All posts by tc

The government, the NHS Risk Register, the comedian and the cat

thoughtcat, , , ,

The other day there were news reports that this shambles of a government had again formally refused to publish the NHS Risk Register, despite being instructed to by an Information Tribunal back in March. (What on earth is the point of the Information Commissioner, then, if the government can just do what it likes?) I heard about the story via Twitter where comedian and writer Graham Linehan, amongst others, was lamenting this latest episode of coalition numskullery and joined him in requesting that the register be released without any further bullshit. However, in the absence of Cameron, Lansley & co listening to us (who would’ve guessed?) I announced that the register had in fact been leaked… to me!

NHS Risk Register, as seen by Thoughtcat
NHS Risk Register, as seen by Thoughtcat.

I tweeted this via Lockerz and tried my best not to look at the stats every few minutes, although I couldn’t help noticing it was gradually getting views. That’s not saying much though, as anything uploaded to Lockerz gets a few dozen views regardless of what it is. Stats crawled up to about 19 or something and at that point a non-celebrity Twitter friend retweeted it, this time adding some hashtags which I should have added myself to begin with. It got a few more views and I then unashamedly decided to RT my friend’s tweet at Graham Linehan to see if he’d RT it himself. He didn’t seem to notice it for a while, which is understandable as he has about 170,000 followers and must get mentions all the time. But then, suddenly, he did. What a guy! I watched as the views went quickly into three figures, and the RT was itself RT’d about 50 more times over the course of the next two hours. By that time, views of the photo had exceeded 4,000, and at the peak of the RTing I got a tweet from an account I’d never heard of called @TrendsUK saying that I was, er, trending in the UK. I couldn’t quite believe this and when I looked at the official Twitter there was nothing there to back up this claim, but it was a nice feeling while it lasted.

I am only joking, of course. None of this is “nice” at all. The way the government is behaving over the NHS is appalling. I don’t for a moment fail to see the irony of a photo like this getting retweeted dozens of times. But it’s the sort of thing that happens when a government lies to the electorate. Shame on the government for propagating this sort of satire.

NB: I’ve still not heard from any of the Lib Dem peers I emailed back in March asking them to vote against the Health & Social Care bill. Not a single one.

An open letter to Lib Dem peers, and other communications I have attempted to get politicians to save the NHS

thoughtcat

This afternoon the Health & Social Care Bill is getting its final reading in the House of Lords. The outcome of this vote will have huge ramifications for the future of the National Health Service.

Last week I tried emailing a single Lib Dem MP, Sarah Teather, to ask that she vote to drop the Bill. I chose Ms Teather not because she’s my MP but because she always seemed to me to be basically a pleasant and trustworthy person. She’s also a Liberal Democrat, the party that could have swayed the vote and at one time were a bunch I thought quite highly of. Ms Teather did not respond, even to acknowledge my email. It is a great shame that she did this but what’s worse is that she didn’t even show up to vote, which contributed to the failure of the motion.

I have also written to my actual local MP, Mark Pawsey, urging him to support the release of the NHS Risk Register, and he responded as follows (I am quoting from his letter): “This Government is committed to transparency and is publishing more information than ever before to help patients make the right choices about their care … Risk registers are specific policy tools used across Government that present risks in ‘worst case scenario’ terms … to release these documents would damage the ability of Ministers to receive accurate advice, mislead the public debate and be detrimental to the public interest.”

This is clearly nonsense. Apart from the Orwellian use of the word “transparency”, and the fact that the Information Commissioner has asked that the nhs risk register be made public, which he would never have done if there were any technical reason for it to remain secret, how can it be against the public interest to release information which is absolutely relevant to the debate?

I find myself growing more and more depressed and, paradoxically, exercised by the news of the Bill as it groans on. I can’t express my contempt for Andrew Lansley deeply enough for his ill-conceived plans and snubbing of democracy. I was similarly angered by reports on Twitter about aggressive and intimidating police tactics used against peaceful NHS demonstrators in London on Saturday. When I first read the tweets about police being deployed armed with machine guns to control the protestors and verbally and physically abusing a woman with a 4-year-old child, I went straight to the BBC News website to see what on earth was going on. Nothing – not a dicky-bird. The same on the Guardian website, and on the Channel 4 News website. To date I’ve still seen nothing on these sites about any of this. I tweeted at them to ask why not but didn’t receive a response. I wasn’t in London myself at the time but I know for a fact that demonstrators did not behave in a manner befitting such policing precisely because those news websites failed to report anything. Had there been “clashes” we would have known about them straightaway. My faith in this government and its tactics grows ever lower… and don’t even get me started on George Osborne’s plot to lower the top rate of tax or Michael Gove, well, just being Michael Gove.

But, I digress… today I tried to find a website giving the ability to email all Lib Dem peers to ask them to vote to save the NHS. I couldn’t find one, but I did find most of their email addresses on the parliament.uk website. I manually copied the ones that were displayed into an email and sent them all the following letter:

Hello,

As an extremely wavering Lib Dem voter/supporter I am counting on you as a Lib Dem peer to restore my trust in the Liberal Democrats and the democratic process and save one of our country’s most vital institutions.

It will be clear by now that the Health & Social Care Bill threatens many vulnerable people. The National Health System will be fragmented, private providers will take over and care will be rationed. This is deeply wrong, and I will tell you a one-paragraph story from my personal experience as to why.

Seven years ago my first child was born at an NHS hospital in Surrey. I hadn’t, thankfully, had much cause to use the NHS during my life. My wife went into labour around 7 in the morning but 24 hours later, most of that spent in the hospital, she still hadn’t given birth. The decision was made to induce the delivery and possibly perform a caesarean. Suddenly we went from a quiet private room in which one midwife was encouraging my wife to “push” to an operating theatre in which no fewer than a dozen medical experts were in attendance – all for one baby and one woman. I was staggered at this level of care and attention. The team of doctors and nurses delivered the baby without having to perform the caesarean and, just as importantly, my wife and I were personally comforted at this extremely emotional and worrying moment by members of the team. My wife was fine and our son was born healthy and has just celebrated his seventh birthday.

This service was paid for by me and millions of other people out of our taxes and this is why the UK is a better place than other countries where we wouldn’t even have been let into the building if we hadn’t had the money to pay for the care.

Our government is eroding democracy by trying to push through this Bill against the will of doctors, nurses, patients and taxpayers. I am PLEADING with you to respect democracy and transparency and stop this damaging bill now. I would like you to ensure the government’s Risk Register is published to enable full debate about the consequences of any reforms – but if you cannot or will not do that, at least recognise that millions of people never voted for the proposed changes, and hundreds of thousands of people have signed petitions and contacted politicians such as yourself to express this view.

Please vote to save the NHS.

Many thanks and kind regards.

So far I’ve had four automatic replies: one from Baroness Bonham-Carter saying “I do not check this email address every day”, one from Lord Tordoff saying “I shall be away until 28th March.  During that period I will not be able to process any e-mails”, and one from Lord Clement-Jones saying “I am currently out of the the office” although adding that the email will be forwarded to another address. I’ve also had an automatic reply from Baroness Williams saying “Thank you for writing to me about the Health and Social Care Bill. I have received hundreds of emails and letters so I’m afraid I cannot provide an individual reply”, going on to outline her position and provide explanations for it. Since that was an automatic reply I’m quite surprised that her email software knew that it was about the Health & Social Care Bill. Maybe she has a guilty conscience. I sure hope some of them have.

RIP Tom Hibbert

Music, thoughtcat

I had the rare opportunity last Sunday to read the whole of the newspaper (it wasn’t even the Sunday newspaper, but the Guardian from the previous day). As happens 99% of the time, hardly anything in the paper was much of a surprise. And then I got to the back and there was a large photo of Margaret Thatcher in all her regalness sitting on a posh Number 10 sofa next to someone who looked like he really didn’t belong on a posh sofa next to the prime minister. It took me several moments to realise who he was: thin, bespectacled, dark suit with white socks. Surely not… blimey, yes, it’s him, I realised at the same time as reading his name printed alone at the top of the article, and then to my genuine surprise and sadness the word “Obituary”.

Tom Hibbert (for it was he) was one of my favourite journalists back in the eighties. He first came to my attention at Smash Hits, a now-defunct weekly pop magazine (almost a comic, really) which had interviews with pop acts of the day, posters, quizzes, news/gossip and song lyrics. Hibbert’s contributions were mainly ridiculous questions posed to pop stars, such as “Have you ever swallowed a golf tee?” or “Have you ever been sick in your shoe?” I also remember laughing hysterically (well, I was only 13) at a photo of Max Headroom‘s Matt Frewer wearing a fez (long before they were cool) with a Hibbert caption referring to him as a “buffoon”. I laughed at that particular item so much in fact one night while lying in bed that my mum later said she initially thought I was in pain. I probably was, actually, albeit only with sore ribs from reading all these brilliant Hibbertisms.

Elsewhere in “ver Hits” you’d find interjections ranging from the onomatopoeic (“Spleeeee!!!”) to the sarcastic, such as this in the lyrics of a new Paul McCartney single called Press:

Baby, we could hit upon a word,
Something that the others haven’t heard,
When you want me to love you,
Just tell me to press.
Right there, that’s it, yes, [are you absolutely sure about this? – Ed]
Ah, when you feel the stress don’t just stand there,
Tell me to press...

The best thing about Hibbert was that he wasn’t afraid of poking fun at the great and good, and certainly not at the truly crap. He moved on from Smash Hits to Q Magazine, which I started reading from its second or third issue. Q became a monthly ritual for me back in the 80s and 90s, i.e. when it was actually any good. Hibbert was given a monthly interview slot called “Who the hell does X think he is?” in which he’d talk to X, who was invariably some pompous, arrogant celebrity or media character – or rather, he’d turn on the tape recorder, say hardly anything at all and let them hang themselves. People cite the usual subjects like Bernard Manning, Albert Goldman and Jonathan Ross, but the one I remember most was Dennis Potter, who was a tad on the arrogant side even if he wasn’t in the same (low) league as most of the other targets. I was a great Potter fan at the time, as The Singing Detective had just been on TV, so I was delighted to see two of my favourite writers in the same room. Potter though was terribly rude to Hibbert, saying “Oh, why don’t you just die” when the journalist couldn’t light his cigarette properly or something. Hibbert responded by saying “Sorry, I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to say.” I doubt very many people who encountered Potter had the confidence to respond like that, even though it’s perfectly reasonable, but the funniest thing is that at the end of the interview, during which Potter had continued to be rude and also advised “Never apologise”, the playwright got up from his seat, apologised heartily to Hibbert and broke into peals of laughter.

Q Magazine in later years also had a section called Where are they now? in which they’d analyse what happened to a particular group or artist. One time they had some kind of special article on The Love Trousers, which turned out to be a band comprising veteran rock journalist Mark Ellen and Hibbert. The latter, I recall, was pictured splayed on the floor with a guitar, and the photo caption had the credit “Tom Hibbert (Flying on the ground is wrong)”, referencing a Neil Young song. Even more years later I was queuing up in a chaotic Albert Hall foyer for the Concert for George when I found myself standing next to Mark Ellen, who seemed to be having as much hassle getting into the gig as everyone else. There was ample time to chat and I really wanted to say “When are The Love Trousers going to reform?” but all I said was something about the Albert Hall disorganisation. I bumped into Ellen again about five years after that at a showcase gig for Leonard Cohen’s girlfriend Anjani that I’d managed to blag my way into, but again failed to speak to him. I really wish I had, as by then I’d not heard anything of Hibbert for years and was keen to know what he was up to.

Sadly, according to the obituary, it seems that what Hibbert was up to was being seriously ill at home and unable to work – for years. I long ago got shot of all my back issues of Q – I gave them to a local hospital, I think, as they were becoming a major feature in my tiny flat at that time (this was before eBay was invented, so I could probably have made a few quid from them if I’d waited, but I’m kind of glad I didn’t). Just a few weeks ago I’d Googled for a Hibbert Q magazine article and found no examples of his journalism online at all beyond what was behind an expensive paywall site. I didn’t stump up, because all I was actually after was a silly short interview with Ginger Baker, mainly so I could read a typical exchange between Hibbert and the drummer about heroin use, in which Hibbert had said he could understand how one could “toot” a trumpet while stoned, but not play a highly physical instrument like the drums. It sounds very silly indeed but it was just Hibbert’s choice of verb “toot” that I remembered and wanted to see again in print. I don’t think there was anyone else like him in journalism and I’d like to take this opportunity of thanking him for all the hours of fun he gave me.

  • There are also nice articles about Hibbert here and here

My memories of reading and books as a child

thoughtcat,

I recently befriended a lovely woman who tweets under the name of @AliB68, following an event we both attended in London a few months ago involving Russell Hoban, of whom we’ve both long been big fans. Ali runs a blog about children’s books called Fantastic Reads on which she’d written about Hoban’s classic The Mouse and his Child, while I’ve been webmaster-in-chief of the SA4QE website for many years. It was great meeting her, as it always is other Hoban fans (I’m something of a veteran in these quarters), and Ali went on to help “Russ” celebrate his 86th birthday this year by delivering his annual “birthday bottle” gift donated by his fan club The Kraken.

Anyway, a few months passed and, inspired by Ali’s excellent blog, I had the idea of writing about the books I myself had read as a child. I remembered quite a lot of the titles and luckily still have many of the original books (I read some now to my own children). I asked Ali if she’d be interested in a guest post for her site, and very generously she said yes, so I set to work. When my first draft turned out to be over 5,000 words long, I fully anticipated her changing her mind, but she adapted effortlessly and broke my epic down into a series of posts. So here, for the hopeful entertainment of Thoughtcat readers, are the links to said posts:

Part 1 – on James by Kathryn, The Great Pie Robbery by Richard Scarry, and Little Richard by Patricia M. Scarry

James was the first book I remember reading and still one of the most original books I’ve ever seen. The Scarrys’ books had pies and biscuits in them – nuff said.

Part 2 – on Mr Tickle by Roger Hargreaves, Aesop’s Fables, and a Ladybird I won for singing

Mr Tickle’s own deft way with a biscuit made him my favourite Mr Man. Plus: the mystery of Aesop’s missing limbs.

Part 3 – on The Adventures of Uncle Lubin by W. Heath Robinson, Paddington by Michael Bond and Rabbiting On by Kit Wright

Uncle Lubin was a brilliant book, even if it will psychologically damage you for life. And Paddington had marmalade sandwiches (you may detect a certain sweet-tooth theme by now).

Part 4 – on Grimble by Clement Freud, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend, The Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle, and meeting Bobby Brewster author H.E. Todd

My schoolboy role models! (Together with the Uncle Lubin influence it’s a wonder I managed to become a fully-functioning adult at all.)

Part 5 – on Owl Babies by Martin Waddell, A New House for Mouse by Petr Horáček, Mr Big by Ed Vere, This Is London by Miroslav Sasek, Yellow Submarine “by” The Beatles, Miss Renee’s Mice by Elizabeth Stokes Hoffman and The Animal Train by Christopher Wormell

A round-up of modern books (and recent discoveries of classics) that I read to my own children.

Having written all of this (especially at such length), I then realised I’d still left out a few titles. One was Elmer by David McKee, the classic story of the patchwork elephant who just wants to be like all the other elephants: the jungle illustrations are fabulous and I especially love the message that ultimately you can never hide your true colours. Another was Lauren Child’s Charlie and Lola phenomenon – to be fair, I came to that through the TV series, not the books, but both are wonderful, hugely imaginative and beautifully observed stories about a young brother and sister. Lola’s unique way of expressing herself has meant that phrases such as “I haven’t got time to do stopping” (instead of “I haven’t got time to stop”) have entered my own vocabulary, while strawberry milkshake is no longer strawberry milkshake in our family but will forever be “pink milk”.

Some journalists “a bit thick”, according to reports

thoughtcat, , , ,

A quick study by Thoughtcat over a cup of tea and a biscuit has found that some journalists and news organisations are “a bit stupid”.

The BBC was forced into a humiliating climbdown today after finding that “a study” by some dodgy psychometric testing firm called AptiQuant, which found users of Internet Explorer were by definition borderline retarded, was a hoax.

The BBC report followed a report saying the same thing on the Daily Mail website, amongst others.

“I didn’t realise that some stories might not necessarily be based on facts,” said Dan Pratt, a technology reporter for the BBC.

“I thought I just had to read the Daily Mail and do a cut-and-paste job to generate content for the site.”

Meanwhile, Kevin Thick, the reporter responsible for the Daily Mail story, said: “I didn’t realise there had to be proper science behind these sorts of stories. I just found this study online and thought, Wow, this is interesting.

“The only problem with the story was that we couldn’t get in any immigrant-bashing, but we thought Hey, why not bash thick people instead for a change?”

The BBC has now replaced its original story with a story reporting that the original story was a hoax, while the Daily Mail has removed its story altogether.

Rumours that users of Internet Explorer are in fact a bit thick have yet to be confirmed, but another Thoughtcat study, this time over a cup of coffee and a doughnut, have found it to be “probably true”.

Thoughtcat.com – new Drupal site

thoughtcat

The original Thoughtcat site at thoughtcat.com has been dormant for quite a while (even more so than this blog in fact). I’ve started the process of resurrecting it today, as I’ve lately got into Drupal for various reasons and it feels appropriate to use that platform for my stuff rather than this one now. To be fair the main reasons I moved to WordPress in the first place were (a) it had, at that time, more “website”-type features than Blogger, such as standalone pages, and (b) it was free. I had envisaged saving myself a few pounds on hosting fees by eventually migrating all the original content from thoughtcat.com to this blog, but it never really happened and anyway in the meantime I’ve quite happily started developing on Drupal with a slightly cheaper (and certainly much better value) hosting than I had previously. When I first started blogging and “developing” websites (for want of a better word) I actually never imagined I’d be able to have a proper database-driven site on my own hosting, so I’m quite amazed this has finally happened 🙂

So anyway, it’s likely that future updates and blog posts will be made on www.thoughtcat.com.

EDIT 3/8/11: Actually I’ve decided to keep Thoughtcat.com just for Drupal stuff, and the WordPress blog for everything else, especially as I can’t be arsed to do yet another big content migration from here to Drupal (even if it would be an interesting exercise). So do please keep reading the WordPress blog.

The Concert for George: A review

Music

On the occasion today of what would have been George Harrison’s 68th birthday, I’m posting the original text of my review of The Concert for George, the 2002 all-star tribute show that I was lucky enough to attend, which was first posted on the old Thoughtcat blog on 3 December 2003. (No, I can’t believe it’s been almost ten years since he died either, and even less somehow that I’ve been blogging nearly as long…)

FALLING SWINGERS

I’m delighted to see that The Concert for George, the magnificent memorial gig for George Harrison at London’s Royal Albert Hall almost exactly a year ago, has now been released on CD and DVD. Thoughtcat was lucky enough to be in attendance at this star-studded one-off tribute to the late Quiet One, although it was kind of a miracle that we even got there at all. First of all it involved a trial of telethonic proportions to get through and buy the tickets, although this was only to be expected: Albert Hall was selling seats exclusively over the phone and only from 9am on a certain day a few weeks before the concert, and even though I was all set at ten to nine with the number and my credit card to hand, despite about 600 attempts I couldn’t get through for over an hour. All I can say is thank heavens for the redial button, or else I might have given up with cramp after about ten minutes. By the time I did get through, the only tickets they had left were standing room only in the top gallery, at a whopping £50 each. Having bought six for myself and some friends and family, Albert advised that the tickets wouldn’t be sent through the post but would instead be issued at the venue from 5pm on the night of the concert. This was a bit early (the gig was due to start at 7.30) but we were advised we could get a meal at the Albert Hall restaurants from 5.30, which was good news because most of us had been working all day and none of us were particularly looking forward to standing up all night not having had anything to eat. In the event though the box office was open but there was a queue anyway, and after queuing for ten minutes I was told to wait in a separate queue for the standing tickets. This second queue went round the side of the building and not only wasn’t moving but didn’t go anywhere for an hour, a situation worsened by some building work being done adjacent and the proximity of the artists’ door, where paparazzi and autograph-hunters were crowding. The whole queue was moaning in true British style about being given confusing information, about being given no information, about having to queue at all, and of course about how it was all Tony Blair’s fault. Inside there was a great scrum of people collecting their tickets, although when we eventually got to the counter they weren’t tickets but wristbands which we each had to be personally “fitted” with. As we waited, Mark Ellen, the famous Old Grey Whistle Test and Q Magazine journalist and sometime Blair bandmate turned up, and was trying to get in as haplessly as the rest of us. I said to him, “If they’re making you wait, we’re all in trouble!” He nodded gravely. “It doesn’t look good,” he concurred. When we were finally all wristbanded, the beleaguered ticket guy said that if we wanted our actual tickets as a memento, we had to queue again for them after the show! It was extraordinary.

By the time they let us in it was 7pm. The air inside Albert was literally hazy with incense, and staff were standing around in white long-sleeve teeshirts with purple chakra designs handing out free programs, which were very nicely bound in rich purple with tasteful black & white photos of George and some comments from him about life, music and his Material World charity which the gig was in aid of (‘in aid of which the gig was’?). We felt a bit better but by now it was too late to get a meal, so we grabbed some glasses of red wine and headed up to the gallery. None of us had ever been up there before and the view was fantastic. It was unreserved but there was a space at the balcony directly opposite the centre of the stage, so we grabbed it. The whole hall was lit in warm orange and yellow hues. A banner in red and orange with the “Arpan” symbol from Harrison’s records was hanging above the hall. The semi-circular stage was perimetered with Indian instruments, and in the centre there was a raised platform with an Indian rug and an electric guitar. Hanging behind the stage was a vast black and white photo of George looking fabulously handsome and moody in an early-70s pose with long hair and moustache. (He really was one of the few men who could wear a moustache and not look like a member of the Village People.) From where we were though we couldn’t see the whole picture because the rack of lights was in the way – in fact from where we stood, two large, round, black lights were hanging in front of his eyes, making him look like a giant fly. We stood around for a while, and just when we’d got settled in and forgotten all the previous inconveniences, a steward in a red Butlins-type jacket told us off for bringing glasses up to the gallery, even though we’d been told we were allowed to by the bartender. We could however use plastic glasses, she said, so we swigged our drinks and one of us went down to the bar and brought up another round in plastic glasses. We’d got about half way through those when a second steward appeared and said we were in fact only allowed plastic bottles with lids on, “in case anything was spilled”. It took a third steward in a black jacket to arbitrate between the first two stewards and us before we could enjoy our drinks against the sort of peaceful background appropriate to the occasion the Albert Hall was pretending to provide. George himself was probably rocking and rolling in his grave.

To our enormous relief, the first part of the concert started, albeit half an hour later than billed. Eric Clapton came on in a grey short-sleeved shirt and introduced the concert in a very low, peaceful voice. Rarely the most confident of speakers, he nervously referred to “George’s wife Dhani” before correcting himself (Dhani is George’s son – his wife’s name is Olivia). There was a faint ripple of laughter at this but it seemed soon forgotten. EC introduced Ravi Shankar, who came on looking very frail. He didn’t play but introduced his daughter Anoushka and a 16-strong Indian orchestra. Olivia came on then and lit some candles. The house lights stayed on, and although this was probably only because they needed the light to film the concert, it lent a great deal of warmth, optimism and calm to the concert. The Indian music, which lasted about half an hour, was beautiful, peaceful and colourful, and Anoushka was also beautiful and clearly highly skilled, although you could sense that a lot of people were aching for the main part of the concert to start. Jeff Lynne, of ELO and Traveling Wilburys fame, joined them at the end for The Inner Light, and then EC came back on, picked up a Spanish guitar and “jammed” with the orchestra on a delightful acoustic instrumental piece. There was an intermission then, interrupted only by a steward who told us we weren’t allowed to hang our coats over the balcony.

Thankfully the main set started without further ado. The atmosphere was electric, or at least acoustic. To everyone’s delight the show began with a little comedy section. Four guys dressed as posh French restaurant waiters with ankle-length aprons and crisp dishcloths over their wrists trouped on and did a silly song which I couldn’t hear hardly any of the words of, but it was obviously something Pythonesque, as the programme mentioned that various Pythons would be participating. Later I found the song was Sit On My Face And Tell Me That You Love Me. When they’d finished singing, they turned round and trouped off again, revealing that they were wearing no trousers or pants under their aprons. Then, a guy whose face I couldn’t see very well (we couldn’t really see any facial details from that distance) but who turned out to be Michael Palin bounded down the stairs onto the stage wearing a bright white jacket with gold lame lapels and did a silly introduction: “This evening is so big, so ginormously huge, so simply magnificently, er, large, that it makes one feel just wretchedly inadequate, really…” Palin then ripped off his jacket to reveal a lumberjack shirt, and a troupe of “mounties” came on for the Pythons’ brilliant Lumberjack song, complete with the pretty, dippy girl with blonde pigtails and big blue dress. It was fantastic, and although you couldn’t hear all the words, it hardly mattered. We had no idea at the time, but apparently Tom Hanks turned in a cameo as one of the mounties.

This bunch all went off, and then the main band came on – EC, Gary Brooker and Chris Stainton on keyboards, Jim Keltner on drums, Ray Cooper on percussion, Andy Fairweather Low and Albert Lee among the backup guitarists, EC’s backing singers Tessa Niles and Katie Kissoon, a sax and trumpet player, and even, on bass, Klaus Voormann, who designed the Beatles’ Revolver album cover and had played with Lennon on the Imagine album and here, there and everywhere else. George’s son Dhani was also on stage, wearing a long white smock-type shirt and playing a big brown acoustic guitar. I didn’t know it was him for quite a while (he wasn’t mentioned on the program and not introduced until the end) but there was something very Georgian about his… well, his hair, really. The band began with a resounding I Want to Tell You from Revolver, and continued the Beatles stuff with If I Needed Someone, both of which EC sang. Gary Brooker sang the vocal on Old Brown Shoe, while Jeff Lynne sang on Give Me Love. EC came back up to the front to sing on Beware of Darkness, a sublime track from All Things Must Pass, and he played the solo note-for-note from the record. God, the number of evenings I’ve sat up and played that song, disappearing with the aid of a few glasses of wine into its echoey depths… it couldn’t have been a better choice.

The main band then went off for a while as old “cockerney” rock hero Joe Brown and his band took the stage to do a perfectly-judged acoustic Here Comes the Sun. He then took out a mandolin and played a song I hadn’t heard before called That’s the Way it Goes from Gone Troppo, which was also lovely. The main band came back on with Jools Holland and Sam Brown for Horse to the Water, the last song Harrison recorded (for Jools’ Small World, Big Band ensemble album from the previous year, crediting it to the “RIP 2001” publishing company, only to die a few months later). This number was storming, Sam Brown’s voice taking the Albert’s famously domed roof off. The band then did Isn’t It a Pity, another All Things classic, on which EC played some magnificent extended solos. The whole thing was getting better and better.

EC and the others then went off yet again, this time to be replaced by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who did Taxman (Petty sneering the wicked vocal in Artful Dodger pose), I Need You, complete with the distinctive volume-pedal guitar part, and Handle With Care from the first Wilburys record, which was fantastic, another storming version. There was much hope in the air that Bob Dylan would come on to do more Wilburys songs, but he didn’t. I can’t imagine he wasn’t asked to join in but I think it might have been difficult politically for him to have been involved, with the emphasis on the British aspect and the fact that it was ultimately a Beatles thing more than anything else, plus there were so many legends there already that his turning up might have caused a mass mutual orgasm from which none of us might ever have recovered.

The main band returned then and EC introduced Ringo. The crowd gave him a fantastic reception – pretty much a standing ovation in fact. He had a beautiful red velvet jacket and a pair of round sunglasses. “I loved George, and George loved me,” he said laconically, conveying fifty years of unique companionship and the whole Beatles story in one quintessential Ringunderstatement. He sang Photograph, a great song which he co-wrote with George, and Honey Don’t, an old Carl Perkins song that Harrison loved, which featured a howling solo from a guitarist with wild grey hair who was either Albert Einstein or Albert Lee.

Ringo then retired to the drums, so now there were three drummers and about 14 guitarists and 3 keyboard players on stage. When EC then introduced “Sir” Paul McCartney, the place just became unspeakable. Macca started with For You Blue, the nice but inessential Harrison blues from Let It Be, and then, referring to Eric’s mistake earlier about “George’s wife Dhani”, which got a laugh, picked up a ukulele and explained that whenever you went round George’s house, after dinner “the ukuleles would come out” and you’d inevitably find yourself singing “all these old numbers”. He then strummed (plucked? uked?) a solo version of Something – it was so simple and beautiful, and all the more heartbreaking because you were thinking maybe George’s best-known (and surely best Beatles-era) song wasn’t going to be given the full-band treatment. However, when it came to the solo, McCartney stopped plucking, wandered over to the piano, and the whole band seamlessly picked up the thread of the song, with one of the other guitarists playing the famous solo (George’s best, for my money) note-for-note. EC then took over the lead vocal from Macca, which must have been bizarre given that George wrote the song for his first wife Patti, whom Clapton of course later went on to steal from George (as well-documented in EC’s own classic Layla and just about everywhere else).

The next Paul-vocalised song was a pleasant surprise – All Things Must Pass itself. By now McCartney was back on acoustic guitar, and he and EC were up the front of the stage standing side by side with their guitar necks facing each other, looking uncannily Beatle-esque. The next song took a few moments to get started, but the band played a few notes to tune up and I had a strong feeling it was going to be While My Guitar Gently Weeps… and it was. Macca played the echoey keyboard intro exactly the same as on the record, while EC sang the lead vocal and played a note-for-note solo, complete with the famous extra “wobbly” vibrato. All this guitar heroicism was almost too much for poor old Thoughtcat. It was magnificent, the whole moment setting in stone before my ears.

The concert ended with My Sweet Lord, which Billy Preston sang in a sub-gospel style, and Wah-Wah, a very heavy song off All Things Must Pass, which was so loud it was actually painful. As the Guardian review of the gig explained later, Wah-Wah was an interesting choice because Harrison reputedly wrote the song as a stab at McCartney after a particularly sour late-era Beatles rehearsal, yet here was Macca himself playing piano on the track. For this last song the people in the front stalls got out of their seats and crowded up near the front of the stage like a bunch of middle-aged teenagers. As the show ended McCartney took the mike and said, “Olivia just said that with Dhani up on stage tonight it looks like George stayed young and we all got old.” Then for an encore Joe Brown came on with his ukulele (saying “This ain’t too loud for ya, is it?”) and did the gentle old jazz number I’ll See You in My Dreams as red rose petals tumbled down from the roof onto the audience and Olivia came on to hug Dhani. It was enough, as they say, to make a grown man cry. Afterwards Dhani came up to the front and said, “Hi, I just want to thank everyone for performing… I’m Dhani by the way, George’s wife.”

Altogether, I need hardly say it was the best rock concert I’ve ever been to. It was really more than I could have hoped for. And the good news is that you too can now share in the magnificence of this unique gig in the comfort of your own front room, and all without having to spend an hour on the phone for tickets, queue around the block or be told off by people in red jackets (unless that’s your thing, of course). Amazon as ever is doing some excellent offers on the DVD and CD, so if this whole thing turns you on please do click on the appropriate link below, turn up the volume and listen to the music of a master played by a handful of legends. Even better, all profits from the DVD are to go to Harrison’s Material World Charitable Foundation. The Foundation doesn’t appear to have a website but according to this page on Norwegian site beatles-unlimited.com it was established in 1973 to “sponsor diverse forms of artistic expression and to encourage the exploration of alternative life views and philosophies”, as well as support “established charitable organizations with consideration to those with special needs”.

Kitchen gig update update

Music, thoughtcat

I’m well chuffed to see that one of the guitar solo videos I recorded last summer – Me playing along to Portishead’s It Could Be Sweet – has now had over 500 views. Sure, I mean this isn’t exactly up there with other YouTube hits we have known, but better/slap/face/fish etc. Above is a reprise for those who missed it first time around.

Update 2/2/11: finally edited to link to the correct video on YT. (The Portishead one has now had over 600 views btw :))