Gone camping

With apologies to David Shrigley and thanks to K&D.

The Olivetti Chronicles

Eagle-eyed readers of this blog will have noticed the little LibraryThing widget about halfway down the column on the right seems to have been stuck, displaying the pensive visage of the legendary John Peel without fail for the last three months as numerous other book covers have come and gone. However, the problem has nothing to do with the irreproachable LibraryThing or even with my lax updating of the data which it requires to accurately provide this essential part of the Geography of Hope experience. No, it has all been down to the fact that I couldn't bear to finish this cobbled together, blatant (dare I say it) cash-in which is all that remains of John's wit and wisdom.

Like listening to John's radio show (which I have to confess I never did as often as I would have liked to pretend I did) you never know what is going to be up next. But it has been wonderfully comforting picking up this collection of articles and hearing in my head that gruff but reassuring accent musing on subjects as varied as Eurovision, Extreme Noise Terror, The Fall (not nearly as much as you would expect), football (lots of football), Cliff Richard, vaginal deodorants and Top of the Pops. Written for a diverse range of publications from Sounds to The Radio Times over a period of about thirty three (and a third) years it is actually the perfect memento of a singular and remarkable man whose love of new music rubbed off on a couple of generations of music fans.

The greatest pleasure in pop music derives, I believe, from the manner in which its very nature resists scholarship ... Pop is a car-boot sale, a parade of trinkets, junk and handicrafts, most worthless, some capable of giving a few moments of pleasure, with a few glorious items made more glorious by their unexpected appearance in this market. Then in an unpredictable double-bluff, the worthless can, within a few years, take on great worth and the glorious become merely laughable.

Monkey

Eleven quotes from an article in The Observer Music Monthly by Paul Morley and about 'the musician, realist and fantasist Damon Albarn and fellow conspirator, the graphic artist Jamie Hewlett'.

1 how since everything is a reflection of our minds everything can be changed with our minds

2 There were 30 Mali musicians playing very loud music [on the roof of Damon and Jamie's west London studio] and whenever a train came past we all waved. People must have thought, did I actually see that, or have I had a long and tiring day. No one waved back, though.

3 I remember the moment when I became a little bit more political when I spliced on tape some of my Dad's Arabic recordings over the Human League's 'The Lebanon'

4 fifteen lotus maidens in pyramid formation, some doing the splits and spinning plates in front of the all-knowing Buddha

5 Damon arrives carrying coffee and cake for three. 'That's not easy on a bicycle,' he boasts.

6 your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart give yourself to it

7 Opera magazine host an informal discussion, exploring for a classical readership unfamiliar with Albarn's pop music the possibility that Journey to the West might actually not just be hyperbolically called an opera but might actually be an opera.

8 There are in fact three Monkeys in all this – the cuddlier cartoon BBC Monkey, the slightly more sinister rascally Monkey in the Opera and the much more menacing Monkey of the record.

9 Chen Shi-Zheng has taught us about the Buddhist principle that you must not mourn for the past, or worry about the future, or anticipate problems, but live in the present moment wisely and earnestly. That's why we call him Chairman Now.

10 He wonders if perhaps it's from the 1940s, and is therefore a Nazi typewriter. The thought perversely pleases him.

11 Damon dances to his music, unashamedly lost in the thoughts he's having about how three years of thoughts – about the history and future of China, about how to follow up Blur, Gorillaz, his Mali music, his film soundtracks, the decaying London of The Good, the Bad and the Queen, his own perfectionist craving for newness that honours oldness, for strangeness that emphasies romance – have turned into an electric music that is clearly by the musician responsible for the above, and yet by a new kind of musician.