Rich Men's Blues

I love Eric Clapton's guitar playing. He is likely to be the greatest guitarist ever to pass through here... But tickets have just gone on sale for his Albert Hall concerts in May 2017. And the cheapest are £100 each, with a £12 booking fee per ticket.

The £12 booking fee per ticket actually seems more out of order than the £100 for a cheap seat.

So to echo my comments about Buddy Guy recently, I'm sorry but I'm not prepared to pay that much. And how many young blues fans who should see Eric before he goes are going to be able to pay that amount?

I confess I paid over £300 a ticket (from criminal touts) to see Cream's reunion at the Albert Hall (although a lot less to see their first farewell there in 1968). But that was to see Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker as well as Eric.

With Bruce dead and Baker in a bad way, Clapton raking in yet more money seems to stick in the craw – even though he richly deserves to be rich.

Let's not forget that Cream (i.e. Bruce and Baker) made him much bigger than John Mayall's Bluesbreakers ever did. A benefit night for Mr Baker might haver persuaded me to part with £112.

But as it is, I hope all those rich old men enjoy their outing to the Albert Hall.

Just The Type

It has been 'revealed' that Lady Gaga writes her lyrics on a typewriter. One wonders why. Everybody used to, of course. Bob Dylan turned out most of his early masterpieces with a typewriter and a stream of cigarettes. Just like reporters did in the old days when I first joined a newspaper.

The discipline of the typewriter is that you have to try to get things right without starting again too many times, otherwise you create a mess – either on the page or in the wastebin or on the floor.

All those screwed up bits of paper used to be used in the movies to show how hard the writer was working – or how hard the writing process was.

Perhaps Gaga also sits surrounded by balls of discarded paper to illustrate the intensity of her creative processes.

And maybe also typewritten lyrics are not a bad investment for the future – since they'll be around to be sold to collectors in a few years' time, and far more of a genuine historical musical document than a computer printout.

Brown Shoes (Still) Don't Make It

A report by the Social Mobility Commission, quoted by the BBC, suggests that candidates who wear brown shoes to interviews tend not to get the job. People who get hired tend to be those "who fit in".

Loud ties and ill-fitting suits also have much the same effect as brown shoes, apparently. 

This is hardly news. Frank Zappa observed, at some length, on the Mothers of Invention 1967 album "Absolutely Free" that "Brown Shoes Don't Make It". Anyone who has heard that early Zappa magnum opus on the ills of society would hardly need the Social Mobility Commission, whatever that is, to tell them that brown shoes don't make it...