At one point he sings a song called San Quentin I hate every inch of you, which must be the epitome of a crowd-pleaser.  Never has a song been as well-targetted I think.

Apart from the music there was a little banter, including a fantastic put-down for a heckler which I shall remember in case I return to public speaking at any point, or unexpectedly branch into standup comedy:

I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you said. I was talking.

The music was interspersed with documentary elements and interviews with staff and inmates.  The total acceptance of the death penalty was chilling, as was one prisoner’s story of how he strangled a woman and her son without really knowing why he did it.

Fascinating film, which I only saw because it was on straight after the Specials reunion concert in Coventry on Sky Arts.

Etc. etc.

Nearly all over now. There is a lot of talk about this being a significant election, about the possibility of massive change in the system.  There are hundreds of soi disant experts and each has a different prediction. But I think my opinion of political commentary and prediction is fairly well known by now:

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Did I mention that I met legendary Shakespearian actor Patrick Stewart yesterday?  Does it show?

Anyway, good luck to all the Labour candidates out there, especially Chris Oxlade, Emily Benn, Simon Holland, Tim Lunnon, David Boot, and all the others in West Sussex and Brighton & Hove and Rob Hull up in Surrey.

This time he has gone for a long speech that is packed with soundbites.  I think my favourite one is this remark about Cameron:

Because he’s ok at question time. Not so good at answer time.

Now that would have made a far better poster than that ridiculous Gene Hunt effort.

Billy Bragg at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival 2009. Is that a big wobbly sausage in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?

Yes it is only two weeks until the big wobbly sausage!

If that makes it sound like I am losing my marbles a bit, I refer you to this story in the Telegraph, specifically the end bit.The story is about Billy Bragg, and at the end he gives his considered opinion on the general election.

I think it’s like a big wobbly sausage and a really strange pair of trousers and the sausage sticking out of the front of the trousers.  And people saying: ‘I don’t know, is that a sausage sticking out of those trousers or is it a —-?”

Move over Eric Cantona, with your seagulls following the trawler, there is a new champion of the non sequitur!

We got to talking about how some people were selfish and some weren’t, and the difference between right-wing people and left-wing people. You said it all came down to imagination.

Conservative people don’t usually have very much, so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren’t just like them.  They can only empathise with people just like they are: the same sex, the same age, the same class, the same golf club or nation or race or whatever.

Liberals can pretty much empathise with anybody else, no matter how different they are.  It’s all to do with imagination; empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it’s why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left-leaning.  Hard-headed people – business people – didn’t have that sort of imagination; it’s all directed at seeing business opportunities, identifying gaps in the market, spotting weaknesses in rivals.

Being just words put into the mouth of a character in a novel I know they carry no authority, but they struck a chord with me.

I even have a modicum of respect for Margaret Thatcher – you always knew where you were with Maggie. It was just being there without a paddle that I didn’t enjoy.

I am rarely in a position to say “told you so” but someone who is in a great position to utter those words is Naseem Nicholas Taleb.  I am nearing the end of his book The Black Swan (published in 2007) and on page 225 he says:

We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are now interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks (often Guassianized in their risk measurement) – when one falls they all fall.  The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard.  We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogenous framework of firms that all resemble one another.  True we now have fewer failures, but when they occur… I shiver at the thought.

The Tories, of course, paraphrase that by saying it is all Gordon Brown’s fault…  In a footnote to that paragraph Taleb is even more specific when he says:

Likewise, the government-sponsored institution Fanny Mae, when I look at their risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup.

As the book was published in April 2007 those words would have been written in 2006 or early 2007 at the latest.  In September 2008 Fanny Mae was rescued/nationalised/taken into conservatorship when the fuse got lit to that barrel of dynamite.

Of course this is a selection, so you have to imagine that the contents were chosen to be the best and all the others could be absolute rubbish – but even if that were true I wouldn;t care.  So far I am thoroughly enjoying the book.

I think it is the way the tone can change from being straightforward to flights of lyrical whimsy, with both styles providing a constant supply of beautifully-turned phrases.  I am particularly enjoying the way Peel can go off on an assignment – to report on a concert for example – and write absolutely nothing that any normal reporter or reviewer would.  The quiet revolution of totally ignoring the conventions of reviewing are a wonder to behold.

Take this example, from a review of a Happy Mondays concert in 1988.  There is some discussion about the on-stage inter-band communication, some incredulity about how people now pretend to be Mancunians in the way that 60s posers all pretended to be scousers, and some observations about how many Japanese women there seem to be at interesting London concerts, and then it just finishes with:

I was too busy enjoying myself to note whether the Happy Mondays were playing selections from the new LP Bummed.  I expect they were.

Who else could get away with that sort of behaviour?

The only downside of the book is that reading so many newspaper or magazine columns together  draws your attention to the formula for a good column.  You get the same thing reading books of Dave Barry columns.

The formula – so easy to state but so difficult to replicate – is that you try to end with a little one-liner that refers back to a point in the opening line or even in the middle of the piece.  When reading an isolated column in its natural habitat it works almost sub-consciously, wrapping the whole thing up nicely with a sort of feeling that a circle has been closed.

Reading them en masse makes you notice the trick more and takes away some of the magic, but it is a price worth paying to be able to read some of these explorations of the Eurovision, Extreme Noise Terror or Billy Joel without having to look through microfishes of old copies of the Radio Times.

A good job of selection from Peel’s son, William.  Reading it is making me happy, but on another level regretful that Peel never got to write his autobiography himself.  You get the feeling he could have filled several volumes of  accessible yet interesting writing.

Politics bore me. Politics separate people, especially where we’re from.  Politics rarely brings people together.

Makes a lot of sense to me, despite having been involved in politics to varying degrees over the years, but then he also says:

I really dislike it when celebrities get up on a soapbox and start giving their opinion.  It shouldn’t be more valid because you’re popular.

I do think it is a valid point that politics separate people though.  The whole nature of politics is point-scoring and nay-saying and I can see how that can be boring.  I find it a bit tedious myself, but its unavoidable isn’t it?   The whole business is a bit like the prisoners’ dilemma: if both sides give up it is more constructive overall, but if only one gives up they lose.

The only conclusion I can come to is that the new Metallica CD would make a great birthday present….