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...

Give Us A Break

The old joke about a drummer being someone who hangs around with musicians is not really that funny. And you'd think it would have been made obsolete by now, as a result of the remarkable musicianship of so many drummers in all fields of music.

But BBC online has just featured a report with the byline of business reporter Ed Butler that starts off: "The British musician and drummer Sudha Kheterpal..."

Is he insulting drummers deliberately? Or is he subconsciously or totally unknowingly simply revealing ignorance and prejudice?

For the record Sudha Kheterpal (who has played with Faithless, the Spice Girls and Kylie Minogue) has created a percussive device that also creates energy. Goodness! A successful drummer... and she has a brain! Whatever next?

Final Edition

The Independent is dead. Long live The Independent online?

The Independent was launched as a radical, politically independent newspaper in the UK in 1986. That it survived for 30 years – and through many years of its imminent demise being forecast – is quite an achievement.

The current proprietor has portrayed its demise as part of a pioneering leap forward into the new world of online publishing. Newspaper journalists, on the whole, see it as a deeply sad bereavement.

Dumbing down appears to be the way ahead online – a glance at the Daily Mail online, The Telegraph online, and even The Independent online or the BBC online should make that fairly clear.

Lists, trivia and a paucity of in-depth coverage seem to be what is required. And in the case of the Mail Online, prurient droolings over female 'celebrities' showing their tits and arses. This is the new journalism.

I am glad to say that I freelanced at The Independent for several years in the 1990s, and also again over the past three years. With grateful thanks to fate, I will be in its office on the night we put together its last edition, and say goodbye to a journalistic era that began with idealism and ended with pragmatism – and a sense of dread.

The BBC? Don't Knock It...

If you thought the BBC was just too outdated and too unwieldy for anyone to manage it, a few moments inside the labyrinth of its Maida Vale studios in London would confirm your opinion.

People could go into this ancient maze of characterless corridors and rooms and never be seen again.

I was there last night because I had the honour of acting as roadie for drummer John Marshall, one of the legendary jazz musicians (along with Roy Babbington and Art Themen) playing with the BBC Big Band in a memorial concert for the late and great Graham Collier.

And once you were guided through the tangle of passageways and were inside the studio with some of the finest players in jazz, then you appreciated the fact that there are certain things the BBC does better than anyone else ever will. (As if to accentuate the timeless quality of the place, a plaque by the stage informed us that this was the studio where Bing Crosby made his last recording.)

Collier's music — especially in the hands of these master players — was absolutely stunning, running from dirty blues to sophisticated jazz, via grooves that could be (and have been) sampled by contemporary DJs and hip-hop musicians.

If you want to hear how good a night it was, the concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 11pm on Sunday November 25 and will also be on iPlayer.

Security Risk

Only a few days to go to the Olympics, and it's good to know that the military are prepared to shoot down hijacked passenger planes over heavily populated areas of London.

Now we can all sleep easy in our beds.

David Starkey tends to be a little extreme in his pronouncements, but his tirade against the Olympics on the BBC's Any Questions? last night really did go over the top — in the very best way.

It's surprising that he wasn't taken out mid-flow by a strategically based missile.

A Lot Of Front

Russ, dynamic frontman with Russ Payne and the Shark Dentists (www.sharkdentists.co.uk), pictured above, hit the airwaves yesterday to talk about our latest venture — a monthly blues night at the Port Mahon, Oxford, at which we're inviting local players to come and sit in with the band.

I set up the interview on BBC Radio Oxford, but Russ did the business in the studio. He's a great front man. And, like most drummers, apart from the likes of Buddy Rich, Keith Moon and Ginger Baker, I'm mostly happy to be in the background.

Wasn't it a bit arrogant, asked the BBC interviewer, for Russ to put his own name in front of that of the band? "Yes," said Russ. "But I'm a guitarist."