The Dumbest Thing I've Heard This Week

BBC Radio 2 continues to offend in ways it can hardly imagine, and I don't just mean by playing too much Snow Patrol. I had the misfortune on my way home last night, (in-between poptastic CD's of my own choice naturally) to catch approximately 1 minute of Claudia Winkleman's show. It was Clem Burke from Blondie's birthday, and she'd played `Atomic' in his honour. As the record faded, her exact words were "...brilliant ! Happy birthday to Clem, they really should use that song in an advert".

I beg your pardon ? That's all these classic songs are fit for now? Timeless, crafted magnificent pop music reduced to being purloined and bastardised into selling something nobody really needs and ruining the song for everybody in the process? and idiots like her are encouraging this as if it's some kind of achievement and ultimate goal? I didn't think the ignorance of our broadcasters could get much lower, but I hadn't reckoned on Claudia. To some of us, many of us, music is a precious form of communication, a treasured soundtrack. It's a reminder of a time when weren't patronised by politicians and advertisers at every turn. To us thinking types, the music we treasure is one of our only refuges from the landfill which passes for mass culture these days. Our I-Pods the only insulation in public against the inane, intrusive phone drivel of those determined to microwave their brains as quickly as possible.

Remember the mobile phone ad which used Vashti Bunyan's `Just Another Diamond Day' ? The song was written in the late sixties while the author was on a two year sojourn to Scotland with horse and cart and no conveniences at all, never mind a 3G, bluetooth, 10 megapixel ticket to nowhere. Some advertising non-entity hears Vashti's charming little tune at a dinner party in Hoxton and amidst the canapes and coke decides to ruin it for everybody by foisting it upon an ungrateful nation so that rather than being a rare treat to listen to on exactly the right occasion, (on holiday in Pembrokeshire, say) it becomes a source of irritation as it's repeated at every ad break for months on end, under pictures which have absolutely nothing to do with the song. Nick Drake's `Pink Moon' used to advertise VW cars. What the hell was that all about ? Are we to be pleased with the fact that more people discovered this wonderful artist's legacy through this ad than merely by educating themselves and opening their ears in the first place?

John Densmore of The Doors lost his fellow surviving band members a lot of money by refusing to agree to license `Break On Through' to the advertising whores. He said "People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music..... on stage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That's not for rent". Amen to that.

I'll be setting my car radio default to static from now on.