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I want to do this, please. Four grand, though?
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Excellent stuff despite what I wrote a while ago. Clearly you have to be a fairly colossal jerk to oppose immigration.
After a really crappy week of sport (yes, I was at Wembley on Saturday) this cheered me up.
I’ve been on a campaign for some time to abolish flying from my schedule. I hate it. Not the actual act of flying, but the absolutely horrendous psychological trauma of going to a bloody airport and being treated like a particularly stupid sheep for the best part of two hours. Hate it hate it hate it. Although I am flying to Greece this Sunday. Tin hats on.
So I really enjoyed reading Simon Busch’s piece in Guardian travel (link below) about sailing to Amsterdam. As someone who is seriously considering taking the train to the Algarve (best part of 48 hours) rather than the plane (8 hours) I know precisely where Simon is coming from.
And a very nice Douglas Adams quote kicks it off. Go read it.
| On my last flight, a so-called budget fare to Grenoble, I wondered why they didn’t just slap me and let me board: the sum assault on my dignity would have been the same as all the preliminaries. In its rationalistic dehumanisation and its crushing of enchantment, flying represents everything about modernity it would be pleasant to rewind. |
| Word of the ferries’ concertina expansion had evidently not yet got out. Progress through customs on the outward journey was uncrowded enough – there was no crowd – but, returning from Holland, I was the only passenger in the departure hall at all. “Busy night?” I asked the officer, almost giggling from the strangeness of it all. “You’re the first one I’ve seen in half an hour,” he replied, flicking languidly through my passport. A quartet of his towering, blonde, female Dutch colleagues began, for some reason, singing Auld Lang Syne as he waved me through. This was not Heathrow. |
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So, you’re Stuart Rose. You turn around a gigantic high street retailer. You make billions. And then you appoint Martha Lane Fox as a non-executive director. So whose photo do the journalists put on your story?
There’s been, ooh, fifty trillion blog posts with that headline above, but none of them have been as concise or knowledgable as David Hepworth’s this morning on the EMI takeover.
The other week I got a call from EMI asking me to do a voiceover for a John Cale ad to run on a couple of digital rock stations. I turned up at the appointed time at one of those flash Soho sound studios where there are two leggy girls on reception and they bring you coffee in designer cups. When the rep from EMI turned up - late because for some reason they’d ordered a car to deliver them into the West End during rush hour - it took about two minutes to do the ad. The studio is bound to have put in a four figure bill for their services, on a job that I could have done on my Mac at home.
The point of this story is, big record companies still make records in the only way they know how - expensively. |
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