fashion designers

Three years ago I wrote a book about Leonard Cohen and if you haven’t read it you really should, but first read this article I wrote about LC and religion for Aeon magazine.

“Intimidated”. Yes. Oh, yes, that’s good. Oh no, hang on, perhaps it’s pretentious. Actually, that may not be such a bad thing, according to Pat Long’s The History of the NME, another recent book that covers much the same ground as King’s, from a slightly different perspective. In it, Ian Penman stands his ground:

Phew.

I’ve never been a big fan of positive discrimination, mainly because it doesn’t work; inevitably it’s easier to base quotas on empirical criteria such as race or gender or disability, rather than things that are harder to quantify but no less real, such as socio-economic status class, there, I said it. But I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at the choice of acts for the gig marking the beginning of the Olympics. Leave aside for the moment the galumphing tedium of all the performers on the bill; Duran Duran were moderately amusing for a couple of albums in the early 80s, while the others (Paolo Nutini, the Stereophonics, Snow Patrol) have never even aspired to such lofty standards. That said, do we really think that London in 2012 is best represented by a dozen or so white men in their 30s, 40s and 50s, many of them playing guitars?

Obviously nobody wants blatant tokenism: I’m old enough to remember the line-up for the Band Aid single, with a few members of Shalamar and Kool & the Gang hovering around the edges. But for an event that aims to show off 21st-century Britain to the world, this is a bit embarrassing.

PS: In the Telegraph, Lucy Jones fumes.

To mark (roughly) the fifth anniversary of my book about OK Computer, here are some small children talking about one of the songs on the album. The funny thing is, I bet the various members of Radiohead were just like these middle-class wannabe rock hacks when they were smaller. Not such good dancers, though, obviously.