Marcus Berkmann

Marcus Berkmann’s Berkmann’s Pop Miscellany is out in June.

The last taboo in pop: fat old men

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go on about Glastonbury. I wasn’t there, I never have been and, unless forced at gunpoint, I never will be. It has been a source of great comfort to discover that rock critics far more professional than I detest festivals as much as I do. My friend Andrew Mueller

All Together Now, by David Rowley – review

Too many Beatles books? In my house there’s always room for one more, and this week’s addition is All Together Now (Matador, £9.99), an ABC of Beatles’ songs by registered Fabs geek David Rowley. This is his third book on the subject, for like many repeat offenders, Rowley has spent more years writing about the

Chic’s Nile Rodgers on Daft Punk’s new single

Every new product, whatever it is, needs a bit of ‘buzz’, and indeed vast numbers of people around the world make a decent living trying to generate that ‘buzz’, while the rest of us spend much of our time trying to ignore it. Last week, though, much chatter was to be had in music-loving circles

‘Babble’, by Charles Saatchi

Once all our basic human needs have been met, and we can eat and we can sleep and we can live in comfort, what is next? The urge to express yourself in hardcovers might not be top of everybody’s list, but I suspect it’s near the top of Charles Saatchi’s. During a career of extraordinary

The brilliant fun of Bryan Ferry’s The Jazz Age

When you can do anything you like, what do you do? In Bryan Ferry’s case, the answer seems to be ‘make a 1920s instrumental jazz record out of some of my old songs’. I have to admit that the mere idea of The Jazz Age (BMG), which is credited to The Bryan Ferry Orchestra, appealed

Penguin Underground Lines – review

You don’t have to live in London to be faintly obsessed by the Tube, but it probably helps. At this point I should state my bona fides: born in Great Ormond Street Hospital (nearest station: Russell Square), babyhood in Marylebone (Bakerloo line, originally to be called ‘Lisson Grove’), grew up in Hampstead (deepest station on

Turned Out Nice Again, by Richard Mabey – review

We don’t have an extreme climate, says Richard Mabey in Turned Out Nice Again (Profile, £8.99). We don’t have tsunamis, active volcanoes, monsoons or Saharan duststorms. ‘What we really suffer from is a whimsical climate, and that can be tougher to cope with than knowing for sure you’re going to be under three feet of

Wish you were here

It’s just a guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the 60p first-class stamp has finally done for the postcard as a useful or desirable means of communication. Receiving one postal delivery a day instead of two didn’t help, but then postal authorities across the world ceased to treat postcards with respect a long time

Wielding the axe

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a bit sorry for Mike Harding. The long-serving host of BBC Radio 2’s ‘folk, roots and acoustic’ show was given the heave-ho last month, and the far-from-underemployed Mark Radcliffe took his place last week. One might ask what Harding had done wrong, and indeed Harding has been asking

The quiz biz

Come December, I often find myself writing a lot of quizzes. Not that I’m complaining: I love writing quizzes, and I really love being paid for writing quizzes. There’s a definite skill in crafting a decent question, and therefore considerable satisfaction in getting it right, tempered only by the unceasing fear of getting it completely

A choice of stocking-fillers

There can be few phrases in the language more debased than ‘Christmas gift book’. (Well, ‘friendly fire’, maybe, or ‘light entertainment’.) Needless to say, every writer worth his overdraft wants to do one, having already spent in his head all the lovely money he is going to earn from it. But you are essentially writing

The one who got away with it

The first track on Neil Young’s latest album lasts nearly 28 minutes, for while he usually has no problem starting, he sometimes struggles to finish. Some of the same prolixity characterises his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace (Viking, £14.75). No ghost writer has been allowed near this: it’s Young in all his ragged glory. The narrative

Golden oldies | 8 November 2012

Old blokes make records too; they just take their time over it. Graham Gouldman of 10cc has one out, his first for 11 years. Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra has two out, but they’re his first for 11 years too. Donald Fagen’s new one is his first for six years, but he may be

Hart-felt praise

‘I don’t profess this tome to be one of deep reflection or profound, serious thinking,’ writes Miranda Hart, which may or may not come as a surprise to her readers. ‘I am nowhere close to one of them French philosophers; I basically lollop through life like an amiable hound.’ If self-knowledge tends to be hard

Sweet serendipity

‘If you liked that, why not try this?’ Such tempting words, so hard to resist. I love the idea that some immeasurably complex computer algorithm, lovingly created by nerds, can sift through the teeming piles of new music out there and find something for me that I didn’t know I was going to like. One

Games over

It seems like only hours since they ended, but people have already written and published books about the Olympics, and I have already read one. Nicholas Lezard’s The Nolympics (Penguin, £7.99) was originally planned as a counterblast, a fusillade of righteous rage against what we all expected to be an administrative and sporting catastrophe that