The Today Programme — which sets the serious news agenda for the UK on a daily basis — had no less than three pieces on this story this morning. Normally, Today would have avoided discussing the rumours in exactly the way that William Hague should have done.

The issue — as explained by Max Clifford, the big bad boy of PR who seems to be improving with age — is that by issuing a statement, you essentially make it open season on discussing your private and personal life. You may not like Clifford’s track record, but, as usual, his publicity instinct is bang on.

If the world of Public Relations seems strange to you, then consider for a moment the following two headlines:

“Politician admits wrongdoing”
“Politician denies wrongdoing”

Which headline is more likely to make you want to read the article? There is something satisfying, but also disappointing, about a politician admitting wrongdoing. It wraps the story up, we now know the truth, but, equally, the story is over, and our worst feelings about politicians have once again been confirmed.

What about denying wrongdoing? Any journalist or editor knows that “politician denies wrongdoing” is a better headline for grabbing readers. It tells you the reader that you’re getting the news right up to date. It tells you that the story is still happening. It instantly introduces conflict — and conflict is what sells the story.

As long as William Hague was saying nothing, then the rumours might circulate, but eventually they would die down. Most of us pay no attention to those kind of rumours anyway, and the ones who do are the ones who are predisposed to believe that something is going on anyway.

So, what do you do if you’re caught in such a situation? Rumours are circulating about you. You don’t like them. Your friends tell you they’re silly. You know they aren’t true. But you live on your reputation, and you’re getting worried about it.

My advice, which I’ve been giving (successfully) for twenty years, is, simply, never bring your personal life into the public domain. If invited to do an exclusive interview about your personal life, don’t do it. Talk about your policies, talk about your international concerns, talk about your fascination with train spotting (it worked for Michael Portillo), but don’t talk about your personal life. What is personal? Whatever is personal to you. Whatever you might be misled into issuing a long, winding and rather embarrassing statement about.

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It is absolutely clear that athletes in every sport at whatever level should behave diligently and honourably, tarnishing sport neither with drug-taking nor taking of bribes nor any other kind of corrupt behaviour. Athletes representing their country in front of the world’s cameras in a major sport share this obligation, and the implications of failing in it are far worse for the reputation of sport overall, and their nation’s and their game’s sport even more.

But, equally, there is a world of difference between a journalist who discovers that a scam or corrupt behaviour is taking place and exposes it, and a newspaper — which, it appears from the reports — took active steps to lure athletes into committing a crime.

As the Pakistan team manager Yawar Saeed has very properly said, no allegations are true until they are proved. It is still possible that Pakistan’s crickets will be exonerated, and that the News of the World will withdraw its story.

However, this does not resolve the issue of entrapment journalism.

The Press Complaints Commission Editors’ Code of Conduct makes the following ruling: “Engaging in misrepresentation or subterfuge, including by agents or intermediaries, can generally be justified only in the public interest and then only when the material cannot be obtained by other means.”

Most of us would accept that, when this involves the exposure of a paedophile, sex trafficking or drug smuggling ring, subterfuge does work in the public interest. But what about cricket betting? The News of the World article makes it clear that the editors believe they were engaging with an existing gambling cartel. But who exactly was in that ring? It seems unlikely that, before this series, Mohammed Amir would have been especially high up a cartel’s list of targets.

If we take the News of the World story at face value, then a crooked manager agreed to fix certain aspects of the game. But the News of the World has no insights about how that manager persuaded players (if he did). Consider the kind of pressure that a crooked manager (allegedly) could bring to bear on a teenage cricket star who had just delivered six wickets at Lords for the first time. Was Amir promised money? How much money? What other tricks, techniques and cunning were brought to bear?

The issue here is that — it would appear — the News of the World actually commissioned a crime, which then went on to take place. This is not the same as a TV reporter who gets to the point of buying a trafficked woman, and then pushes the deal away, having gained the footage he needs. Nor is it the same as a team of journalists meeting a known drugs-dealer in order to film a drugs deal right up to the moment money changes hands. In this particular case, there is no reason to believe that the crime would have taken place at all, and no assurance that pressure of a kind few of us can imagine was not brought to bear on an impressionable but previously untainted teenager.

When offered wealth on the one hand, and the threat of losing an agent’s essential support on the other, how many people really would manage to say no? Supposing their family was also threatened? Supposing photographs of a sensitive nature were produced? I have no idea whether any of this happened or not, but, crucially, in offering money to have a crime committed, neither did the News of the World.

This is the reason why the police are not allowed to persuade criminals to commit crimes in order to prosecute them. Far too many otherwise virtuous people have been persuaded to do things they would afterwards regret. It is far too easy, in that way, to convict someone for a crime they would never have dreamt of if they had not been thus entrapped.

I, for one, will remember this Test Match for the outstanding cricket, for the heart-in-mouth turnaround, for the heroism of Broad and Trott, and for the bowling of Mohammed Amir in the first innings.

But, at the Liberal Democrat Party Conference in Liverpool this month, I will be pressing for a change in the law, not merely the Press Complaints Commission Code, to prevent newspapers ever adopting these kinds of practices again.

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Personally, Autotune doesn’t bother me. To be absolutely honest, I’ve been using it for ten years, ever since I started recording seriously. The alternative is to record three ‘takes’ of the vocal, and then ‘comp’ them together so that only the in-tune, nicely enunciated notes and words are used. And, yes, producers have been using that particular technique for decades.

The reality is that most singers are able to sing in tune, but very few singers always sing in tune. In a live performance, we don’t really notice it. On a CD, when you hear it again and again, you notice it pretty quickly.

But leaving aside Autotune, how do you respond to Portrait Professional? If you don’t quite get what this does, click on this link, and roll the mouse over the photo. See what I’m talking about? For a few £s, or a few $s more, you can have a piece of software that not only cleans up any lingering skin issues, as in this example, but actually changes the shape of the face to a more ‘perfect’ form, as in this example.

Don’t let me stop you buying this software — I’ve tried the demo and it really is very good value for money — but do pause with me for a moment to consider whether an image altered in this way is actually still a portrait at all.

Photographers have, of course, been improving skin for decades, long before digital photography, and long before you could even buy filters from Cokin or Lee or other manufacturers. If you have an SLR camera, you can try this yourself: simply stretch a black or white stocking over the lens, and then shoot a picture of someone’s face. You’ll see that you get the effect known as ‘soft focus’, which softens skin areas but leaves high contrast, such as eyes, intact. You can apply a digital version of this in Photoshop afterwards if you prefer.

Most photographers who regularly shoot portraits employ a range of techniques these days to improve skin. These range from ‘cloning’ out blemishes to removing stray hairs, ‘dodging’ the shadows to remove tiredness from around the eyes, and slightly improving the skin tone, through to using heavyweight ‘do it all’ plugins such as Imagenomic’s Portraiture. The more basic techniques could be done in a darkroom or with an airbrush (I fear I may be among the last generation of photographers to have ever retouched an image using a real, rather than a digital, airbrush), but by the time you reach Imagenomic’s Portraiture, you are in a realm which only digital can provide.

Now, you may be already thinking: is nothing sacred? Is it right to improve skin using such netherworld techniques?

Clearly, if you are shooting news photography, either as a photojournalist or as a PR or political photographer, then it isn’t. David Cameron was heavily mocked during the election campaign for what was perceived to be an airbrushed photograph, although he claimed it was genuine. We expect (and should do) that all news photographs are unaltered beyond the most basic contrast and colour corrections so that they reproduce properly.

But for portraits, it’s actually necessary to do something to overcome the artefacts of digital photography, and, indeed, of photography in general.

When you look at someone’s face, your eyes glance around the face, but, if you are interested at all in the person, they keep returning to their eyes, and to a lesser extent their mouth. When you build up a visual picture of them in your memory, the eyes will be in fairly sharp focus, whereas the rest will be progressively less clear. The more interested you are in them, the sharper and brighter the eyes will appear. If you don’t believe me, try remembering someone’s face.

When you shoot a photograph, the camera picks up everything which is at the same distance from the lens with equal sharpness. A good photographer can use this creatively by shooting, say, an 85mm lens at f/1.4 with the focus exactly on the eyes. The eyes will be in focus, but everything else will become progressively blurred. This is great for a romantic portrait, or an interview for a magazine, but not quite the thing for the picture of your Chairman in the Annual Report. If you shoot at, say, f/8, then the whole face will be in sharp focus (unless, of course, you auto-focussed on the background — an all too common error, even by pros), caught in a moment in time. The impression you get by looking at such a picture of any real person is of really bad skin trouble, because it captures every pore and every wrinkle in a way which you would never notice in real life.

Therefore, to overcome the greater depth of field of the camera, and the fact that it takes a single snapshot, frozen in time, softening and treating skin is necessary. Or you could do the entire thing with makeup, which is no more nor less ‘genuine’ than doing it in post-processing.

The extent to which you do this will make the difference between what looks like an entirely natural picture, where you have compensated for the difference between the camera and the human eye, or something which looks like it was made out of plastic. For myself, I try to work towards the most natural look possible, most of the time, but tastes vary.

But — what about the reshaping of the face that Portrait Professional is offering? The examples I offered, which are all on the software’s website, are fairly extreme as far as skin-tone is concerned. In fact, on this picture, my personal taste would have been to keep the freckles and not introduce any skin enhancement at all, though I would have tried to do something about getting the eyes more in focus. But, leaving aside the skin issue, which could have been achieved by make-up, is altering the shape of the face, as here something which leaves us with anything which can be called a portrait at all?

To go back to Autotune, correcting skin issues is like correcting notes — we know the singer can get the note, but she or he doesn’t always get the note. In the same way, everyone has good and bad skin days, and skin weeks and months. The skin can be perfect, or made-up, it just probably won’t be at its best on the day you happen to shoot the photograph. But altering the shape of the face would be like using software to have the singer sing unnaturally high, or with an entirely different vocal tone, or with a mixture of their voice and notes sampled from someone else’s voice. Of course, you might do this in music. Back in the ’60s and ’70s a common high-end stage effect was the Vocoder, where someone played guitar and also talked into a microphone, and the sound of the guitar came out with the words of a human voice. But everyone knew this was a special effect, and no-one would have ever claimed (or believed) that this was a pristine, documentary recording or pure acoustic performance.

Portrait Professional — and ‘by hand’ techniques that you can do yourself in Photoshop, as I don’t really want to demonise what is a very evolved and intelligent piece of software — offer you the ability to create an illusion of reality but which bears no real relationship to the personality of the person you are photographing.

To what extent is a portrait still a portrait if the true face of the sitter is glossed over and altered to be more ‘beautiful’?

If you’re an art-historian, you will probably come back and tell me that that is what portrait painters have been doing for centuries. While in Venezuela we saw many portraits of Simon Bolivar, most of which were painted by people who never met him. But there was one portrait which the tour guide attempted to gloss over, though he did admit that this was the only portrait painted by someone who knew Bolivar well and spent much time with him. Unlike the straight backed, tall, white skinned portraits seen elsewhere, this revealed Bolivar to be a short man, not especially erect, with an olive skin which suggested that he was of mixed-race origin. Our tour guide took pains to tell us that Bolivar was, of course, not really that dark. But wasn’t he? Why would the only person who knew him and painted him choose to darken him, and why would Bolivar have put up with it, since he must have seen the portrait many times before it was finished.

Portraits have always been done at least partly for PR purposes, even back to the portrait-statues of Roman emperors which were measured out and the measurements sent across the entire Roman empire so that every province could have a (much larger than life) likeness of the emperor. To look at those statues, the Roman emperors were almost without exception godlike and regal, and perfect examples of one or other physical form. Since Roman emperors were chosen by descent or conquest, rather than on looks like the cast of Hollyoaks, we can safely assume that most, if not all, of the statues were in some way improved.

We all at times want to be someone we aren’t quite. One of the attractions of makeover studios, equipped with their own (fairly budget) photographic studios is so that you can see yourself photographed in some glamourous made-up guise. For a few $ more, you can have the images retouched to remove blemishes and so on. Or for quite a few $, you can buy your own copy of Portrait Professional and do your own surgery.

But my question remains, if it were your own sister, would you still recognise her from the portrait?

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Close-up Vol 1: Love Songs

Suzanne Vega exploded into my musical life in 1985 when someone played me her debut album and said “why can’t everything be produced like that?” The vocals were largely unprocessed, the guitar playing startlingly beautiful, the overall instrumentation sparse, and the lyrics bright, challenging, intelligent, and ever so slightly world weary.

The next album, Solitude Standing, had more elaborate production, though stand out tracks such as Luka and Tom’s Diner put Vega on the map for many who had missed the first outing. The follow-up, Days of Open Hand, was much thicker in texture, exploring wider worlds but moving away from the intimate brightness of the first album. Following that, 99.9 degrees was industrial, band based. Not everyone liked it. Finally, the last two albums of new songs, Nine Objects of Desire, Songs in Red and Grey and Beauty and Crime were more polished, more reflective, but somehow — to my ears — did not communicate the stinging musical brilliance that first switched on a whole new style of music for me, and inspired a generation of female singer songwriters.

For her new album, Suzanne Vega has rerecorded a selection of songs from right across her albums, as part of a longer project to rerecord most of the songs (or all?) over four albums.

If the notion of a female singer-songwriter rerecording her old stuff twenty-five years on doesn’t thrill you, then you absolutely have to listen to some of the previews of this on Amazon or iTunes.

Vega doesn’t just return to the brilliant minimalism of the first album, she goes far beyond it. With just her voice, her own acoustic guitar playing and, on some tracks, bass and electric guitar, and with an absolute minimum of effects which make everything sound nice and smooth, but also put distance between the singer and the listener, this is the most proximate album I’ve heard in a long, long time, and puts you right in the mix, among the musicians.

The sound is so detailed that you even hear the chair squeaking at the end of Marlene On The Wall.

Vega has developed more traces of huskiness (aside from that, her voice has weathered far better than… well, let’s not name the culprits) which add to the personality of the lyrics, and, in keeping with her later vocal style, moves the words around the rhythm more and uses pauses to focus on meaning.

Her guitar playing has got better. What was already a bright, intricate and percussive style is now so strong that there is no need for percussion, though you may have to listen carefully to realise that — beyond some finger clicking and hand-clapping — all of the percussive sound is from that guitar.

This is sensitively underpinned by the electric guitar of Gerry Leonard and the bass of Michael Visceglia, though these aren’t on all tracks. Zak Soulam provides additional acoustic guitar on Caramel.

Generally, the pace is a bit slower with the tracks from the early albums. Gypsy doesn’t quite rollick along in the same way, and neither does Marlene on the Wall. But don’t let that put you off — really.

More importantly for me — though those early songs are given a fresh, new, incisive voice with the re-recording — some of the songs on the later albums which (I have to admit) I originally listened to a couple of times and then forgot about come entirely alive for me in this reworking. I was listening to ‘Bound’ for about the eighth time yesterday, and wondering “how did I miss this first time around?” It is so exquisitely fragile:

“And I ask
I am asking you
Asking you if you
Might still want me.”

Just as importantly, played on the same album in a now very similar style, the musical connection with Small Blue Thing becomes very apparent, lending additional nuance to both songs.

I posted on Suzanne Vega’s FaceBook page: “Your new album is absolutely brilliant. One of the best things I have by anyone for years.” The next day I got a notification: “Suzanne Vega likes this”. It absolutely made my day.

But this album has made my month.

It really is, quite literally, the best thing I’ve heard in years.

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So why does Bobev maintain that e-Books are “not such a green option”, and why does he claim that this is “according to research”?

This is, of course, incalculable.

As opposed to carbon costs, which go largely uncalculated.

All reports of the nature of the Cleantech report are, of course, laden with assumptions. There are perhaps fewer assumptions regarding the Kindle, which only performs one function, than the iPad which performs many, but they are assumptions nonetheless. This notwithstanding, attempts to quantify what costs what are necessary if we are to understand what is ecological living and what is not.

More importantly, we need to learn to distinguish between a hair-shirt mentality towards environmentalism, and sound choices, and again between sound-choices and ‘tech will save the day’.

Which is more environmentally friendly, to drive a twelve-year old car with a two-generations old engine which has already lost much of its performance vs fuel expended, or a brand new car? Put in those terms, a brand new car of the same specifications sounds like a safe bet. But what about the environmental cost of manufacturing the new car? Every manufacturer will happily declare the miles per gallon — though you may struggle to get anywhere near this in real life — but I have yet to see a new car advertised with its carbon offset cost of manufacture  declared. A 2004 analysis by Toyota found that as much as 28 percent of CO2 emissions of a typical petrol-burning car occur during manufacture and transportation. Another study by Seikei University put the pre-purchase number at 12 percent. ¹ Rivals criticised the Toyota Prius for having dramatically higher manufacturing carbon-offset costs, which mean that it may be the unenvironmental option for drivers who keep a low mileage.

Which is better — new or old? High-tech or lowfi? The answer is inevitably that there is no one-size fits all. Information is required — and yet, in an information saturated society, we very rarely get to see the kind of information which Cleantech has calculated for us.

This in itself is not assisted by journalists who report the news backwards.

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Charles Kennedy, on the day I first met him in 1999

BBC — Charles Kennedy calls rumours ‘absolute rubbish’ On Saturday, several newspapers ran stories that former Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy was in talks with Labour with a view to defecting. When the story was denied by the Liberal Democrat party, but not immediately by Charles Kennedy, many bloggers took this as a sign that the rumours were true.

Of course, Kennedy has now denied them, saying “I am not joining the Labour Party and have not had any discussions about it with anyone from the Labour Party.”

But the question remains, why did anyone think it was plausible in the first place, and why did newspapers choose to run an unsubstantiated story?

There are two issues here. The first is about the way the public — or, at least, some journalists and editors — see the natural relationships in politics. The Lib Dems have been perceived for a long time as a sort of ‘soft Labour’: during the Blair years, possibly even a refuge for Labour activists who felt they could not back their party on Iraq. Attempts by ‘Orange Book’ Lib Dems such as Oaten (remember him), Webb and Clegg to put forward a slightly right of centre economic theory were dismissed as pandering to potential Tory crossover voters. Very few people ever imagined that Lib Dems would really be involved in anything as unsocialist, or, indeed, anti-socialist, as the current coalition. Kennedy was the only Lib Dem MP who did not vote for the coalition. Therefore, he is the obvious candidate for defection. The fact that he is the ousted former Liberal Democrat leader lends spice to the story.

Was there ever a basis of fact? Was there some meeting or conversation that took place which could credibly have been misunderstood to have been about defection? Or was someone just making mischief, using their informal role as an informed source to possibly try and flush Kennedy out? We may never know.

Now to the other matter. If this had been a business deal, or a celebrity, or some such, there would have been talk of the Press Complaints Commission by now. Newspapers have a duty not to publish misleading stories, and the fact that a journalist may have been themselves honestly misled is not a defence. The onus is on the publisher to ensure that they do not mislead.

However, the moment a politician is involved, it seems that it is open season, and, really, anything goes. Journalists may believe that politicians get what they deserve, and anyone who puts themselves into the public spotlight gets what is coming to them. But the issue is really not the damage done to politicians, but the damage done to journalism, and by extension, to democracy.

Confidence in journalists, newspapers and politicians is more or less as far down as it can go. Even the expenses scandal of last year did not depress the stock market value of politicians very much. But is it really the job of journalists to keep it down at the bottom level?

Since I first decided to stand for parliament, back in 1998, people have asked me over and over again “why?” Sometimes it’s because they feel the cost/benefit isn’t very good, and they may well have a point. But most of the time they say something like: “You seem like a nice enough chap. Why would you want to get involved in that?”

Given that the vast majority of people in Britain will never meet their MP or their local councillor, this is rarely because of personal contact with MPs. In fact, people who know MPs personally generally regard the ones they know as really rather honourable. But there is an assumption that, as a class, they are scoundrels.

Perhaps MPs are. Perhaps our current crop are talentless good-for-nothings who bought their way into parliament with either trades-union backing, inherited money, or money earned through financial dealings of the kind that brought the economy to its knees. But if we persist in treating MPs as if they are guilty until proved innocent, we will never attract the next generation of MPs (if the current crop really are like that) who will be honest, hard-working servants of the people, in it out of duty and public service, not out of greed and self-aggrandisement.

As Winston Churchill pointed out, in democracy we get the government we deserve. But this is not just what we deserve when we go out and vote. It is what we deserve as a result of the stories we choose to put our trust in, the newspapers we choose to buy, the stories we choose to retell, to retweet, to post on Facebook or on blogs.

Unlimited press freedom comes, it seems, at a heavy price.

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Not that I’m complaining. But it does beg the question of why the BBC is showing its stuff in short bursts — three episodes for Sherlock, five for this — during August when, even with the wonders of iPlayer, most viewers can be expected to be on holiday for at least part of the period.

If you’ve not been following, there is just enough time to catch the first three episodes on iPlayer, with two more to come this week and the week after. If you have been avoiding watching out of the fear that it may be in some way connected with the lamentable 1977 adventure in silliness of the same name, you can relax. Actually, that was the main reason why I missed the opening two episodes when they were first broadcast. Fortunately, the programme makers are merely recycling the name, probably on the grounds that there will be absolutely no-one saying “I was disappointed, because I thought it was a remake of that great film…”.

Although we once more run the risk of being lambasted by the Americans for only making shows that last a few weeks, there is a compelling pace and tension in the decision to restrict this to just five episodes. If (like me) you got bored with Lost somewhere in the middle of the first series, then there is something utterly refreshing about a story which really advances week by week, and where you discover that it isn’t about what you thought it was at the start of the episode just half way through.

If you’re wondering if you might like it, I won’t spoil it for you, beyond saying that it’s about oil, Russians, illegal deep-water exploration below the North Pole, radiation poisoning, love, adultery, courage, and some new form of life. At least, that’s what I think it’s about so far, but I may discover that I am entirely wrong by the end of episode 4.

On radiation poisoning, the BBC are returning to one of their strongest suits across many years. If you remember Edge of Darkness — the original BBC version, not the lamentable Mel Gibson remake — you will recall the fear of radiation which permeates the (also short) series, right from the radiation warning sign on a train going north in the first minutes through to the final scene. Americans seem to go for the big explosion itself, as in Ben Affleck/Morgan Freeman Sum of All Fears. Perhaps the Greenham Common protests and the secret Thatcher-era information series Protect and Survive sensitised us all to the threat of radiation itself.

In keeping with classics like Edge of Darkness and Doctor Who and the Green Death, this is top-notch escapist thrills and chills telly, but with a strong linkage to serious issues of global importance. While stuff like the X-files, Dark Skies (no, no-one really remembers that series) and Lost fed a generation of Americans on the notion that there was a global conspiracy of big business conducting experiments with strange forces and/or aliens, The Deep is planting powerful science-based ideas about the world we live in into the minds of its viewers, and reminding all of us how it is possible — as long as the government continues to allow it — to inform, to educate and to entertain, all at the same time.

I’m just left wondering if the reason why we are having a rash of such high quality programming in the low season is that BBC bosses are making one last effort to persuade the increasingly Conservative coalition that public broadcasting really is one of our most precious national resources, before it’s too late.

More power to them, I say.

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Klezmer/Gypsy band Payazén busking in York. Note the irony of where they chose to stand

We saw Amsterdam based Klezmer/Gypsy/Balkans band Payazén busking in York this week. I’ve no idea who the real finest buskers in the world are, but, if you want my opinon, Payazén have got to be up there with the best.

As a former street performer myself, I always look at who’s doing and what they’re about with some interest.

To me, there are four things which make or break a street performance — whether for cash, paid for by an event organiser, or for any other purpose.

1. What you see or hear from a distance. Lots of people sound good close by, but, if you watch, a lot of people will give  busker a wide berth or hurry on past. Great buskers make you want to change course to go and find them.
2. How well they can grab and hold an audience. This is about the quality of the show, it’s about eye contact, it’s about there being enough variation to keep you wanting more, and it’s about being loud or bright enough to be comfortably heard and seen with all the street’s distractions
3. How you relate to potential customers. Some buskers seem to imagine that if you’re performing on the street, people owe you money to listen or take photographs. Great buskers know that most passers-by only put money in the pot if they’ve experienced something they really enjoyed.
4. What the audience can take away with them. Busking is a fleeting moment in someone’s life. A great flyer for an event, a well-produced CD, a balloon sculpture… anything the punters take with them can fix the experience into permanence.

These guys have all of this in spades. The sound of their Jewish-Gypsy acoustic folk came snaking down the street long before we saw them. They’d positioned themselves in front of a beautifully designed but evidently commercially unsuccessful former pork-butcher, which framed them nicely, and they dressed the part. Visually, a clarinet, a double-bass and a violin on the street with money thrown into a violin case and no extraneous amplification is vastly more appealing than, say, an electric guitar, a CD player giving background music and two or three miscellaneous battery powered amplifiers, supporting an ice-cream tub for coins.

The longer we watched, the better the music got, and when I produced a £fiver to pay for the CD, the clarinet player winked at me and nodded before carrying on. By this time quite a crowd had gathered (there were six of us, and nothing draws a crowd like a crowd), and the band upped the tempo and the energy to give everyone who had bothered to stop the show they deserved to hear.

The CD itself was — on the surface of it — as home made as they come. It was a plain CDR with a CD label attached, and the sleeve was paper made into an envelope with the aid of eighteen (!) staples. The artwork was hand-drawn black and white, an apparently photocopied with the kind of multi-copy degradation that I haven’t seen since the 1990s. All the lettering was by hand, and the production credit was “Recorded at school studios Amsterdam”.

It wasn’t until I got it home and put it onto the hifi that I discovered that this was a professional recording, expertly made and expertly mastered. A true delight to take away, and more than worth the £5 it cost me.

A look at their website http://www.myspace.com/payazen reveals that these aren’t just some guys who happened to have some instruments with them when in York. They’ve also got a Facebook page if you prefer that route. They’ve played Glastonbury, and are on a UK tour. York was just — it would seem — an impromptu stopping point. But a treat for all who saw it just the same.

There were many buskers in York that day. One man played exquisite classical guitar music on a Fender Strat. Great to hear, but nothing visually to compare with Payazen. Another upbraided me for taking his photo without permission, clearly having failed to learn the first law of busking: people will only give you money if you make them want to. We saw another busker whose act had cleared a wide space around them, as people hurried past to avoid eye contact. There was also a pianist who had brought a stripped down upright piano into the street. He was probably brilliant, but we only got to hear him for a moment, as he went off for a short break just as we arrived. Certainly, a piano on the street is a good start for the kind of star quality that Payazén exhibited.

Anyway, if this has whetted your appetite, listen to their tracks on myspace. See if you agree. Are these the finest buskers in the world?

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I think it was Jack White who changed all that, though the White Stripes don’t actually feature on my list. Suddenly, kids were picking up guitars in shops and going dum—, dum, dum dum dum dum, duh (that’s the start to Seven Nation Army, if you didn’t quite get it). Guitar shop owners were initially most likely mighty relieved. There’s only a certain amount of the first four bars of Stairway to Heaven or Smoke on the Water that you can really have in your life before you begin, quietly, to explode. Now Seven Nation Army is probably on the black list with the best of them. But, the difference was, young teenagers were looking at electric guitars, and wanted to play them like they had six separate strings, instead of one huge strummy string that could only be played in one go. I have to say, I was mightily relieved when Led Zeppelin suddenly became cool again. If you’re one of the 2000+ crop of teenagers, then take this list as a master list of the very best to emulate. If you’re an old pro, then revel for a few moments in this — highly personal, as they all are — list of the greatest guitar solos of all time, according to me. ¹

In the traditional fashion, from the bottom up

# 10 Thin Lizzy — the Boys are Back in Town. The highly distinctive double guitar solo is still being toured by the current line-up of the band, even though only a fraction of the original members are still alive. Highly distinctive in its day, this one can, sadly, now be done by one player and an effects unit.

# 9 Dave Gilmore — Wuthering Heights, on Kate Bush – The Kick Inside. Dave Gilmore is the only person on this list twice, largely because he crosses over two distinct genres. As a pop-ballad solo, this one really can’t be beat, and, in my opinion, never has been. The track is mastered fairly quietly which gives space for the dynamics to come out — something which today’s crop of poptastic girl-singers never really do. Gilmore mentored Kate Bush, and was instrumental in the rise of her screechy vocals, unconvincing dance, and world of bizarre lyrics. The vocals eventually came together, and she stopped dancing. The best take of this track is on The Whole Story, where it was remastered with new (less screechy) vocals.

# 8 Gary Rossington, Lynyrd Skynyrd — Comin’ Home. Everyone talks about Freebird (well, they do down at Kerrang! Radio whenever I go down there), but the live solo, which is on the album Gold and Platinum, is more an extended romp than anything particularly artistic. If you have that album, though, go to the last track on the fourth side (or second CD, if you don’t have the LPs — whaddya mean “what’s an LP”?), and you’ll hear a two guitar solo which, if you’re paying attention, will course through your veins. Magnificent.

# 7 The Edge, U2 — With or without you. It’s a bit difficult to decide whether this really qualifies as a guitar solo, especially as the Edge never positioned himself as one of those soloing guitar-heroes. But the free-playing, aggressive sound which lights this song up should be in every guitarist’s vocabulary

# 6 Carlos Santana — She’s Not There. The funny thing about Carlos Santana is that while his playing goes from everything to the most electrifying rock guitar to the sleazy sound of Samba Pa Ti, better known as the Marks & Spencers commercial music, his vocals were much more suited to soft soul or funk. She’s Not There is a good example of this. But listen for the solo. If not convinced, listen to Samba Pa Ti instead.

# 5 Mark Knopfler — Tunnel of Love, from Making Movies. A lot of people have very mixed feelings about Dire Straits. Actually, a lot of people just don’t like them, or affect to dislike them, much as people these days affect to dislike Cliff Richard, and, not very many years ago, didn’t like Led Zeppelin. Simply put, Dire Straits is out of fashion. But. Listen to the guitar work on Tunnel of Love. Straits may have gone all sleazy and tedious with their final outing, On Every Street, but the raw sound of Tunnel of Love and, most especially, the whole new vocabulary that Knopfler brought to guitar solos, are worth learning and emulating, even if you never admit where you got them from.

# 4 Jimi Hendrix — The Star Spangled Banner, live at Woodstock. People talk endlessly about Hendrix. He brought something entirely new to the world of guitar playing, even if what he brought was electrically dangerous and largely LSD-inspired. The stand out performance, to me, was the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. Listening to it is one thing, but watching it on the Woodstock film is something entirely different. The scene was imitated without parody in Back to the Future.

# 3 Pat Metheny — Pat’s Solo, from Joni Mitchell Shadows and Light. It’s well known that jazz players are better than rock players. Well, it’s well known to jazz players. Joni Mitchell’s Mingus tour moved her from alternative folk into a permanent place in the world of jazz, and, among the removal men who helped her to accomplish it, were Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius. Pat’s solo, coming after Amelia, is the most extraordinary tour de force in synth-assisted guitar playing. Metheny was one of the pioneers of synth-guitar, and, to this day, it’s hard to really play synth-guitar without starting to hear the voice of Metheny behind it all.

# 2 Dave Gilmore — Comfortably Numb. Comfortably Numb, on The Wall, is one of the most agonised bouts of rock music depression ever to wallop the unsuspecting world. When it finally made it onto screen with Bob Geldof (yes, the Bob Geldof) playing the part of Pink (no relation to P!NK, the R&B singer), it was also one of the most alarming, having morphed into a statement about post-Hitlerian British fascists. But, in either version, the solo which burns in at the end is riveting. Pity we don’t get to hear it all, as it’s a victim of the fade-out.

# 1 Jimmy Page — Stairway to Heaven, on Led Zeppelin IV. This solo exploded into my life round about 1979, just when the Zeppelin era ended. It still explodes every time I hear it. No guitar solo has captured my imagination in this way, and no guitar solo has continued to tease me with its technicality as this one does. Steve Morse, who now tours with Deep Purple and would be on this list if he would only record his take on the Smoke on the Water solo, attributed his development as a guitarist to trying to figure out how Page played some of this stuff.

Anyway, that’s my list. I’d be interested to know yours.

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eBay everything else - other - Midnight Soul Collection. Why not in the 'music' category, you ask

Bored by the endless monotony of waiting for the British summer to appear (ignore this if reading in another country)? No longer thrilled by reading the latest antics at MyLifeis Average? Facebook not doing it for you? Rather than surfing the web in the hope of finding something interesting, have you ever wandered through the bizarre, misspelled, or simply badly categorised world of eBay>Everything Else>Other?

I rather remember a Joan Aiken story — I think it was Dragon Monday, but could be mistaken — when someone brings home a copy of Exchange and Mart and peruses the bizarre items. Magical trouble results. eBay’s ‘Everything Else’ category, is something of the same kind, only bigger. A good start for someone trying to use one of Edward de Bono’s lateral thinking exercises, or an author looking for ideas, or just to pass a half hour.

Today’s selection includes such marvels as a Richard Branson press release, 50 printed paper wristbands (they will actually print the text for you — disappointingly it isn’t actually someone’s treasured collection of festival stuff), a Static Caravan, available for pick up only, a 3 day potty training method, a bestman speech, self defence spray, 100% UK legal, but check with your lawyer before using, 25 headphone earbud earpads, doubtless for people with serious CDO (that’s obsessive compulsive disorder, but with the letters in alphabetical order, like they should be), 17th edition full course and exam papers on CD, though we are not told for what subject, a Brass Pin, suitable for bushcraft or hunting (do you chase the animals with a pin — we want to know!), VW Camper Van transport voucher, S. Wales only, 3-6 months boys clothes, job lot, and also 0-3 months boys clothes, job lot, large red plastic heart, photoframe – leopard print furry, casino roulette winning system (predicts casino results — that additional information in case you hadn’t grasped it from the main title). Someone is also selling Jesus, starting price £0.99, but £5 delivery. Thus far no bids. Also ‘secrets of starting a professional cake decorating biz’

Of course, in among the miscellaneous is a large number of simply tedious items — quasi-legal services such as unlocking phones, and a variety of tacky bits and pieces.

Actually, I think it either isn’t as good as it used to be, or I just looked today on a bad day. There used to be oodles of circus equipment (that is the correct plural noun — an oodle). On today’s look I did find a Magic Sword Through Neck Illusion (Missing Sword). With the sword missing one would imagine that most magicians would give it a miss. There’s also a gold-mining claim, and a FAKE USB flash drive. I admire the honesty of someone admitting that their device is fake, and even going to the point of putting it in capital letters, but I wonder how many people would really want to part with the £0.15 + £1.92 postage. Oops — I take it back. There is now 1 Bid for this item.

A friend of a friend who collected badges once bought ‘collection of fifty badges’ on eBay. When they arrived, it turned out it was fifty of the same badge, which slightly stretches the word ‘collection’.

Perhaps you don’t find the miscellany of eBay Everything Else as amusing as I do. To me, this is like getting an archaeologist’s glimpse of our civilisation from, say, a thousand years in the future. Imagine if all that was left of our culture was the collection of items advertised on today’s eBay Everything Else. What would the future think of us? What would they make of our fascination with, say, ball-bearings, phone unlocking and Hello Kity (sic) mascara?

Philip K Dick had a word for this: Kipple, the collection of useless bits of trash we wallow in. Philip Larkin questioned whether that which survives of us is love ¹. Archaeologists would probably argue that Dick rather than Larkin had it better. That which will outlast us all is Kipple.

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