of the blues arrived to possess him.

Of course you could question whether That's All Right really was the first rock'n'roll record. There are earlier R&B tracks that seem equally entitled. Even Bill Haley, though rather unglamorous, was attempting a blues-hillbilly crossover and so, perhaps, were many anonymous backwoods acts that are lost to posterity. But this debate is only fascinating to geeky male rock types like me. For now let's celebrate the Sun sessions in their own right - as some of the sexiest, most electrifying music ever made.

And so to the DVDs that are being reissued as part of the same extravaganza. By far the more important is 'Elvis: 68 Comeback Special Deluxe Edition'. What that unwieldy title portends is a triple disc set of genuine importance. As well as the NBC TV Special that revived Elvis's career, there are the four live shows he recorded in its making and numerous outtakes of the studio routines the programme also included.

The TV Special followed long years of mediocre music by Elvis, a lot of very bad movies and no live appearances at all. Meanwhile a new generation had arisen, including Dylan, The Beatles and the Stones. Presley was all but forgotten as a musical force. It would be fair to say that nobody with any claim to taste took him seriously any more.

Yet here he was. Back and magnificent. In hippified 1968 he was the last man alive to wear his hair combed back - everyone else had obeyed The Beatles and let it flop. But Elvis Unbound was an act of macho defiance. Let the rest of the world be overrun by feminised fops like Jagger, here was the real King - dressed from head to toe in mythically charged, kaftan-trashing black leather. His marble-smooth visage, still as beautiful as any Greek god's, was framed by a quiff and sideburns blacker than his manager's heart. 'If you're lookin' for trouble,' his opening close-up went, 'look right in my face.'

For most of the show he is filmed in a kind of surrogate boxing ring, either seated with his musical buddies in a circle, playing acoustically, with adoring women huddled around, or else standing upright in the same arena, with a bigger audience and the backing band kept off screen. In the latter numbers he is like a lone prize fighter, doing battle with an invisible opponent - his own legend, perhaps.

The 'sit down' set has Elvis in self-mocking mode - he pretends his sneering lip has got stuck and drawls, 'I got news for you baby, I did 29 movies like that.' Then he locks eyes with old pals Scotty Moore and DJ Fontana, thrumming the deepest, swampy rhythms of rock'n'roll's sub-conscious, and the sound is fierce and righteous. He never has enough patience for the programme makers' script. He tries a spiel about his supposed respect for the 'new' music, speaking with heavy-lidded apathy of 'uh, The Beedles, The Beards...' before trailing off.

The girls giggle and sigh. They are themselves a phenomenon. In shades of lime and orange they emit the electric crackle of sexual tension and man-made fibres.

Filmed across a couple of days in late June, the assembled show was compiled from these in-the-round appearances and a batch of studio 'production numbers'. Such numbers were a staple of TV entertainment in those days - the star would croon a song of some thematic significance; hurtling all about were the bodies of a dancing troupe, in bell bottoms or mini skirts; two-dimensional scenery would wobble in time to their efforts. The Elvis show obeyed these conventions, but just for once there seemed to be a commitment - certainly not at the insistence of Colonel Tom Parker - that the job be done with intelligence and quality. The numbers now look dated, to be sure, but they're stylish enough and more than just nostalgic kitsch.

One sequence is gospel based, attaining a climax in the Leiber & Stoller song Saved - the not entirely serious testimony of a redeemed sinner who 'used to smoke and drink and dance the hootchy koo'. Another set casts Presley as a wandering guitar picker, whose adventures take him into a bordello of girls who most certainly smoke and drink and,- it is to be feared, really do dance the hootchy koo. At length he finds his tart with the heart of gold and must needs have fisticuffs with her lord and master - cue a great Elvis tune of that period, Big Boss Man ('You ain't so big/You just tall, that's all').

Six months after taping the show Elvis returned to make his first records in Memphis since the Sun sessions. Splendid tracks like In The Ghetto suggested his rejuvenation was complete. But nothing much materialised after that. Colonel Parker turned Presley's new found status into a Vegas gambling chip, and his final years were spent in gentle decline. The other reissued DVD, 'Aloha From Hawaii Deluxe Edition' is from 1973, when Elvis was expanding into the chubby, helmet haired, spangled white suit man beloved of Elvis impersonators.

At the Hawaii concerts he is still a powerful figure, but the songs are mostly other men's property - Sinatra's My Way, The Beatles' Something - or else they're obligatory nods to his past that now sound drained of joy. If I could salvage just one track it would be Hank Williams' I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry - 'the saddest song I ever heard,' he tells the sun-tanned tourist audience. And he's suddenly a lost boy, all the way from Memphis, and a mighty long way down rock'n'roll. Within five years, Elvis would leave the building for good.

*************

The 1968 Comeback Special

There were many sightings of Elvis Presley after his death in 1977. He was known to favour burger joints, of course. In the gambling halls of Las Vegas, he'd barely merit a second glance. There was even a report in the Sunday Sport, on 9 October 1988, that he was secretly working as a fishmonger in Middlesex (the shop's speciality, apparently, was 'hound dog fish'). But the most miraculous apparition of all was on 3 December, 1968. Witnessed by millions of citizens across America, the event was Elvis's legendary TV special, broadcast at ten past nine that evening. And it was the mother of all comebacks.

While it's true the King was not technically deceased in 1968, his career was definitely looking poorly. So far as a new generation was concerned, Elvis might as well be dead. At 33 - which was extremely old for a pop star in those days - he was no longer the rock'n'roll god who had transformed music in the 1950s. The British Invasion had toppled him from his throne, and now America was grooving to newer sounds that ranged from Motown soul to West Coast psychedelia. Meanwhile in Las Vegas, the crowds were being wowed by one Tom Jones, a hip-grinding sexual timebomb from somewhere called South Wales. Elvis's hits, once automatic, were tailing off. He'd done no TV work for years. If Presley was famous for anything any more, it was for starring in movies of steadily mounting ghastliness (one of them, 1963's Fun In Acapulco, had him tackling a number entitled There's No Room To Rhumba In A Sports Car). It was all a melancholy contrast to the halcyon days of Jailhouse Rock and Heartbreak Hotel. The King's remoteness from his subjects was underlined by one stark fact: since March of 1961, he had not made a single stage appearance.

But now, at last, Elvis sensed the need for a change. In April of '68 he'd caught a Tom Jones show, and watched it thoughtfully. At the same time, he'd begun to make singles that rocked again: Guitar Man, US Male, Big Boss Man. His next film, Charro, would cast him as a stubbled anti-hero, in the style of Clint Eastwood and the new spaghetti westerns ('I'm tired,' he explained, 'of playing a guy who would be in a fight and start singing to the guy he was beating up'). Simply by recognising that he had an image problem, he took the first step towards rectifying it. When his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, negotiated a TV special with the NBC network, everybody knew there was much ground to be recovered. Filmed in the summer of '68, the show would go on air in early December, sponsored by the good folks at Singer Sewing Machines. There would be a spin-off album too. The key question was, What form would the show take? What would it take to resuscitate the Elvis legend?

True to his show business instincts, the Colonel's idea was for an old-time Christmas extravaganza, with Elvis singing Silent Night. Why, there would probably be log fires involved. But NBC put up a young director called Steve Binder, soft-spoken and persuasive, who knew that something hipper was required. Despite the Colonel's scepticism, Binder's will prevailed and calls were placed to Scotty Moore and DJ Fontana, guitarist and drummer on Presley's hard rock hits from the golden age. 'For two straight months,' noted his wife Priscilla, 'Elvis worked harder than on all his movies combined. It was the most important event in his life.' He went on a diet. He worked out. And then he tried on a skin-tight black leather suit, in the style of The Doors' Jim Morrison. This would be the King of Rock, returning from Squaresville to claim his crown. In late June, sessions with a live audience were booked at the NBC studios in Burbank, California.

The time was right for a comeback, as Binder correctly guessed. After the psychedelic high of 1967's Summer of Love, rock was moving back to its roots. The baby boom generation was growing nostalgic, and a spirit of revivalism was evident everywhere: old warhorses like Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis were being booked for outdoor festivals; The Band and Creedence Clearwater Revival caught the back-to-basics spirit of the times; soon the Woodstock multitudes would be jiving to Sha-Na-Na, while in London The Beatles were singing Get Back. Who better to capitalise on the new zeitgeist than rock'n'roll's forgotten figurehead, Elvis Presley himself? But even the King needed coaxing. The turning point came one afternoon in LA, when Binder took his wary superstar out on to Sunset Boulevard. He'd bet Elvis that the passers-by would not remember who he was. 'So we did it,' the director recalled. 'We stood there to the point of embarrassment. Kids were bumping into us and saying 'Excuse me' or not even saying that. Elvis started talking louder than normal, trying to be recognised... But nothing happened. Zero.'

The TV Special, then, pushed precisely the right buttons. From its opening shots, Presley looked magnificent: sideburns restored to 1950s splendour, hair dyed black as night, his meanest sneer rehabilitated. He was the greasy hoodlum of his pre-GI days, grown even more handsome. 'Cuz I'm ee-ee-ee-vil,' he snarled into the camera. ' Mah middle name is Misery!' Suddenly he was not the grinning goofball of a dozen forgettable movies. He was the god of rock'n'roll all over again. Prime-time television had never seen anything like it. A version of Guitar Man followed, with Elvis backed by the silhouettes of a hundred shape-throwing guitar-players. It was a ruse to remind us who'd invented all this stuff in the first place, and to send the upstart long-hairs running for cover. Let them remember: Elvis was the creator. They were merely his creatures.

Then there came the show's most emblematic image of all. Binder's inspired idea was to stage some parts of the show in a mocked-up boxing ring. Elvis and a few musicians sat around it, with the audience gathering at their feet. The image was of a prize fighter, ready for anyone. But it worked on many levels. It showed Elvis at one with his fans once more: dreamy-eyed young women were of course to the fore, dressed in a riot of lime and orange polyester. And it was, above all, a kind of Elvis Unplugged - with just a few acoustic guitars and basic percussion, Presley and his boys would cook up the primitive country blues of his Sun label sessions in Memphis, a decade before. To his left sat Scotty Moore, the hillbilly guitar-picker on those historic recordings, whose train-track rhythms and ripped-up riffs had merged with the singer's instinctively sexy phrasing, resulting in the first pure rock'n'roll music ever heard. If something so magically inexplicable had occurred back then in Memphis, why not now, here in Burbank, with the TV cameras rolling?

And, in a way, magic did take place again. With a sultry drawl of 'Oh, get dirty, baby!' Elvis The Pelvis rediscovered his potent mix of sex and danger. The black leather outfit evoked a glamorised notion of the 1950s; it was not historically accurate but it dripped with Heroic Mythology. And the music was a revelation. Galvanised by the stripped-down format of his hand-picked band of good ol' boys, Elvis rocked with a vengeance. An insolent smirk on his face, he rode the rhythms, moaned and grunted, took the beat back into the depths of the Mississippi backwoods and dazzled his adoring audience with an intoxicating assault of titilating savagery. 'It's been a long time, baby!' came his exultant verdict at the end of All Shook Up, when the crowd's applause appeared to re-awaken some long-dormant joy inside him.

Like Sam Philips at Sun, Binder located the inner Elvis: not the dull-eyed Momma's boy but the pure animal rocker. A more obvious way of updating Elvis, in 1968, would have been to position him as a weekend hippy (perhaps with matching flowered shirt and tie) as many MOR celebrities were then attempting to do. But while the Colonel fretted about his boy destroying a hard-won place in the hearts of Middle America, the TV Special was actually re-creating Elvis as something greater than a mere entertainer - he was becoming, in fact, the first true icon of rock'n'roll. And it succeeded so well because Presley was operating once more on the level of pure instinct.

Which was just as well, since his mind was all over the shop. A team of writers had laboured long to prepare a complete script for the star, down to his last ad-lib. But Elvis was so paralysed by nerves that he couldn't recollect a single word he was supposed to say. Shots were taken and re-taken as he goofed and stumbled over his lines, until the show's overseers realised they should just go with the flow. They'd equipped him, at one point, with an earnest speech expressing his keen appreciation of the exciting changes in popular music. But it came out mangled. 'I, uh, like a lot of the new groups,' he mumbled, with patent insincerity. 'The Beatles,' (who, far from being 'new', were on their last legs by this time); 'The Byrds,' (which, either satirically or accidentally, he pronounced 'The Beards') before drying up again. But he went on to make the worthwhile observation that all rock music was born out of rhythm and blues: then he played a gospel-flavoured sequence of songs, like those he'd picked up as a teenager on the black radio stations of Memphis.

Presley's reverent acknowledgement of black music was not without significance. He was after all Southern redneck royalty. He was a white-trash son of Dixie, from the town where Martin Luther King had just been assassinated (swiftly followed, in LA, by Robert Kennedy). That summer, the nation's race relations were at boiling point, and the message would not have been lost on America's mainstream viewers. Presley was nobody's idea of a campaigning radical, but he was, at least, profoundly colour-blind.

On a less exalted level, there had always been a streak of self-mockery in Presley's act, even in the dynamic live performances of his early career. It was a trick he revived to winning effect here, fooling about with the soothing endearments of Love Me Tender ('You have made my life... a wreck') and subverting Are You Lonesome Tonight by pointing to his curled-lip sneer as if it were a physical affliction. In years to come this taste for parody would be the undoing of his onstage reputation, but for now it seemed seductive in its humility, and admirable in its freedom from pomposity.

The remainder of the TV Special obeyed the conventions of its day. There were elaborately constructed dance routines featuring winsome youths in tight bell-bottoms and exuberant leggy lovelies in mini-skirts. Binder had earlier conceived the show as a musical drama, with Elvis as a travelling guitar-slinger, passing through a sleazy neon world of strip joints and gambling dens. Conscious of the all-important ratings, NBC rejected that idea as too controversial. Instead, a vestige of the scheme remained in a sequence of songs, including Big Boss Man, It Hurts Me and Little Egypt, wherein Elvis does karate battle with dancing gangsters and smooches with their molls. The studio orchestra was giving its all: while the arrangements are mostly too close to cabaret, their full and bombastic style was another portent of the style Elvis would adopt in his stage shows of the '70s. He ends with a big production number. It wasn't a Christmas hymn, as the Colonel had wanted, but a specially-written finale called If I Can Dream: a vague statement of non-specific idealism that would leave everyone with a festive feelgood glow. Elvis sang it beautifully, without betraying the slightest sign that he knew or cared what he was singing about.

On transmission night, Elvis sat and watched the show in his Graceland home. He was quiet and tense at first, but took the phone calls of congratulation afterwards and knew he was back. The spin-off album went Top 10: initially called the Elvis NBC TV Special, it was later renamed the '68 Comeback Special, so symbolic had the broadcast become. Better still, the single If I Can Dream became a hit in the New Year of 1969 - his biggest success since 1965. Events acquired a new momentum. Barely a month after the show, Elvis entered a Memphis recording studio for his first home-town sessions since the Sun era. There, at the HQ of producer Chips Moman, he joined a crack assortment of musicians who had proved their worth on '60s soul classics by everyone from Wilson Pickett to Bobby Womack. Songs were considered from anyone who sounded good enough, not just from those who'd cut an acceptable deal with the Colonel. Over the weeks that followed, Elvis made some of the greatest music of his life: Suspicious Minds became his first Number 1 since 1962. Another new song, In the Ghetto, was perhaps the most ambitious he ever attempted - and he was rewarded with another best-seller. The sessions of early 1969 gave him two more successful LPs, From Elvis In Memphis and From Memphis To Vegas, both distinguished by a funky, updated R&B style as credible as anything being cut by his younger rivals.

The great puzzle of Elvis Presley's 1968 Comeback is that it was in one respect a false dawn. Commercially it revitalised him, helping him become the top-dollar live attraction of his last years. But creatively it was his last attempt to explore the cutting edge. The TV show and the Memphis sessions won him the admiration of hip reviewers who welcomed him back like a prodigal father. Had Elvis chosen the rock route, the Woodstock Nation would have been his for the taking. Instead, he turned to Las Vegas. Colonel Tom Parker was an old-school impresario who doubted whether rock'n'roll would last. Nor was he a fan of the hippie counter-culture: he would not be booking his boy on double headers with The Grateful Dead. There would be no more rockabilly, either: the loyal Scotty Moore, who'd discussed a European tour with Elvis, never heard from him again. Nor did Presley ever return to Chips Moman's studio.

For better or worse, the TV Special encouraged Elvis and the Colonel to look beyond both rock and Hollywood. From now on he aimed to be the world's greatest entertainer. With his self-belief restored, he played Las Vegas and elsewhere, wrapped in costumes of regal extravagance, his sound as bloated as he was. The rock'n'roll Elvis, so briefly revived, had finally left the building. Fat Elvis had arrived.

High Society: Sinatra meets "my Auntie Gracie"

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

A movie review for WORD of High Society, the brilliant Cole Porter musical. Includes some highly tenuous genealogical information, too.

I'll never forget the day I learned I was related to Princess Grace of Monaco. Unluckily, as my mother went on to explain, our link was not to the crowned heads of Europe but through some shared roots in the peasantry of County Mayo. In the time-honoured way, Grace Kelly's branch of the family had emigrated to America and become rich, while mine sailed to Liverpool and grew even poorer. Nevertheless I've kept a benevolent interest in her work. To you, she may be the unattainable Ice Goddess of Hollywood. But for me she'll always be plain old Auntie Gracie.

High Society is not her greatest film but it might be her most enjoyable. A romantic comedy, the story first saw light of night as a Broadway play and became that proverbially sophisticated movie The Philadelphia Story. The 1956 remake lacks the absolute class of its predecessor but, on the other hand, it has the magnificent music of Cole Porter, whose songs make this a contender for the greatest musical ever. Grace Kelly's role as the heiress Tracy Lord had been intended for Elizabeth Taylor, who proved unavailable. It's impossible now to conceive it without her. In real life Grace had just become betrothed to Prince Rainier of Monaco. On film she wore her actual engagement ring - which, in the DVD documentary, her droll co-star Celeste Holm describes as 'a skating rink'.

This time The Philadelphia Story is re-located to the millionaires' playground of Newport, Rhode Island. Its backdrop is the local jazz festival, which permits the inclusion of Louis Armstrong and his band. As the house-guests of a suave songwriter Dexter (Bing Crosby) they provide a swinging commentary on the developing plot: 'The silly chick is gonna marry a square!' Dexter is a wisecracking rascal, whilst his ex-wife Tracy is a frigid snob. Now that Tracy is about to marry the drippy George (John Lund) their estrangement looks complete. Into this situation walk Mike and Liz (Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm), a writer and photographer from a gossipy New York magazine called Spy ('it rhymes with lie').

Scrapes and japes ensue. But they are as nothing to the songs of Cole Porter. There isn't a weak one among them. The best-known are probably Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (Holm and Sinatra ogle Rhode Island's opulence: 'Do I want a yacht? Oh, how I do not!') and True Love (Bing serenading Grace on a twilit cruise). That's not to mention the summit meeting of the era's two pre-eminent male vocalists, Crosby and Sinatra's Well Did You Evah?: I used to think its lyric was strangely surreal for this pre-psychedelic period ('Have you heard, it's in the stars, next July we collide with Mars') until I discovered it's sung by a couple of pie-eyed drunks. Greater yet is Bing's guest spot with Louis Armstrong's legendary ensemble on Now You Has Jazz, especially in its exquisitely hip presentation of each band member: 'some shimmering sharps and flats'.

In fact, while it may be 'Frank's world and we just live in it' as the posters say in Little Italy, this is actually Bing's film and Frank only co-stars in it. The senior singer's sleepy croon is key to High Society; Sinatra supports the one male singer he ever deferred to. Though I've revered Sinatra all my life I'm a recent convert to the subtler charm of Crosby, helped enormously by the CD A Centennial Anthology Of His Decca Recordings. To savour the whole cast's response to Cole Porter's genius, I'd recommend the High Society soundtrack album.

As for the film it can - like A Hard Day's Night - feel a bit stilted until the songs come along and lift it to the heavens. Yet you'll relish its timeless dialogue: 'One of the servants has been at the sherry again'; 'Isn't it time for your milk and arsenic, darling?'; 'You know how I feel about my grandmother, but I'd sell her for a drink'.

High Society is rich entertainment of a kind no longer made. Nobody in it goes around being 'dark' or 'edgy'. Everyone is clever and well-dressed and not really wicked; the tone is grown-up. It's also escapist, �litist and soothing (though stimulating in its wit). In that sense it's everything that modern cinema set out to abolish - and successfully. Films like this will eventually get made again, but possibly not in our lifetimes.

As for my imaginary Auntie Gracie, this was her last movie. On the day that High Society was having its gala premiere in Hollywood, Miss Kelly was sailing into Monte Carlo harbour to become a real-life Princess. She remained for many years a beautiful woman but proved, in the end, an even worse driver than I am. She died on one of the hair-pin bends above the Principality in 1982. I drink to her memory each time I'm back in Mayo.

The Iditarod: Hell On Ice

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The Iditarod is an annual sled dog race in Alaska. It's an appalling challenge for both the animals and the humans. In Manchester I met Max Hall, a Briton who entered the race and - only just - survived to tell the tale. This piece appeared in FHM in March 1997.

In this weather your spit turns to ice before it hits the ground. The locals say, 'It's cold enough to piss and lean on it.' And tonight Max Hall was in the middle of it, on a windblasted plateau in central Alaska. Marooned with his dwindling team of husky dogs he sought refuge in a ruined hut. Once inside, he stared grimly at his snowboots, knowing that his feet were encased in glass slippers of frozen sweat. Frostbite could not be far behind. It was, he says, 'the most miserable night of my life.'

The abandoned shack known as Don's Cabin was an unscheduled stop on Alaska's notorious Iditarod, the annual dog race that is reckoned among the toughest sports events in the world. The only British entrant, Max Hall doubted his own sanity as he fed the huskies in darkness and tried desperately to thaw his feet. 'At temperatures below -40,' he recalls, 'I found the sweat off my feet was forming a layer of ice inside the boot. I was aware that I had to deal with it and I spent all night in that cabin trying to light a fire and sort it out.' Only when daylight came could he see the futility of his efforts. Bears had wrecked the cabin during summer, ripping great holes in it. 'It was like a lettuce crate. I'd been trying to heat the whole of Alaska.

'You know you've frozen your feet. But you don't know how far it is to the next place where you can make a fire and deal with the problem. It's a gamble. Do you strip down to your bare flesh or do you carry on? If you strip down at those temperatures you've probably got less than a minute to deal with it. It's a big decision.'

Hall's horrific choice was typical of the Iditarod's dangers, and one of many moments when he thought his first race would be his last. That was in 1995. But this year he'll be back on the starting line for another go. The Iditarod's followers call it The Last Great Race On Earth, and it's addictive. 'It's like a fever,' Max confesses. 'You get sucked into this big black hole of wanting to be involved.' Every year it attracts about 60 qualified competitors - called mushers - who'll spend between 10 and 20 days driving their dogs across the most challenging landscape in North America. Named after a ghost town on its route, the Iditarod's 1160 miles follow the old sled trails of gold prospectors across mountains, snow plains and frozen rivers. There are few worse places on earth.

'The dogs will burn 8,000 calories per day,' he says. 'Before the race ends, the mushers will lose five or ten pounds in weight. Some will fall asleep on their sleds. Some will run into trees. Some will be blown over by the wind. Some will get lost. Some will get hurt. Some will get frostbite on their faces and hands. A few will fail to finish, and more than one will hallucinate on the trail and see swords falling from the sky, or trees turning into sharks' teeth. Yet all will tell you that running the Iditarod beats doing taxes.'

Merely to finish the Iditarod is a victory. The $50,000 prize money is almost always won by Alaskans, who have all year to train. For Max Hall, a businessman from the North of England, running the Iditarod can only be a part-time labour of love. Iditarod entrants have been described as 'just a bunch of weirdos looking at the south end of dogs going north.' But Hall had an unstoppable urge to join them ever since visiting Alaska in 1991.

His dream became a reality on 4 March, 1995, in the pandemonium of Start Day in downtown Anchorage: 'They close it down for the day. You've got 1200 dogs all barking their brains out with excitement. People who've spent the winter clearing snow from the streets of Anchorage suddenly have to bring snow in.' Hall and his 16 dogs shot off like a bullet from the .44 Magnum he carried in case of a showdown with hostile wildlife. (Teams of up to 20 dogs may pull the sleds, there must be minimum of five left at the end. Tired and sick dogs are dropped off at checkpoints along the way.) There was a near disaster as soon as he left the city limits. Hurtling down a snowy river bank to ride the ice, Hall found something jamming the footbrake of his sled - it was someone else's gun, dropped along the trail. 'The mind boggles if it had gone off. I nearly changed my trousers...'

At the Skwenta checkpoint came a taste of hazards to come. Fetching buckets of water from a hole in the river ice, he'd find the first bucket frozen solid by the time he got the second. He made do with melted snow.

Whatever hardships he faced, though, Hall's first concern had to be the dogs, who are the real athletes of an Iditarod. 'At the end of the day,' he says, 'dog care is the thing that everyone is interested in, and quite rightly, because the people have chosen to be there and do this, but the dogs have not had a choice.' Alaskan huskies, he explains, 'aren't a pure breed, but a bit of everything that happens to be passing the kennels - including wolf.' They're prodigiously hardy, sleeping under the snow if necessary, and highly intelligent. What's more, he adds, 'Their sole purpose in life is to run.'

His only way of controlling them was to shout commands. 'There are no reins, and your lead dog can be 70 feet away. 'Gee' is for right, 'Haw' means turn left. 'Woah' means stop - if you're lucky. The popular conception is that you say 'Mush' for go, which comes from the Canadian Mounties when they used to say 'Marchez'. But very few mushers actually say that. It's usually 'OK' or 'Let's go'. Mush is not a hard enough word for the dogs to relate to.'

Keeping the dogs fed and rested meant frequent delays, and strength-sapping labour for Hall when he was cold and exhausted himself. 'You need to get around 10,000 calories a day into each dog. They won't eat much in dogfood, so they're on beef, salmon, chicken, liver and beaver.' Dogfights were a constant danger. Max chose his own team for their placid temperaments, but any contact with a neighbouring team could flare up into war. And dogs in teams have their equivalent of the office romance: females in heat are a perpetual source of conflict.

Above all there was the cold. Given the windchill factor - when Arctic gales strip away the body's ambient heat - temperatures could hit -130�F. 'Dogs have a problem with getting frostbite on the testicles,' Hall frowns. 'That's something you've got to look out for. It may sound like Mrs Fifi's poodle, but there are conditions when you've got to put windproof jackets on them. You can usually get through the cold, but the wind will kill you.'

Mushers themselves depend on their endurance rather than brute strength. The Iditarod is frequently won by women. 'You don't have to be big and tough,' says Hall. 'I'm not, but I've got a lot of determination on my side, and you need an immense amount of willpower. There are many points along the route when you think, 'Enough's enough, forget it.' You need to cope with yourself in the wilderness, because that's the real beast of it. You need to build a strong relationship with the dogs. If you're stuck 300 miles in the middle of nowhere and you meet a moose in the middle of the trail, you'd better know what dog number 13's quirks are. And if you're going to cook a hot meal for 16 dogs on the Yukon River at 50� below zero, you'd better have your brain in gear, because you'll damage yourself. If you touch anything metal at those temperatures you'll just leave the skin behind. You have to think every move through, even a simple operation like changing your boots.'

The hardest part, for Max Hall, was sleep deprivation. He averaged one-and-a-half hours a night for 15 days. 'You fall asleep on the sled and you wake up by banging your head on a tree. The guys who win it can hardly be taking any sleep at all. At times it does cause you to hallucinate, I think any musher would tell you that. One guy reported seeing taxis going by in the opposite direction.' Other mushers speak of pausing to rest in imaginary cabins, or battling with a phantom animals. One remembers watching the horizon turn into a giant stick, coming to hit him. Another, more fortunate, gave a ride on his sled to a naked woman.

'My own hallucinations,' Max reports, 'were always from following the lead dog's bottom. Norway, his name was. You've got your headlight on in the night and you're zooming in for mile after mile on this dog's bottom. For me it would become a man, and the tail was his beard, and the patches on the dog became the man's eyes. I would see Norway's bottom disappearing into chasms. It wasn't happening, but in my mind I'd see big holes opening up in the ice and the dogs falling down. Then suddenly I'd jolt myself awake.'

The race sled is a light wooden frame, packed with gear, resting on ski-like plastic runners. Gripping his handlebar the musher stands perched at the back. In the Iditarod's roughest sections, says Hall, 'it's like riding a bucking bronco over a rollercoaster... The Dalzell Gorge is the one I feared the most, where you've been climbing for the first three days and suddenly you're dropping out of the Alaskan mountain range. The sled turned over and I lost loads of equipment, but there's nothing you can do because the dogs are pulling you down. Theoretically, the golden rule of dog mushing is Never Let Go. You hang on whatever.'

Animal attacks were another threat. Wolves and Arctic foxes, even bison, will watch but rarely intrude. Bears are normally in hibernation, but a polar bear did chase one musher over miles of sea ice: 'It put the fear of God up the next four or five teams who were coming through.' The commonest enemy is the moose, who likes the same trodden trail the teams are taking, out of deep snow. He will not move aside, and tramples the dogs if challenged. 'The law of Alaska says that if you shoot a big animal you have to gut it while the carcass is warm and take the meat to the nearest village. Consequently, if you see a moose on the trail you'll do anything to avoid confronting it - even walk a two mile radius around it. '

After Max's night of misery in Don's Cabin, his feet froze again on the 130-mile stretch that runs along the glacial surface of the Yukon River. The torrent still flows beneath, and 'bad ice' is every musher's nightmare. Hall relied on his team's sixth sense to preserve them from catastrophe. Now down to nine dogs, he reached a desolate stop named Shaktoolik: 'It's an Eskimo word meaning the place where the east wind blows. It must be the most godforsaken place on the surface of the earth and why anyone would choose to live there I can't imagine.' It's here that the Iditarod leaves the land mass of Alaska altogether, crossing 70 miles of sea ice - a place so treacherous, according to one author, that the native women are often widowed twice over by the age of 25. Of the crossing, Hall says simply, 'It's very bumpy. You'd expect it to freeze flat, but it's as if the waves have frozen solid in mid-wave.'

Back on land, Hall headed for the Iditarod's finish line in the remote town of Nome. He believed that the worst was behind him, but it was still to come. 'The last two days was probably the shittiest time. The last 77 miles, the weather really came in. On what should have been the last day I ended in a blizzard on top of the hills. Eventually the dogs just say enough is enough. They turn around and pile on top of each other for warmth, they just make a big bundle of dogs. And once they do that you may as well save your breath, you're not going to do anything with them.'

Trapped in total whiteout, Hall found shelter in a cabin already occupied by three fellow racers. Covered in snow, he knocked politely before coming in - a quaint act of courtesy that made the local newspaper. ('I can't believe he knocked,' his wife laughed later. 'That's so British! Anyone else would have flung the door open and fallen in.') Later that night he reached the final checkpoint, a place called Safety, just 22 miles from the finish line. Having averaged seven miles per hour through the previous fortnight, Hall assumed the final 22 miles would take him three hours. In fact they took him 36.

Under atrocious conditions, unable to see if he really was on the trail into Nome, or heading out across sea ice to Siberia on the nearby Russian coast, Hall was forced once more to obey his dogs. 'I spent two hours lying on what was in fact the main street of Nome, waiting for the blizzard to subside. You can't tell the dogs, 'Look, you're only two miles from the finish line after 1160 miles!' They don't digest it. And the guy who came in after me, he actually scratched, two miles from the finish.'

Finally, while Gerry & The Pacemakers sang 'You'll Never Walk Alone' through his Walkman earphones, Hall scraped the ice off his dogs' eyes (pulling 'ping-pong balls' off his own) and staggered into Nome during the coldest Idtitarod finish on record. He was 46th in a field of 48 survivors, but that did not diminish the warmth of his welcome: 'There is a feeling in Nome that they'll do their bit, and they all crawl out of the bars no matter what time of day or night. And it's very satisfying.' But then, he adds as an afterthought, 'It needs to be!'

There is a musher proverb: 'Life is boring after you run the Iditarod.' According to one contestant, 'You finish this race and you feel like you could spit in a tiger's eye.' Max Hall felt it too: 'You'll never be the same again after you've done it. It's made me put things into perspective. It gives you an immense feeling of self-esteem. The sensation of crossing that finishing line is just huge.

'A lot of people ask me, 'Why do you do it?' They'll say, 'Have a nice time over there. You must really enjoy it to spend all that time and money.' But the funny thing is, I don't enjoy it. To me, there's nothing enjoyable about sitting on the Yukon River at 50 below zero, cooking a meal for 16 dogs and freezing your bum off. A lot of the time I think, What on earth am I doing this for? And that's what I find difficult to explain. You've got to be odd to mush dogs in the first place. We're the oddest bunch of people you can put together.

'It needs a huge commitment. A guy I was talking to the other night said, 'Oh, I fancy doing that. Yes, I think I'll try that.' I just thought, You silly sod...'

Lemmy of Mot�rhead!

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Lemmy of Mot�rhead! A rock'n'roll institution. With his bourbon, cigs and outlaw aphorisms ('I much prefer to see my enemies coming, even if they are imaginary') he was like a piece of performance art. This is a fuller version of the interview that appeared in The Word in August 2006.

In silhouette against the hotel window sits a man with one leg on the table. He shakes back his long black hair and pulls a drag from his cigarette. A piratical figure he cuts, in his open black shirt, tight black pants and long black boots. Around him are his accoutrements: the bottles of Jack Daniel's and Coca-Cola, the glass of ice he'll scoop in handfuls, the Marlboros, the portable tape machine with a cassette of his new album.

I'm in a line of media people Lemmy must meet today. He sighs and proffers a brawny paw, then stares stoically out of the window, across Kensington Gardens to the Palace of Diana. To its gates are tied fresh flowers, left by devotees of her cult. Around the other corner is the site of Kensington Market, once a patchouli-scented trading post of the alternative culture, where the younger and fresher-faced Lemmy sold drugs. Today that building is a branch of PC World, which provokes our man, a non-computer owner, to one of his bleak assessments of human nature: 'The internet is probably the greatest gift to mankind ever, and what do we use it for? Child porn. That's humanity for you, man. They never let you down, do they?'

He speaks as you would hope from the voice of Mot�rhead: in a hoarse rumble and slurred growl. He lives in LA nowadays but his accent betrays the North-west of England and North Wales where he was raised. Born Ian Kilmister, he became Lemmy for no special reason; he took to saying it came from a habit of saying 'lemmy a fiver' but now denies it. He scuffled about in regional beat groups, including the fabulously-named Rocking Vicars, and became a minor hippy star on joining Hawkwind, makers of Silver Machine. They fired him over a drug bust, which is like being expelled from the Gestapo for cruelty. But he got his revenge by forming Mot�rhead, the loudest, fastest and frankly horriblest hard rock band of all time.

He is a bassman, a buccaneer and a bar-stool philosopher. (And ladies... he's single.) He is, in the end, superb company. Lemmy doesn't ask much of life beyond those simple accoutrements. In LA he lives in a modest two-room apartment. He shrugs. 'A pretty simple sort of geezer, really.'

What made you become a musician?

I always knew what I wanted to do. I used to watch the TV show Oh Boy!, Cliff Richard was the resident singer and he was immediately surrounded by all these birds screaming and tearing his clothes off. So I thought, 'That's the fucking job for me!' And his gimmick then was that he never smiled, doing the moody Elvis thing. But you couldn't stop the cunt smiling now with a crowbar, could you? I used to trek up to Liverpool and see The Beatles at the Cavern. But Billy Fury was the first live show, another Scouser, in his silver lam� suit. That was a great bill, with Marty Wilde, Mike Sarne (Come Outside), Peter Jay & The Jaywalkers at the Llandudno Odeon. First record? Knee Deep In The Blues by Tommy Steele, on a 78 which my mother left outside in the sun one day. I had a couple of Elvis ones on 78. Ah, those dear, dead days.

Tell me about your early bands.

First band was truly awful, called The Sundowners, in Conway when I was living there, that didn't last very long. Then a band which rejoiced in the original name The DJs, we thought we were well flash, doing all the Shadows steps. Then I went up to Manchester and joined The Motown Sect, we played soul clubs just on the strength of our name. We used to turn up in striped jerseys with our harmonicas and long hair but it was too late, they'd booked us by then. Went down like a concrete parachute. Then I joined The Rocking Vickers, from Burnley originally but based in Blackpool when I joined them. Played Odeons, Locarnos, Nelson Imperial, Blackburn St George's Hall. We didn't know if it would last until next week.

Why did you leave for London?

Everybody does. Even The Beatles had to do that because it's where everything is. All the streets look the same when you first come down, all those rows of houses with pillars on the doors. The size was daunting, especially if you're from Colwyn Bay. But it was great, they really were the Swinging 60s. I was working for Hendrix, humping gear; did a few tours with him until they went back to the States. I was at all the sessions for Axis: Bold As Love. Jimi was the best, never seen anyone like him. Then I became a drug dealer in Kensington Market. It was a great place to sell dope, to pull chicks, get clothes you didn't get anywhere else, really cool. Hendrix gave me couple of buckskin jackets, but they didn't fit me exactly so I gave them away, like you do. I didn't know he was going to die, did I?

You joined Hawkwind, who eventually sacked you. But did you get off on the whole 'underground' era?

It was a great time. Drugs were the making of it, as well as its undoing. Everybody was doing acid. You could still trust the pills too. And the drugs were cheaper. But it's a dead scene now. People go, 'Oooh, we've got ecstasy'. I go, You poor cunt, you haven't got a clue. I fucking hate heroin, though. It's the only one I ever saw kill people. That and downers. I never saw anyone die on speed or coke or dope or acid. I still see Dave Brock, from Hawkwind. The drummer, who was instrumental in getting me thrown out, is now the Chief Executive in charge of Waste Disposal in Reading. So I didn't need to get my revenge on him, did I? When I went off and formed Mot�rhead, I just wanted to be the MC5, basically. But two of them bailed and we became the MC3. Us against the world, mate.

You were always the heavy band that punks could accept.

The punks loved us. The only reason we weren't in that lot was because we had long hair, so obviously we must be heavy metal. That was the thinking, but a lot of kids heard us without seeing a picture so they thought we were a punk band. Whatever. I always thought we had a lot more in common with The Damned that we did with Judas Priest. I used to love The Damned. The Captain! I went down to the Roxy to find out about the punk number and all these punks are sitting there with needles through everything and I walk in with me flares on. I'm at the bar and this voice behind me goes, 'Hawkwind. I used to sell acid at your shows' and it was Johnny Rotten. He used to sell acid at the Kings Cross Cinema, he had long hair and a big Army great-coat. There goes your street cred.

You've just finished your new album Kiss Of Death. Would this be a good time for ex-fans to come back to Mot�rhead's world?

If they'd had that singular lapse in judgement, I suppose it would be. We're one of the few bands that never let you down. We've been true right through. We had a good idea at the beginning and we didn't fuck with it too much, and I like that in us. A lot of bands get confused and change the plan and it's always fatal. And we'd have broken up if we'd stayed in England cos the interest here was zero. In America they'd never heard of us so we went over and had a go at them. And got a Grammy last year, so there you go. Actually we've never had a plan of any kind, we just played the music we like. We don't like people telling us what to do: 'Get your hair cut, it's out of fashion.' Fuck off! How does that sound? There's that much of the Northerner in me still. I don't like being told what to do by grotty Southerners: 'What the fuck do you know about it? You sit on your arse all day listening to opinion polls.' I just wanted to be the MC5 basically. But two of them bailed and we became the MC3. Us against the world, mate. I play bass but I'm still not normal, I just play what seems right and it's worked all right for 31 years. I like Paul McCartney but John Entwistle was the best for me: it's impossible what I saw him do. I met him in 1966 when the Vicars supported The Who on the South Pier in Blackpool. He was nice geezer then and until the day he dropped. He went out fairly well, I thought: five strippers and a quick heart attack. And in the Hard Rock Caf� in Vegas at that.

You must have a hell of a constitution.

I must have. I got checked over in Berlin two weeks ago and my doctor said I have the liver of a new-born baby. That's some justice, isn't it, eh? I'm sure everybody who's switched to fucking nut-cutlets is really pissed off by that. I don't do anything to keep in shape. I eat junk food, I drink all day, I still take speed. What the fuck. I think the secret is you find out which bits work for you, and then do only them. Don't fuck with the programme. Everybody I ever knew who went on heroin or downers then fucked up. They were asleep when the phone call came. I much prefer to see my enemies coming, even if they are imaginary. The main thing is not to lose your hair. Mine's on its way, at the back. But we have the technology. And you can always dye the motherfucker. It helps being skinny, too. How many good players are really gross now? Whole bands of them.

Why did you move to Los Angeles?

I moved to LA because it had stopped happening in London. We would have broke up before now if we'd stayed in England, cos the interest here was zero. In America they'd never heard of us so we went over and had a go at them. And got a Grammy last year, so there you go. I've been there 17 years now, half my Mot�rhead life. I was sick of London, I'd been in London since 1967, I was 44 and I thought, 'Fuck it, if I'm going to go anywhere I'd better go now'. I miss Britain, but only a bit. I don't miss the weather for a kick off. People say 'Oh I love England, it's so green.' I say, 'That's because it's under water half the fucking time, it's seaweed!' The only thing I really miss is the cheese, which they can't make in America to save their fucking lives, it's terrible. And they can't do Marmite so I take that home with me. I like LA, I've got good friends there. Everything's half price. And the chicks are cuter. They are! They wear much less clothing because of the torrid heat. So, any questions? Ha ha!

What is the lure of the road? Are girls still the incentive they used to be?

We're on the road seven months a year. That's where a band belongs. You have to prove that you can deliver on stage. You can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear in a studio, but you have to be able to whack it out on stage. You have to be able to murder an audience with one note. And luckily we've always been able to do that. I still enjoy it in the same way. I just love being up there showing off. Cos, let's get down to the basics, that's what we're all doing up there. 'Look at me!' The girls were always a big incentive, even if you get musicians going 'Oh, I have a message for the kids.' Well bollocks to that. I didn't have a message for the kids, except for the female kids, where my message was 'Come round backstage' y'know? We don't get a lot of women now in our crowd. It's mostly spotty oiks who want to be in a band like us. But we get a few occasional spin-offs.

Will there always be a Mot�rhead?

I see no reason to stop. If you enjoy it keep doing it. And anyway, we're filling a hole that no one else is going to fill. When we're gone there'll just be a hole. Regrets? Life's too short, man. It's where you're going not where you've been. I can't be bothered about what might have been. Fuck that shit.

Tell me about your sons, and your own father.

I see a lot of my kid now [the musician Paul Inder], he's 39, he lives in LA and works as a producer, he's all right. And the other one I never even saw, it was adopted at birth, very bad news, the mother was 15 at the time. My Dad left when I was three months old. Just as well: he was a fucking vicar! Though he did get thrown out the church. He didn't get in touch 'til I was 25, then he started getting a conscience, he started writing letters to my mother saying 'I feel bad about the boy'. He probably couldn't even remember me fucking name, 'the boy'. So I met him in a pizza place in Earls Court Road and he offered to pay for a course for me to become a commercial traveller. I said, 'It's a good thing the pizza hasn't arrived yet, it'd be your new fucking hat' and I walked out. I never saw him again. He's dead now. Him and my step-father died within six months of each other. I'm sure they had lots to talk about on their way up there, or down there. I'm going down there, because that's where all the pool tables are. You can't imagine any pool tables up there can you?

The Beatles at Shea Stadium

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The Beatles' first show at Shea Stadium remains a landmark in music history. I wrote this anniversary piece for the US magazine TV Guide. Paul McCartney helped with a few memories.

One warm summer evening in 1965, a helicopter took off from Manhattan and pointed itself at Queens. On board, the four biggest stars in the world peered towards their destination, the home of the New York Mets. Already sick with nerves, The Beatles suddenly knew they were headed for the wildest night of their lives. Forty years later the show they played that August 15 is legendary. Even today, Shea Stadium stands for the peak of that madness the world knew as Beatlemania.

Hysterical fans were the norm at Beatle shows by 1965. What was different at Shea was that the hysteria gripped the band as well. Captured on 12 TV cameras around the stage, The Beatles' performance was riot of panic and hilarity. While 55,600 fans screamed and cried, and 1300 New York police struggled to keep order, the four young men at the center of it all looked at one another and knew this was something they could not control, only enjoy.

At that point it was the biggest concert ever staged for a rock'n'roll act. (Yet its promoter, Sid Bernstein, spent not a cent in advertising - word of mouth ensured an instant sell-out.) When The Beatles' helicopter dropped them close to the Stadium, they had to be smuggled inside by an armoured Wells Fargo truck. George Harrison quipped: 'I didn't think Wells Fargo were still going; I thought the Indians had got them all years ago.' In the changing room they were fascinated by the exotic names on the players' hangers. But when they changed into their mod stage costumes, beige epaulette jackets with toy sheriff badges, Paul McCartney says they became 'the four-headed monster'.

It took a manic sprint to reach the stage, erected at second base, where they were introduced by Ed Sullivan, whose company was co-producing the TV special. But already the noise was deafening. 'We were playing through the baseball speakers,' remembers Paul, 'and you couldn't hear a thing with the screaming - those 56,000 sea-gulls.' In vain they tried to re-tune their guitars. Not even the custom built Vox amplifiers - primitive by today's standards - could prevail in that steaming cauldron of teen passion. And how many of those screaming girls fantasised about marrying a Beatle? Actually, two of those present achieved exactly that - Barbara Bach became the future Mrs Ringo Starr and Linda Eastman the eventual Mrs McCartney.

In collar and tie, chewing impassively, The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein looked on. He knew he was witnessing the highest grossing rock show so far ($304,000). Perhaps he also sensed that his life would never get better than this. But up on stage his beloved 'boys' were not thinking of anything. They bashed their way through 12 songs including the title track of their movie 'Help!' premiered in London two weeks previously. Throughout Paul's new rock number 'I'm Down' he watched John Lennon weep with laughter as he played the keyboard with his elbow. Neither they nor the audience could hear the difference. It was, says, Paul, 'like being in a washing machine.'

But the band survived and were conjured back to their lair on the 33rd floor of New York's Warwick Hotel. Still besieged by fans their guests included Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones. Security prevented The Beatles accepting an invitation to visit Frank Sinatra, while Frank declined to drop by the Warwick. All that remained, on their return to England, was a two-day stint in a TV studio. Here The Beatles viewed the Shea footage, winced at their chaotic playing, and overdubbed some vocals and instrumental parts.

The TV special did not air in America until screened by ABC on January 10, 1967. It was already the document of a vanished age. Disillusioned by touring, The Beatles had played their last ever public show on August 29, 1966, in San Francisco's Candlestick Park. (Strangely, a return visit to Shea Stadium six days earlier had failed to sell out.) The band had decided to concentrate on recording and now turned their thoughts to the masterpiece that became 'Sgt, Pepper'. Lost and lonely in this new routine, Brian Epstein died of a drug overdose in August.

Yet if Shea Stadium was the beginning of the end for The Beatles as live performers, it was the dawning of a new era for rock music. After Shea, vast outdoor shows would become the superstar standard, as rivals like The Rolling Stones took up the baton The Beatles had dropped. Amplification and stagecraft advanced: new bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin took the rock gig to heights previously undreamt of. Consider this: John, Paul, George and Ringo took just two helpers out on the road. Modern acts like U2 take several hundred. But Shea 's importance will never be forgotten. It certainly haunted John Lennon. 'At Shea Stadium,' he once told Sid Bernstein, 'I saw the top of the mountain.'

The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan

Sun, 18 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Get Behind Me Satan, Jack and Meg's 2005 album, as reviewed for WORD in July of that year.

The White Stripes caught the mass imagination a couple of years ago, about the same time as a rash of guitar bands such as The Strokes, The Hives, The Vines, The Pills, The Bills, The Fillers and so on. Or whatever the rest were called. But this was just coincidence, because The White Stripes are something different and more interesting. The White Stripes carry inside them the DNA of the blues, like an ancient crawling king snake, slithering down the ages from the Mississippi mud. And like a snake they swallow quarry far bigger than themselves. There's a moment on the new record where they gobble up Led Zeppelin whole.

The Detroit duo of Jack and Meg White stay true to their minimalist ethos on Get Behind Me Satan. There's the barest of instrumentation, usually just her drumming and his guitar (not even electric, very often) or piano. But still they come on sonically like a seven nation army. Jack White's lyrics, likewise, haul an awful lot of freight. His songs are stuffed with lyrics that nag at your mind like a toothache. He likes to announce a 'theme' to White Stripes albums, so where the last one, Elephant, addressed 'the death of the sweetheart', the new one concerns 'characters and the ideal of truth'.

What's for sure is the anxious throb behind these new White Stripes songs. The brash guitar opener Blue Orchid is sore with anger and hurt. The next song The Nurse depicts betrayal of trust, in a strange little horror tale of domestic murder - the jollity of tropical marimbas only makes it more sinister, and there is positive dread in the massive thunderclaps of Meg's drumming. She shares John Bonham's knowledge that drums are not just there to keep the beat, but also about the sheer bloody joy of hitting things very hard. Jack, for his part, sounds even more like Robert Plant than Robert Plant does now, whether on the full-tilt bombast of Red Rain or the folky My Doorbell and Ugly As I Seem which echo the acoustic rusticity of Led Zeppelin III.

Relationships are everywhere in trouble here and fill the singer with perplexity. On two songs he is in love with a ghost. On two songs he is the unrequited swain of Rita Hayworth. On two songs he implores the girl to love as unself-consciously as the birds and bees. On one of these, the epic Instinct Blues, he is conjuring the backwoods spirit of Son House or Blind Willie McTell, as he did on Ball And Biscuit - a slow, tortured blues that clanks its chains like a prisoner, and yet re-writes the light Cole Porter classic Let's Do It, Let's Fall In Love - insects, fish, chickens, all those simple creatures know how to mate, so why can't his girl 'get with it'? The problem, it's implied, is that we're human and doomed to choice. Nothing is simple. We can't make like the birds and bees after all.

Are these themes drawn from White's own life? I've no idea. He seems to be a thinking man, for sure, who likes to curl up with the occasional book of medieval Catholic theology. The songs of turbulent hearts may just be clever fictions, or drawn from experiences like his passing affair with Renee Zellweger. (She left him and married a country singer, which sounds like a story from a Jack White song.) It's possible he's already seen the dark side of celebrity - the song Take, Take, Take portrays a needy, whining Rita Hayworth fan who stalks the star with his escalating demands (an autograph, a picture, a lock of hair, a kiss). Like a lot on Get Behind Me Satan, it's rather creepy, a bit like Robert De Niro's character in The King Of Comedy.

Written on the spot, recorded simply and released within weeks, Get Behind Me Satan is pungent stuff - a rare combination of mental intelligence and physical swing. Jack and Meg, the make-believe brother-and-sister in their nursery colours, are charming and deadly, chaste and dirty, easy to like and still enigmatic. These are seldom happy songs, with their lovers who are 'hearing different songs' and the faint impression of somebody's bloodstains on the carpet. But it's as great a rock album as we'll hear all year.

Liverpool: The Hard Days Night Hotel

Sun, 18 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Liverpool's Beatle-themed hotel, the Hard Days Night, opened in February 2008. I stayed there as their guest for the inaugural weekend and wrote this report for the Observer on 10 February 2008.

Down in the bowels of Liverpool's latest hotel, in the residents' lounge that's punningly named Hari's Bar (as in George Harrison, you see), some of the city's modern musicians are getting 'bladdered'. If you blew a hole in the wall you could step into the neighbouring Cavern Club, where the Beatles learned their trade nearly 50 years ago. Today's contenders must learn to live with that intimidating legacy. 'Not only will you never be the best in the world,' a local pop star once lamented to me, 'you'll never even be the best in your home town.' This evening's revellers are putting a brave face on it anyway. Long after midnight an apologetic barman announces he has to close in five minutes. 'That's all right,' replies a prominent Scouse songwriter. 'Give us four million pints of lager, please.'

The Hard Days Night, which must have mislaid an apostrophe 's' since the 1964 song and movie of that name, is billed as the world's first Beatle-themed hotel. All its 110 rooms boast painted portraits of John, Paul. George or Ringo, while their nine-foot effigies perch like chirpy suicides on a high ledge outside. The building is a handsome old office block from 1884, Liverpool's Victorian prime as a port and commercial hub; the polished granite pillars speak poignantly of vanished prosperity. As a child I walked past often. At pavement level were City gents' shops, favoured by the Beatles' suave young manager Brian Epstein: a tailor, a barber's, a wine-merchant. But then they all closed down. On the corner is Mathew Street, where for years the Cavern stood derelict. My generation went to the punk club Eric's, right opposite, where we tried to forget the Fab Four had ever existed.

Fat chance. Thirty years later, 'She's Leaving Home' is fluting from the lobby speakers when I arrive on the hotel's opening day. Beatle music is piped continuously through the public rooms. Even so, the four-starred Hard Days Night is not so brash as you'd expect of a themed joint: subtract a few psychedelic wall-hangings and mop-topped figurines, and you find the d�cor in modern mainstream taste (blocky brown leather chairs, vast lampshades), designed around the 19th century stairwell. If anything jarred with me, it was finding a big, hairy John Lennon (Plastic Ono Band period) peering from my bedroom wall like a secular saint, tiny white doves of peace inside his irises. Sanctimony and Scouseness always warred in Lennon's soul, and here the former wins.

Pleasingly understated, however, is the ground-floor restaurant Blake's, named after Sir Peter, the pop artist who created 'Sgt. Pepper's album cover. Even the menus and cocktail lists display thematic restraint. You could sip a Honey Can't Buy Me Love, if you wished, or a Yellow Matter Custard (not, one trusts, 'dripping from a dead dog's eye' as the song, 'I Am The Walrus', actually continues); if you're abstaining, there is always a non-alcoholic Baby You Can Drive My Car. But that's about all.

In fact a few touches are so subtle as to verge on mysticism. The hotel logo represents George's dramatic guitar chord at the start of 'A Hard Day's Night'. I'm told it also symbolises the four lads' positions on stage. When I find a Gideon's Bible by my bed, I wonder if it's there for my spiritual comfort or as an arcane reference to verse 4 of 'Rocky Racoon'.

That's how it should be, as Liverpool is for many a genuine place of pilgrimage. The Beatle cognoscenti flock from all over the globe and doubtless many will now stay at the Hard Days Night. Their holiest shrine is the Cavern, next door, although the club is actually a careful replica of the long-demolished original. (But so is Shakespeare's Globe in London, come to that.) Indeed the hotel was first mooted by Cavern owners Bill Heckle and Dave Jones. A Liverpool teacher and taxi-driver respectively, they led the way in developing Beatle tourism by offering guided tours and an annual convention. When the hotel scheme grew too unwieldy for them to manage, they passed it over to an outside company, though they remain involved as consultants.

It's easy to be sniffy about Liverpool's dependence on the Beatles. Even as Europe's Capital of Culture, 2008, the city pins its hopes on personal appearances by Paul and Ringo to win the hearts, minds and headlines of a sceptical outside world. But needs must. Liverpool's economic collapse was so desperate that the city's inner busker was re-awakened. In the days of sailing ships the port grew sharp in the arts of entertaining strangers, with harlots and grog-shops and music on every corner. (There are moments, mostly on Saturday nights in club-land, when you might think little has changed.)

It took the murder of John Lennon, in 1980, to focus the civic mind. Suddenly, with five bullets fired in New York City, the Beatles were pitched into history. It was time to take stock of a phenomenon we'd grown up taking for granted. Simultaneously, it dawned on everyone that the port's decline was not just another business cycle; this slump was terminal, and it was taking the whole city down with it. Inside a year there were riots in Toxteth; Trotskyites took the Town Hall. It was always going to take more than memories of the Fab Four to stave off ruination. But faced by the scenes so memorably portrayed in Alan Bleasdale's 'Boys From The Blackstuff' Liverpool was up for anything that offered a whiff of regeneration.

From Tokyo and Rio, Idaho and Oslo, came the curious and nostalgic. The Cavern re-opened to welcome them, and Mathew Street sprouted souvenir shops and new pubs called things like Rubber Soul. Some of it was tacky but then came a proper museum, The Beatles Story, at the Albert Dock; Lennon and McCartney's childhood homes are now looked after by the National Trust. These are serious, almost scholarly destinations. Coaches ply the route from Strawberry Field to Penny Lane. And when you go home you can fly from John Lennon Airport, whose 'Imagine'-inspired motto is 'Above us only sky.' (Or, as an anxious passenger once said at the baggage carousel, 'Imagine no possessions.')

It's hardly over the top. Had The Beatles come from anywhere else (and America springs to mind), one could envisage Disney-styled extravaganzas, with Pepperland fantasy parks, mile-high Helter Skelters, real under-water Yellow Submarines... Liverpool limits itself to an amphibious vehicle from World War II - the Yellow Duckmarine, no less - trundling amiably from street to street. I once met a visiting delegation from Memphis, where Elvis, jazz and the blues are sold as full-on heritage experiences. They were amazed by our British diffidence when it came to marketing. 'Promoting Liverpool without The Beatles?' they cried. 'Are you guys crazy?'

Meanwhile at the Hard Days Night, it's a peaceful Sunday morning. Twelve hours ago the streets of the Cavern Quarter (a warren of neon-lit former warehouses) were one throbbing riot of roaring stag-night boys and shrieking, semi-naked hen parties. It's always like this. I don't think any of them actually plan to get married. Now on the skyline from my window I see these: two Cathedral towers, two Liver Birds, eleven construction cranes over the Duke of Westminster's new shopping centre, the Georgian Gambier Terrace where beatnik Beatles lived as teenagers, a silver ribbon of River Mersey and the distant misty mountains of Wales.

It's lovely, like L.S. Lowry under a John Constable sky. Yet last night it was a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. Liverpool is the city for magical transformations, a madly bi-polar, hospitable and exasperating place. The Hard Days Night Hotel sits snugly in its centre, close to the waterfront, the museums, galleries and all the rest of it. When I stayed, there were the teething troubles of a brand new business. Rooms were not quite ready. Staff seemed not to recognise 'Do Not Disturb' signs. Service at breakfast was performed by friendly amnesiacs, always pleased to attend you but strangely unaware they took your order 40 minutes ago. I rather supposed bacon and eggs might arrive together, but they came in stages, with a half-hour interval. Never mind. It will probably get sorted.

Lots of Liverpudlians came to see the new place. One man spluttered with shock when he heard the luxury 'John Lennon Suite' was �650 a night. Then again, there is a good old-fashioned Merseyside money-lender's shop across the road. Everyone else liked it but most remarked on the irony of opening just now, when Ringo is so unpopular with the locals. He really is in disgrace here, for seeming disloyal to Liverpool on the Jonathan Ross show, where he was promoting his rotten new single. 'Well, that Ringo,' said a philosophical fellow in Hari's Bar. 'He always was a dozy git, wasn't he?'

Paul Du Noyer's 'Liverpool: Wondrous Place' is published by Virgin Books

Live Music

Sun, 18 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

For their December 2007 issue THE WORD approached various musicians for their descriptions of playing live. By way of a preface, I was asked to sum the live experience up from an audience point of view. The following was written very much with that magazine's readership in mind. But it's pretty much a distillation of my own life, too.

It's the Marquee, Aylesbury Friars, the Retford Porterhouse, King Tut's Wah Wah Hut. It's the Cambridge Corn Exchange, Nottingham Rock City, the Hammersmith Odeon and Leicester De Montfort Hall. It's the Edinburgh Playhouse, Cardiff St David's and the Winter Gardens Margate.

It's a fog of fag-smoke. It's patchouli oil or the great smell of Brute. It's almost definitely dope and a little je ne sais quoifrom the Gents toilets. It's lager in plastic beakers and carpets that make a sucking sound. It's 'I reckon those two fancy us.' It's humiliation. It's the nervous public debut of those mail-order 'New Romantic' trousers (state size and colour, regret no refunds). It's a cigarette burn on the back of your best jacket. It's mosh-pits and the pogo and spitting - 'everyone does it now, we read it in Sounds' - and skins and rumours of a scuffle with someone's Barmy Army, and police dogs outside. It's the bouncer you knew at school, now on steroids and five times the size.

It's your name on the door, plus one, because your mate Dave was going to sort it with someone. Oh, except he hasn't...

It's the Fem-Soc and 'Boycott South Africa' posters of a Polytechnic Student Union; it's the plaster gilt goddesses of a former music hall; it's the Civic Centre where one-armed war veterans in peaked caps are policing 2,000 wet-knickered teenyboppers; it's a US-style Sports Arena And Conference Facility that looks like the very enemy of art. It's the back room of an Edwardian pub where men once drank on leave from the Western Front. It's the King George VI Memorial Park, some time after the tombola and Miss Lovely Legs pageant. It's rock'n'roll, man! But if wet it's inside the church hall.

It's 100 failed phone calls to a box-office, followed by a wallet-punishing success; then it's the oh-so-casual invitation: 'Yeah, got two tickets for that gig, fancy it?' It's why you first got onto e-Bay. It's ominous characters lurching from the shadows: 'buy-any-spares, buy-any-spares'; it's useless unofficial 'merch' sold outside the venue, and useless official 'merch' sold inside the venue. It's wondering yet again why you bought a tour programme full of nothing. It's going home on the Tube, trying not to crush the rolled-up tour poster that you will, in fact, treasure for the rest of your life. It's the two ticket stubs inside your self-adhesive photo album that will, in years to come, make your eyes fill up.

It's the busker who works the queue. It's the grotesque and unexplained delays, the fantasising about that unknowably glamorous world backstage. It's the last train that leaves before the headliners actually come on stage; it's wondering why nobody in charge ever gave a damn about that. It's asking 'Shall we see the support or have another pint?' It's replying 'The Melody Maker said they were shit anyway.' It's Newcastle Brown all along the bar and a geezer in a greatcoat going 'Rory Gallagher, man. Never lets you down. I bet you like that fucking disco crap don't you?' It's 'Wally!' and 'Play Freebird!' and the fair-haired hippy boy called Jesus, who makes everyone shout 'Give us Barrabas!'.

It's some farmer's field in Fuck-knows-where-shire, or Lord Snooty's ancestral pile. Bickershaw, 'Knobworth', Blackbushe: can anyone see Dylan? Make some stilts with beer-tins, then you'll get a view. Not too many. Whoah! Oh fuck! Is it broken? Does it hurt? It's the St John's Ambulance. It's amazing how cold it can get on a summer night, isn't it? Going home with sun-burn and frost-bite, who'd have thought it? See that geezer over there? I paid him ten quid for this and I don't feel any different. We're hoping the Hell's Angels won't be doing 'security' this time. It's loons on the lighting tower, a burger van on fire and a plastic bottle of piss that droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.

It's wishing you looked as confident as those worldly guys in their 20s. It's hoping you can get a baby-sitter. It's taking your grown-up children with you for the first time.

It's red lights winking in the darkness. Hubbub. Marshall stacks. Bass-bins. Goblins in black t-shirts getting busy. Hubbub subsides to a murmur. Man with beard and beer-gut at the microphone: 'Two-two, two-two.' Nearly ready now. Murmur gives way to expectant quiet. Must be starting soon. It's what these half a dozen paragraphs of nonsense are really about. It's being there, in the presence, in the same actual building. It's breathing the same air. To be here, now. To be at the gig. And I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Herbert Asbury's Gangs Of New York

Sun, 18 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Long before Scorsese's rather revisionist film, there was Herbert Asbury's book, The Gangs Of New York. This review was written for WORD, March 2003.

Naturally this edition of The Gangs Of New York has been published to coincide with Martin Scorsese's endlessly-awaited movie of the same name. But the original book has been lying around since 1928. Its author, Herbert Asbury, was an American newspaperman descended from the same distinguished family that named New Jersey's Asbury Park (as featured in the old Bruce Springsteen album title). Scorsese was one devotee of the cult of this book, and apparently yearned for most of his adult life to make a movie out of it.

You can see what must have appealed to him, even though the eventual film is largely a yarn about imaginary characters super-imposed upon the events that Asbury's book describes. Buried beneath the tarmac of downtown Manhattan, more lost to modern view than many remnants of the Roman Empire, are the streets of an old slum district called Five Points. Around this wretched intersection swarmed the ragged masses of early nineteenth century Irish immigrants, mired in poverty and perpetually at war with every other ethnic group around them. In their conflicts with the English and German settlers who had preceded them, and with the Italians, Jews and Chinese who came after, we find a feast of wonderfully horrid stories and memorably repulsive characters. Within this boiling cauldron of humanity, steeped in brutality and rank with official corruption, we detect the first drafts of New York mythology, so irresistible to Big Apple romantics down the decades.

Asbury himself was not taken in. Though he clearly delights in some of the sordid details, his book is sanguine about the various reprobates whose infamies he chronicles. From the earliest knockabout brawls, to the fearsome Anti-Draft Riots of 1863, to the rise of that systematic racketeering that we recognise from so many mobster legends, he records it all with a dispassionate eye, confining himself to a grim nod of satisfaction as each swaggering miscreant is felled by a policeman's billy-club or led in shackles to the scaffold.

It's a notoriously disorganised book, though, chiefly compiled from the cuttings files and light on historic context. The real enjoyment is in the litany of names, places and crimes. Who could fail to thrill to such sly customers such as Boiled Oysters Molloy, Dandy Johnny Dolan ('a street brawler of distinction') or Ludwig the Bloodsucker? The low-rise Manhattan of 160 years ago was, in its worst districts, a seething Dickensian warren, where people ate rats and rats ate people. Lords of its noxious alleyways were tribal goon-squads such as the Dead Rabbit Gang and the Plug Uglies. They were overseen by unscrupulous politicians who coaxed, inflamed and deployed the mobs to their own electoral advantage.

We see these tendencies at their worst in the Civil War protests that led to city-wide mayhem, when Irish rioters rampaged against the blacks. (The women were especially savage, pouring oil into the wounds of stricken Negroes before setting them alight and hanging them from lamp-posts.) Commerce shut down for the interim, notes Asbury, though 5,000 liquor stores stayed open for business. Final fatalities were upwards of 2,000, exceeding most actual battles of the War itself. But wily Democrat councillors, consolidating their power base, ensured that offenders escaped un-punished.

When peace returned, New York heavies diversified their interests. During labour strikes the gangs could be hired by unions or employers, or both, to enforce their respective positions. The gambling dens of Chinatown were another possibility. Music halls, gin palaces and bordellos were all good earners, not least the establishment known as Satan's Circus, where girls danced the can-can in a style described by Asbury as 'much more than rollicking'. Around this time, he reports, one Bishop Simpson 'made the startling and discouraging announcement that prostitutes were as numerous in New York as Methodists.' One feels sure that more care went into counting the prostitutes than the Methodists.

But let us take patriotic pride in the fact that Englishmen were not unknown in all this pandemonium. Among the more vicious criminals, Owney 'The Killer' Madden was in the lineage of earlier Limey psychos like Chelsea George, Cockney Ward and London Izzy Lazarus. Dives of ill-repute could also show a British influence in their names, such as the Windsor Palace or the House of Lords.

Herbert Asbury died in 1963, a very old man and by no means famous. He and his book deserve the posthumous spotlight conferred by Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio. Like the movie, this is certainly no masterpiece, but inside its fusty pages there surges that unruly life-force that makes New York the most exciting city on earth.

Sopranos Series 4: "The Cosy Nostra"

Sun, 18 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

opranos Series 4. The eminent crime family's continuing saga, as reviewed in WORD, January 2004.

You know what a bore it is when you've just murdered someone in the kitchen. The mess! The sheer inconvenience! That's when you're glad to know people - good people - who'll come around with mops, bin bags and, yes, a small hacksaw. With the help of his nephew Christopher, mob boss Tony Soprano will have the place ship-shape in no time. And the wiseguy who'd gotten Tony so upset? Rest assured he will soon be en route to a variety of resting places along the New Jersey shore.

Forty episodes in, it's a mark of The Sopranos' hold on some of us that its bloody world seems like a blessed refuge from the real one. The Cosy Nostra? Well, kind of. As Mafia drama goes it boasts some hugely likeable characters. It's true that folk are being slaughtered all the time, but as sentimental old Cockneys said of the Krays, they normally reserve that sort of behaviour for fellow wrong'uns. In our atomised lives, where families are falling to pieces, there's a perverse appeal in the Sopranos' clan mentality ('Trust only blood'). And as the series' creator David Chase points out, a part of us exults in the occasional display of righteous, if technically unlicensed, retribution.

According to Chase, the fourth season's shows are really about the marriage of Tony and Carmela Soprano. We see it come under strain as never before. Typically there are numerous reasons why, just as there would be in real life. Their two children are reaching maturity and see their parents' lives with new insight. When Anthony's teenage friends begin to coo and gasp about his Dad's underworld connections, we're reminded of Michael Corleone (Godfather references are never ducked in The Sopranos), a young man torn between normality and the atavistic pull of his background.

The series' famous 'therapy' strand has all but dwindled away. More than ever, Tony looks for conflict resolution the physical way. Chase describes the Mafia captains as men 'with limited impulse control'. Soprano is almost cuddly compared to some, but he is just as prone to volcanic eruptions of personal savagery. Trouble is, the world that Tony knows is broken. The next generation of hoods is too strung out on drugs. Women - wives and mistresses - are suddenly talking back. And we're post 9/11; American flags flap in suburban avenues; drunkards extemporise on bar stools: 'The World Trade Center? Yeah, Quasimodo predicted all that'.

So doubts multiply. Soprano is moved to wrath when one of his men torches a racehorse for the insurance, but he cannot the answer the underling's protest: 'I don't hear you complain when I bring you a nice fat envelope. You don't ask where that came from.' The only place Soprano looks on top of his game is his car, briefly alone with Pink Floyd or Derek & The Dominos - little reminders that, once and long ago, even Tony Soprano must have had hair and freedom.

He's no more articulate than most of the men around him. ('Heyyy!' 'Whadda fuck?' 'You breakin' my balls here?') But what The Sopranos did was find great actors, gift them with superb characters and then allow those characters to reveal themselves, by degrees, in a way that only literature and long-running TV shows can accommodate. In any case, command of language isn't the Soprano way; these people communicate most vividly when they're inchoate with rage or sly with fake indifference. As Chase says, 'One of my favourite things about this show is the lying that goes on.'

A DVD's audio commentaries are rarely worth the commitment of time required. But in this case they're essential. If I never hear another account of how 'amazingly close' a whole crew felt to one another it will be too soon. Instead, The Sopranos' commentaries deal primarily in the crafting of the shows. Nothing, it seems, will reach the screen without a round of prior discussions, several drafts and the input of the actors themselves. One of the key players, Michael Imperioli who plays the callow Christopher, is himself a regular writer. And David Chase, speaking over the closing Episode 13, does not spare the show from trenchant criticisms where he feels they got it wrong.

There are two more series of The Sopranos scheduled (and look out for Steve Buscemi in the next one). Right now I could do with another 200.

WORD'S VERDICT: A complex treat for the mind and eye alike. It's somehow too good for TV but perfect for DVD. Cancel a weekend for it. Kill anyone who argues.

Liverpool: "Reputation, reputation, reputation"

Sun, 18 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The web-magazine Liverpool Confidential asked me what I thought the outside world was thinking of Liverpool, as the Culture Year got under way. My report appeared on 19 February 2008.

You know the old song about 'our Liverpool home'? We've got the 'accent exceedingly rare', the cathedral to spare, and all of that stuff? Well, we've now got something else to add. We've got 'reputational issues'. Who says? The Financial Times says.

I love these new phrases. 'Reputational issues' sounds almost prestigious. Does Norwich have them? Apart from a little light mockery by Alan Partridge, it does not. London? Manchester? No. Not really. You'd have to look a long way before you found a city with reputational issues like Liverpool's reputational issues. Twenty years ago you might have said that Belfast, or possibly Glasgow, had their own share of notoriety. But they've both come a long way since then. In the eyes of the outside world, the Financial Times says, Liverpool is struggling.

Of course we all hope our Year of Culture will transform Liverpool's reputation. But the first few weeks of 2008 were not encouraging. Bloomberg News, the globally syndicated agency, began their report on the Capital of Culture's opening ceremony with a mention of the night's shootings in Croxteth. Listing the city's cultural attractions, they ended with this immortal pay-off: 'Just remember to bring your bullet-proof leg protectors.'

To be fair, Bloomberg's report was not completely damning. They were baffled by Liverpool's last two years of political in-fighting, and equally baffled by Ringo's new single. (And who could blame them on either score?) But their essential angle was echoed across the media: 'Liverpool year of culture gets off to a violent start,' ran the headline in the Independent on Sunday. That's human nature. Bad news jolts the brain in ways that good news doesn't. Shock is greater than awe. And every newspaper understands this.

This city carries bitter memories of media mistreatment, most infamously from The Sun. But it's hard to move on, isn't it, when you hear allegations of a TV crew trying to goad some scallies to provide juicy ASBO action on camera. And it's not only the media who take a perverse glee in negative spin. It was depressing enough to read about the burglaries from footballers' homes during away games; it was even worse to see those stories top the 'Most e-mailed' chart on the BBC News website.

We all know this problem exists. And I don't think I'm exaggerating when I call it a sort of displaced racism. In firms across the country there's a habit of sending 'Scouse joke' e-mails around. My wife, who is Irish-born and Liverpool-bred, finally snapped one day and posted her own response: 'Oh, I get it. You're not allowed to call me a thick Paddy any more, so now I'm a thieving Scouser instead.' I'm glad to say that a few of her London colleagues had the decency to be embarrassed.

Still, Liverpool has survived tougher challenges than this. It irritates me, because I know how cheap the taunts are. But I also know that it's not important and that the city will see off its detractors. We should also realise how many real friends we have across the world. (I've never met a musician, for example, who didn't speak highly of the Liverpool audience.) The fact is that few cities arouse any opinions, good or bad. And that's because few cities have any innate personality to speak of. People do respond to the idea of Liverpool; they sense it has a personality. And by and large they like it.

This city is different to other cities, in good ways and bad, and difference will always polarise opinions. Deep down, I think, Liverpudlians enjoy their city's 'exceptionalism'. We don't want to be just like Norwich. But standing out gets you noticed, and to be noticed is to risk attack. If that's the price of our city's individuality, I'd say it's worth paying. We should refute the lies that are told, but do it calmly and with confidence. Let us not seem shrill, defensive or thin-skinned.

Yes, it's a perplexing city. If you're not perplexed by Liverpool then you're probably not paying attention. It's full of life and life is messy. It continues to beguile and infuriate me. Throw your worst abuse at Liverpool and a part of me will acknowledge what you say. Nearly all the criticisms have a grain of truth. Yet no defence is too passionate. Even the most loyal of Scousers see the downside of the city and most of us, I'm sure, occasionally feel despair. I know I do. But life goes on and some things do get fixed. It's our responsibility to fix them, and our obligation to the generations after us. Because, in the end, the city out-lives us all.