Shane Richmond

I read two very good but very different books in May. I still haven’t managed to finish my review of the second but I’ll add the link when it’s done.

Book 15: The Beautiful Game? by David Conn
Book 16: Darkmans by Nicola Barker

From David Conn in the Guardian comes a good article about what makes Barcelona such a great club: they are owned by their supporters.

Alfons Godall, Barcelona’s vice president, puts it perfectly: “We are free. We do not depend on a Mr Abramovich. We want to be successful but also to have meaning, social values. I am sure fans of Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal would like to be in our situation. But they have passed the point of no return; they are customers, not members.”

It’s worth reading the full article to understand the extent to which Barcelona is a club to be proud of, while United should shame its supporters. The former elected the people who run their club, the latter saw their club sold against their wishes and then mortgaged to the hilt:

“United’s record turnover after winning the Premier League and European Cup was turned into a £42.7m loss because they paid £69m interest, on the loans the Glazers took out to buy the club in the first place. Three years after that takeover the £559m they borrowed had grown, with costs and rolled-up interest owed to hedge funds, to £700m.”

Conn quotes a Manchester United spokesman who, in a fine example of point-missing, claims to have found a flaw in the Barcelona model: “We are committed to selling TV rights collectively and, if we did not, it would be at the expense of clubs like Wigan, Hull and Bolton and would seriously weaken the Premier League.”

Good point. Imagine a Premier League in which Wigan, Hull and Bolton were unable to compete.

Oh, wait. You don’t need to imagine - we’ve got one.

Norwich City were relegated yesterday, falling into the third tier of English football for the first time in almost 50 years. It was a sad day for supporters of the club but the match itself was just a formality. The club has been heading for relegation for months and our fate was sealed by the loss to Reading a week ago.

So now, in front of the largest crowds in League One, we join the promotion race, right? Probably not. The sad reality is that even this woeful squad, bereft of talent, inspiration and guts, is too expensive for us. A season of rebuilding is coming.

Sack the board?
It’s understandable that many of the 3,500 fans who made the trip to Charlton yesterday called for the board to be sacked but it isn’t the answer. Without Michael Wynn Jones and Delia Smith the club would be in a much worse situation. We would certainly have gone into administration without the millions they have pumped in.

Michael and Delia and the directors have done their best to keep the club financially stable in an era when most clubs have been pushing themselves to the brink of extinction to chase success. As Delia said yesterday: “There is one, big rich league and the rest of us have to scrabble around doing whatever we can - in any way that we can - and until someone sits up and understands that, this is going to be the sad story of great football clubs like Norwich City and Charlton.”

However, with an average attendance of almost 25,000 Norwich should be competing in the upper reaches of the Championship or perhaps the bottom of the Premier League. With increased ground capacity, City might one day be able to live the dream of being a mid-table Premier League side, acting as cannon fodder for the Big Four’s Champions League bids. Ah, the beautiful game.

Finding a leader
Still, we’re a long way from such mediocre heights and the board must shoulder the blame. Though their financial stewardship has been solid, they remain unable to pick a decent manager. Even their most successful selection, Nigel Worthington, was exposed as woefully out of his depth once he took the club to the Premier League.

His successor, Peter Grant, took the club from an underperforming mid-table side to the brink of relegation. It required Glenn Roeder’s arrival to rescue us last year but it was just a temporary stay of execution. Relegation this year was Roeder’s fault. Arguably, he sealed our fate by releasing Darren Huckerby, our most creative player, and failing to find a replacement.

Delia said yesterday: “I would defy anybody sitting in this room now to sit round a table with a team of applicants to be the manager of a fotball club and to know which one is right.”

I’ve no doubt that it’s a tough decision and the board has shown continually that they lack the ability to make the correct one. The key question for the next few weeks is how the board can make better decisions because a big one is looming: do they give caretaker manager Bryan Gunn the job or seek yet another new appointment?

Sack the boss?
I would have backed Gunn for the job until yesterday. However, I can’t be confident in a manager who sends a team out in a must-win game and sees them three goals down within 30 minutes. Ultimately, the responsibility for that lies with the players but it raises concerns about Gunn’s ability to prepare and motivate his team.

Furthermore, as Nich Starling argues, Gunn made several questionable decisions in his team selection. Gunn is a hero for Norwich fans, myself included, and he has done a lot for the club. In his games in charge he averaged around a point a game. Poor, but no worse than Glenn Roeder’s record over the first two-thirds of the season. I don’t think it’s enough to suggest that he is the man to take Norwich back to the Championship.

If he isn’t, who is? And who would want the job? There is no money to spend and there are no quality players at the club. Can we even afford a proven manager? If we’re faced with another gamble we may as well stick with Gunn.

And that’s what I suspect the board will do. It’s the safe option. They might get lucky. Gunn may blossom into a wonderful manager. He may even take us straight back up. I really hope so.

But recent experience gives me no cause for optimism.

I didn’t think my one-book-a-week pace would last and it hasn’t. The Rest Is Noise slowed me down a bit.

Book 13: The Blind Side by Michael Lewis
Book 14: The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross

The 79-page ‘bible’ for the first season of The Wire appeared online recently. It contains David SImon’s outline of what the series would be about and how it would work, brief descriptions of the main characters and a complete scene-by-scene breakdown of the whole season.

Simon writes: “The reward for the viewer, who has been lured all this way by a well-constructed police show, is not the simple gratification of hearing the handcuffs click. Instead the conclusion is something that Euripides or O’Neill might recognise: an America, at every level at war with itself.”

The synopsis is very close to the final version but there are some significant differences. First of all in length. The series is nine episodes long, four fewer than the show that finally aired. Crucially, the extra episodes were used to slow the pace down, rather than to add more plot.

The Wire - Bible

It’s essential reading if you’re a fan of the show but it takes a while to get through so let me give you some of the highlights.

[In case it isn't obvious, I should point out that what follows contains some pretty major spoilers for series one of The Wire.]

Names and characters

The first difference you’ll notice is in the names. There are several differences. McNulty is McArdle, Lester Freamon is Lester Weeks, Rhonda Pearlman is Janelle Pearlman, Avon Barksdale is Aaron Barksdale and Stringer Bell is Stringy Bell. All changes sound better to me but perhaps I just prefer what I’m used to.

It’s not just the names that are unfamiliar - some characters have significant differences. Herc is a steroid addict, for starters, while Santangelo, who figures more in this draft than he does in the screened series, has a gambling problem. Bubbles is 60 and dies from AIDS in the final episode.

Some of the characteristics of Barksdale and Bell were swapped around between outline and screen. It’s Barksdale who fancies himself as a property investor and is cultivating political contacts. Bell is a decade older than his boss - they no longer came up together - and he is less polished and more thuggish than Barksdale.

I think Simon was smart to change that. The tension between Barksdale and Bell, the latter smarter than his boss but not street-smart enough, is crucial to how the first three seasons unfold. That tension is compounded by the fact that the two are childhood friends, something that gives enormous resonance to the double betrayal at the end of series three.

Missing in action

There is a lot less of Freamon and Bunk in Simon’s original. Though Freamon still surprises his colleagues by turning out to be real police, he loses his lead role on the wire to McArdle and it is Daniels who does some of the financial investigation.

Bunk drinks far less with McArdle than he does with McNulty and is ditched altogether from the now-classic crime scene investigation out in the County. In the final version, of course, McNulty and Bunk piece together the entire crime using only variations on the word fuck. In the draft, McArdle schools Greggs in the art of murder investigation. Another change for the better from Simon.

We don’t see Cheryl, Greggs’ girlfriend, even once. In fact we don’t see much of the home lives of our characters at all.

Finally, there’s no Pryzbylewski. It’s Greggs who cracks the dealers’ payphone code and its Herc and Carver together with a couple of unnamed cops who start a late-night riot in the projects.

How the plot unfolds

The big shock compared to the final version of season one is the death of Greggs halfway through. It’s especially shocking because the draft centres much more on her and McArdle, who do most of the work of the detail themselves.

The circumstances in which Greggs is killed are similar to those which result in her being shot in the finished series. She is undercover in a drugs sting that goes wrong. In the draft she winds up at Orlando’s where D’Angelo identifies her. The dealers attempt to get her out of the club but she fights back and is killed.

This is perhaps the only thing in the draft that is stronger than what made it to screen. Greggs is a great character and it would be a shame to lose her for later series but her death in the draft is much more powerful than the shooting in the final version. Still, if she’d died in season one we would have lost her “goodnight feens” scene in season five, which is one of my favourites.

Greggs’s death galvanises the investigation and allows the unit to turn D’Angelo, who feels guilty at his role in her death. D’Angelo, wearing a wire, is sent to get evidence on Barksdale and Bell. However, the dealers are tipped-off and the unit gets nothing.

In fact, at every turn the dealers seem to be ahead of them. They discover that Santangelo has been tipping off Bell. He needed the cash to service his gambling debts. I think Simon was smart to ditch this. We’ve seen it before and it’s not the kind of corruption that The Wire seeks to document. The snitching plot that replaces it - Carver keeping the chief posted on the investigation - fits far better: it’s corruption for professional, rather than financial, ends.

As in the final version, the money leads to a senator, though this time it’s Dawkins rather than Davis, and the bosses are displeased. They derail the political side of the investigation by arresting Herc for buying steroids. Herc is kicked off the force and the parts of the investigation that he worked on are deemed tainted.

The series closes with D’Angelo in hiding in Atlanta, having testified against Barksdale and Bell.

The conclusion

It’s a fascinating read, not least because the vision for what The Wire would be was clearly in place from the outset. What they changed was, almost without exception, changed for the better and the addition of four extra episodes allowed them to add depth.

And thank god they didn’t kill off Bubbles.

John Madden, probably American football’s best-known commentator, retired last week. On Friday I wrote a short piece for Telegraph sport to explain why he was so important:

Madden taught American football fans to watch the game like a coach. A perfect example came in SuperBowl XLIII, Madden’s final game as a commentator. Many fans would have been wondering why the Arizona Cardinals weren’t destroying the Pittsburgh Steelers with their spectacular passing game. Madden explained that the Steelers were keeping their safeties deep, effectively taking away the Cardinals’ major threat. He suggested they exploit this by passing across the middle of the field. When they did, late in the game, they scored a 64-yard touchdown.

You can read the whole thing here.

I finished six books in March, bringing me to 12 for the year so far, or roughly one a week. Experience tells me that I won’t keep up that pace but it’s going well so far and, more importantly, I’ve read some good books.

Book 7: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Book 8: Sins for Father Knox by Josef Skvorecky
Book 9: Bad Vibes - Britpop and my part in its downfall by Luke Haines
Book 10: Crime Fiction by John Scaggs
Book 11: Copy Killer by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo
Book 12: The Terrorists by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

What surprised me about yesterday’s list of opening tracks was how conventional it was. I don’t listen to much mainstream music so why was the list so mainstream? Where was all the hip hop and electronica?

Unfortunately, hip hop artists have removed themselves from the competition almost entirely by beginning every album with a track called “Intro”. I checked every great hip hop album I own and they all seem to do it. As for electronica, I think I tend to view electronic albums as complete works. It’s hard to separate just the first track.

I thought I’d find out what the top 10 would be if I based it on music I regularly listen to. I made an iTunes smart playlist bringing together songs with a track number of 1 and a rating of five stars. It gave me 32 tracks. This isn’t a perfect plan - I have more than 22,000 songs in iTunes and only about 3,000 have been rated so there’s a lot missing.

However, a few of the songs from yesterday’s list were present: Solid Air, Debaser and Sign o’ the Times. Here’s the top 10 from the rest:

1. I Love Every Little Thing About You by Syreeta (Syreeta)
A deliriously happy soul record that never fails to make me smile - apart from a little god-bothering in the middle. It sounds like classic-era Stevie Wonder because he produced it. He also provides some backing vocals. Well, they were married at the time.

2. Alone Again Or by Love (Forever Changes)
Hippy Mariachi rock that, combined with Felt, provided the template for Belle and Sebastian 30 years later.

3. Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones (Let It Bleed)
This was on Lucy’s list too. It’s a great song with a great opening.

4. Rehab by Amy Winehouse (Back to Black)
It’s perhaps early to tell but I think this will become a classic. A brilliant beginning for a very good album.

5. A Minor Place by Bonnie “Prince” Billy (I See A Darkness)
I played this album almost non-stop for about a year and this song still sounds excellent. As an opener it isn’t exceptional but it does represent the album very nicely.

6. Station to Station by David Bowie (Station to Station)
The Berlin-era is my favourite of Bowie’s many incarnations. This is Bowie doing Kraftwerk and as such can hardly go wrong.

7. Weightless Again by The Handsome Family (Through the Trees)
More Americana. This is probably my favourite Handsome Family song. It’s a weird, bleak and poignant examination of suicide.

8. Bul Ma Min by Orchestra Baobab (Specialist in All Styles)
A fantastically energetic Afro-Cuban track from Orchestra Baobab’s 2002 album. It’s the best track on the album.

9. The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by The Postal Service (Give Up)
It’s not the best track on the album but its slightly hesitant electronic opening does introduce the album very well.

10. Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space by Spiritualized (Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space)
A series of repeating lyrics over a chord sequence borrowed from Pachelbel’s Canon in D provides a gentle, melancholic introduction to this album before Come Together thumps its way in.

What are your favourite album-opening tracks, asks my colleague Lucy Jones today. I couldn’t resist compiling my own list. By wracking my brains and browsing my music collection I came up with the following:

1. Accidents Will Happen by Elvis Costello (Armed Forces)
Elvis’s introduction - “Oh, I just don’t know where to begin…” - which begins just slightly before the music comes in is what makes this a priceless opener.

2. Sign o’ the Times by Prince (Sign o’ the Times)
It’s an astonishing song first of all, but that stark, frosty synthesiser loop and Prince’s poignant lyric make a disturbing beginning for his greatest album.

3. Debaser by Pixies (Doolittle)
This track builds brilliantly to the point where Black Francis gleefully storms in with his lyric about “slicing up eyeballs” - an homage to Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou. With Tame and Wave of Mutilation to follow, the opening seven minutes of this album are thrilling.

4. Army of Me by Bjork (Post)
Over a sinister industrial beat Bjork delivers an aloof, imperious vocal. It’s slightly unrepresentative of what follows but it remains a great first track.

5. Autobahn by Kraftwerk (Autobahn)
It’s not just the opening track - at more than 20 minutes, it’s the first half of the album. A masterpiece of electronica that remains absorbing and hugely influential.

6. Solid Air by John Martyn (Solid Air)
This is a masterpiece too but it’s also significant for its place in Martyn’s career. As the opener of his sixth album, it signalled his maturity as an artist and began a run of four stunning albums.

7. The Fear by Pulp (This Is Hardcore)
Not many opening songs summarise the coming album quite so succinctly as this one: “This is the sound of someone losing the plot, making out that they’re ok when they’re not. You’re going to like it but not a lot. And the chorus goes like this…”

8. Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan (Highway 61 Revisited)
As far as ‘the canon’ is concerned, this is the greatest song of all time. Greil Marcus has written an entire book about it. The adoration can be a little off-putting but this truly is a great song and that crack on the drum that opens it may well be the best opening note in popular music.

9. Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana (Nevermind)
Another one that’s easy to take for granted. We’ve all heard it too much but it’s a great first track, especially for the moment - six seconds in - when Dave Grohl enters like a man trying to break his drum kit into tiny pieces.

10. Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind by Yo La Tengo (I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass)
I wanted an odd one for number ten and this is it. It takes nerve to open your album with a ten-minute guitar freakout but I think Yo La Tengo succeed with this hypnotic song.

What do you think? Here’s a Spotify playlist of all ten.

This blog is sometimes quiet for long periods - it’s been almost two weeks since the last post, for example - but I’m always writing things elsewhere. To make that a little clearer I’ve given this blog a new sidebar. It now pulls in my latest updates from Twitter, the recent posts from my Telegraph blog and the stories I’ve been saving in Google Reader. I’ve also brightened it up a little by pulling in book covers from Amazon (via LibraryThing), album artwork from Last.fm and my recent Flickr photos, which are updated even less often than this blog, admittedly, but they look quite nice.

If you visit and find there hasn’t been a new post for a while, there should at least be something new to read in the sidebar.