Former MTV and BBC music strategist Chris Price reflects on the challenge of programming a UK national radio network on September 11th, 2001.

(Photo by Jorg Dickmann)

If you ever hear Haunted Dancehall (Nursery Remix) by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on. Something terrible has just happened, possibly involving the death of the queen or an untold number of her subjects. If you’re a fan of ambient and chill-out music, try watching the rolling news with subtitles on and the radio turned up – you may never hear Chris Moyles play so perfect a selection of Ibiza sunset moments ever again.

Radio stations, especially big ones like BBC Radio 1, the UK’s national pop network, are prepared for bad stuff happening: it’s called ‘obit procedure’. When a catastrophic news story breaks, such as the death of a royal family member, each network has an audience-appropriate mix of obituary music on standby that will ‘reflect the mood of the nation’, as the internal BBC documentation has it. As Music Producer for six years in the early noughties, my job at Radio 1 involved selecting the playlist and programming music for the daytime shows – Scott Mills, Sara Cox, Jo Whiley, Mark & Lard and Chris Moyles. In times of crisis this meant finding music that young people like, but which won’t be too noisy or upbeat or just plain offensive when something awful happens. It’s harder than it sounds.

Chill-out music is fail safe because it tends not to have lyrics to trip up on before you’re even out of the blocks. As long as the mood is sombre and vaguely reflective-sounding, you can be confident with an instrumental piece about not offending anyone – for example by failing to consider that line ‘catch you when you fall’, just as news arrives of Prince Andrew’s demise in a horrific helicopter accident. (Every music programmer has a horror story about playing a ‘howler’ like this. Mine came in 2002 when, scanning artists and titles in the music logs immediately following the Potters Bar rail disaster, I deemed Overload by the Sugababes sufficiently inoffensive to be played out of the news. My forehead hit the desk just as the chorus chimed in: “Train comes, I don’t know its destination. It’s a one-way ticket to a madman situation.”) While the terrace at Pacha might seem like an odd vibe to recreate during times of national tragedy, having a good hour’s worth of harmless, lyric-free tunes to hand buys you time while you work out what to do next.

But nothing could have prepared us for 9/11. During advance obit preparations I had scrupulously considered every lyric of every song, rejecting any and all references – literal or metaphorical – to death, crashes, explosions and natural disasters, before settling on the final list. Even the most innocuous lyric takes on a sinister undertone heard in obit mode. Dido’s insipid and cheerless pop ballads make her perfect obit fodder, right up to the point when you realize White Flag – “I will go down with this ship” – might sound a tad insensitive in the wake of a ferry disaster. So how exactly do you prepare for the world’s worst terrorist atrocity? How, to coin a phrase, do you imagine the unimaginable? You don’t.

Shortly after 2pm London time on September 11th 2001, I received an email from a friend – Al Hamer of Sweet Billy Pilgrim – instructing me, and presumably everyone else in his pre-Twitter address book, to “turn the TV on. NOW.” I flipped to BBC News 24 as TV sets blinked on in unison around the open-plan office, and watched in dismay as the second plane hit the South Tower. Mark Radcliffe was on air from Manchester at that time – a relief under the circumstances because, though the Mark & Lard staple was toilet humour and unbridled sexual innuendo, Radcliffe was a radio veteran who could switch into serious broadcaster mode at the drop of a hat. In the 2.30 news, an audibly shaken Claire Bradley reported that two airplanes had hit the Twin Towers, with a BBC commentator speculating that it could be a terrorist attack.

The song we played out of that first news bulletin is now lost in the ensuing frenzy; I’m not sure I even want to know. But I can be mercifully certain, since we had not yet received instructions to go into obit procedure, that it wasn’t Haunted Dancehall; given what we now know about the martyrdom aspirations of the 9/11 hi-jackers, Sabres of Paradise might be the most inappropriate artist we could possibly have marked the moment with. What became abundantly clear within moments of the story breaking was that our carefully laid obit plans were hopelessly inadequate. This wasn’t a national tragedy or royal death; it was bigger and more terrible by several orders of magnitude. The radio response, somewhat perversely given the dreadful scenes already being repeated on television, demanded a lightness of touch, not mawkishness or mourning.

At 3pm, just as the full horror of the atrocities was beginning to unfold, Radio 1’s most talkative presenter went into the studio with nothing to say. Chris Moyles, then entertaining millions in the afternoon drivetime slot with a daily repertoire of bum gags and fart jokes, rightly took the view that today called for a different kind of show: “Let’s just play music and I’ll throw to the news between songs.” Under any other circumstances this would literally have been music to my ears; programming for a personality jock like Chris is a kind of tug-of-war: at one end of the rope, a presenter who wants more talk and less music; at the other end, a Music Producer loudly pleading from the production office upstairs that he “play a fucking record” whenever a link (talky bit) entered its eleventh minute. By this process of attrition, the ‘clock’ for Moyles’ show – a kind of template by which all radio programmes structure each hour – had come to contain far fewer songs than those of other presenters.

Generally music logs are delivered to programme teams around 24 to 48 hours in advance of broadcast, allowing producers time to write any relevant editorial content into their scripts. Suddenly, just minutes before he was due on air, Chris needed twice the number of songs he normally played, every one of them screened to account for the sensitivities of the unfolding catastrophe. The first thing was to remove all songs that hit the wrong tone musically. Out went anything too jiggy, too banging, too edgy or too poppy, which didn’t leave much to play with – this was Radio 1 after all. Next, lyrics: Let Me Blow Ya Mind by Eve – out. Castles in the Sky by Ian Van Dahl – out. U2’s Elevation – out. Within fifteen minutes of going to air, Moyles had played every song in what remained of his first hour.

By now Alex Donelly, my boss and Radio 1’s Head of Music, had come down from his upstairs office to manage the music response and lend a hand with the programming. A Dunkirk spirit emerged as the search for suitable music became more frenzied. We would interrogate the database for any ‘Mood 1 or 2’ songs (all music is graded in this way for radio, from very sad to very happy, in order to create an evenness of sound), feeding minidiscs into two hi-fi stereos in tandem as a final check before they went downstairs. Suddenly that throwaway lyric – ‘catch you when you fall’ – became menacing and real when people were literally falling out of the New York skyline, and nothing like it could go to air – even if it meant playing Zero 7 for the third time this hour. At one point we were delivering playlists with only one or two songs cued up in the studio, with a lot of air still to fill.

That evening, slightly stunned to find that it was still going ahead, a handful of us attended the Mercury Music Prize, in which PJ Harvey collected the first of her two awards, for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Improbably, she was on tour in Washington DC at the time. Holed up in her hotel room, she accepted the award by telephone; we leaned in close as Zoe Ball presented the award, the better to make out Polly’s soft, West Country lilt haunting the dancehall of the Dorchester Hotel: “It’s been a very surreal day. We can see the Pentagon from our window.” Chillers of free wine and champagne sat untouched on the tables in front of us.

It went on for days. Hitting the right tone remained the toughest challenge, as much for presenters and producers as for us, the music team. Even the next morning it was difficult to judge the mood of the nation, as the guidelines demanded we do, so we took our cues from the talent, who had a direct line to the listeners. Just when do you get back to ‘normal’ after something like this, and what role should Radio 1 play in making that happen? When do phone-ins, competitions and knob gags go back in the script? When is Bootylicious fair game again, and when does Have A Nice Day by Stereophonics stop sounding wrong? Musically we needed a kind of intermediary stage, one that would gently lift the national mood rather than yank the listener out of the doldrums and demand they feel fine again. We needed uplifting, anthemic guitar songs with shiny production and contemplative but hopeful lyrics that would bridge a gap between chill out and jiggy. We needed Yellow, Trouble and Don’t Panic. The days following September 11th 2001 may be the only time I have said this, but thank God for Coldplay.

As an album of Christian music outsells Beyonce and Lady Gaga down under, now seemed like a good time to audio-blog my experience earlier this year discovering Australia’s fastest-growing Pentecostal mega church – Hillsong.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard may be a confirmed atheist, but if the Australian music-buying public is anything to go by, she’s a tad out of step with her electorate. You might say she’s not singing from the same hymn sheet. God Is Able, an album of contemporary Christian music released by the stratospherically successful Hillsong mega church in Sydney, recently debuted at number three in the Australian chart, becoming the tenth album of Christian pop to reach the Top 10 there since 2002.

And Hillsong has broken America without so much as breaking a sweat. Last year its youth ministry house band, Hillsong United, went in at number two on the US iTunes album chart, just behind Eminem. If it’s true that the music industry is in its death throes, then nobody told Hillsong.

Hillsong Music is the ‘resource arm’ of Hillsong Church, a local Pentecostal ministry in Sydney which began in 1983 with a congregation of forty-five, and which now boasts a membership of 21,000, an annual conference attracting 28,000 faithful attendees, and a growing international footprint with churches in London, Paris, Cape Town, Stockholm and Kiev. In 2009 Hillsong London celebrated ten years of worship in the capital with a service at the O2 London Arena. More than 14,000 people attended.

Needless to say, any church funded by a ‘dynamic music label’, as its promotional materials describe it, is foursquare into the realms of ‘non-traditional’ financing models. But Hillsong is no traditional church. It is ministry with marketing strategies and corporate visions, communion by focus group, where clergy are CEOs and pastors head up ‘creative teams’. Services take place in ‘state-of-the-art worship centres’, where chancel is jettisoned in favour of multimedia ministry and PowerPoint presentations. Hillsong London’s website, whose front page features a group of smiling twenty-somethings in chic winter wear, bears closer resemblance to a Gap advert than a call for cash and congregation. And possibly taking a leaf out of Scientology’s book, Hillsong now looks to the power of celebrity to spread the gospel, recently hosting an ‘Evening with’-style event in which tele-survivalist Bear Grylls talked of Everest expeditions, alligator wrestling and the ‘quiet strength’ of his Christian faith. Jumble sales and church roof appeals it is not.

Masterminded by founders and senior pastors Brian and Bobbie Houston (no self-respecting mega church is seen dead these days without an alliterating husband-and-wife team at the helm), Hillsong’s brand of ‘prosperity theology’ found a hungry market in Sydney’s affluent, conservative Baulkham Hills district during the 1990s. ‘Health and wealth gospel’, popular with Pentecostal churches in America at the time, proved an elixir for middle-class Christians in prosperous, suburban Australia, as the success of Brian Houston’s book You Need More Money: Discovering God’s Amazing Financial Plan For Your Life attests. Spiritual health and material wealth go hand in hand, says Houston; humility and sacrifice are not unimportant, but nor should the faithful be ashamed of material success.

And Brian should know. In the last year for which figures are available, Hillsong’s annual earnings were in the region of $60m, roughly half of which came from its congregation. Because record sales aren’t the church’s only source of income; tithing – such an archaic-sounding word among all that corporate speak – is still a vital component of Hillsong’s revenue streams. Houston admits to a personal package of $300,000 a year plus company car (Bobbie’s salary is undisclosed), but his company Leadership Ministries Inc – ‘the entity through which Bobbie and I conduct our broader ministry’ – bought two waterfront properties from the couple shortly after the company was set up in 2001. Let’s hear Brian conducting his ministry for a moment, for it is a thing to behold:

And it’s very much a family business. Joel Houston, Brian and Bobbie’s son (and incidentally a spit for Westlife’s Brian McFadden), leads the creative team behind Hillsong Music, the multi-million dollar hit machine that powers the operation. He is also the singer in Hillsong United, a ‘next generation praise and worship’ outfit which has released a new album every year since 1999, making Prince look positively idle. Churning out mostly live albums recorded at services and conferences, the Hillsong Music stable is so prolific that just as one release reaches the end of its chart life, another is waiting in the wings to take its place. Evidently the received wisdom in the music industry – that live albums don’t sell – doesn’t apply to Hillsong either.

They’ve done their homework, too. If it felt like Snow Patrol were following you around for three years from 2006, it’s because radio stations and music television channels the world over were banking on audience research which decisively crowned ‘Chasing Cars’ as the stickiest song of the noughties by a country mile. Hillsong, if you can imagine this without wincing, sounds like Snow Patrol singing from a prayer book. And in case you’re tempted to seek out this music for yourself, be warned. For the purposes of journalistic thoroughness I’ve listened to more than my fair share of it the past few days (you’re welcome); it’s marginally less excruciating than chewing tinfoil.

Contemporary Christian music – CCM to its friends – is changing the market in other ways. For All You’ve Done, the first live worship album to debut at number one in Australia, drew widespread whingeing from disgruntled record labels, upset that almost all its sales rang through the cash registers at Hillsong’s annual conference. It’s hard to know which is more telling – the pointless display of sour grapes from the mainstream music industry, or the fact that sales at a religious conference can outstrip the buying power of an entire nation. In 2007 Hillsong hit the headlines again, amid accusations of ‘vote stacking’ in the Australian Idol talent quest. Idol issued a formal, on-air statement refuting the allegations, although four of the eight finalists – Matt Corby, Tarisai Vushe, Ben McKenzie and Daniel Misfud – did in fact turn out to be from the Assemblies of God Pentecostal church, of which Hillsong is an affiliate. Idolatry – 1, Idol – nil.

On Christmas morning last year, finding myself with a few hours to kill before barbecued turkey and trimmings with my Sydney hosts, I went to see Hillsong for myself. I should state for the record that I’m an atheist humanist, and justified my godless sneering on grounds of journalism (I was researching a book). But I still felt like a frightful interloper, a joyless clown en route to a children’s party with the sole intention of popping balloons, stealing party bags and calling the birthday boy names. Worse, I was a freeloading interloper arriving on the Hillsong courtesy shuttle service.

So to ease my conscience I vowed to be the perfect houseguest, making every effort to participate, in as far as I could do so without compromising my principles or seeming to take the piss. If there was singing, I would sing. If there was hugging, I would hug. I drew the line only at praying.

Arriving at the church – sorry, worship centre – I was welcomed into a cavernous modern atrium by a model-pretty hostess bearing glad tidings and armfuls of Christmas candy. Dean Martin sang Winter Wonderland over the speaker system. Free lattes and valet parking were available to all comers. All good, clean fun so far. Being slightly behind schedule I pressed on past the crèche and headed straight for the main room. (And if ‘main room’ sounds a tad super-club, it’s not so far off the mark.) Five enormous TV screens flanked a wide stage, upon which Hillsong stalwart Robert Fergusson was already in mid-flow, hammering home the prosperity gospel as the gifting envelopes went round, and encouraging us to be as ‘extravagant’ with our money as God is with his love:

Then two incredibly happy men appeared and invited all the kids onto the stage to show and tell what they got for Christmas.

“What did Santa bring you, little fella?” beamed Happy Man number 1.

Little boy: “An iPod Touch.”

Whoops and clapping from the audience.

“And what about you?” said Happy Man 2, turning to another little boy.

“A remote-controlled car.”

More whooping.

Happy Man 1: “Well, we’ve got some great prezzies to give away today, for the big kids as well as the little kids. But first we’re crossing live to our Hills campus, where our senior pastor Brian Houston is going to say a few words.”

I’ll say this for Christmas at Hillsong: that’s an ambitious technical feat they’re pulling off. All this ‘crossing live’ felt like Live Aid – it was terrifically exciting. As the Hills service appeared on the screens behind, another show and tell session was finishing up across town. A third happy man was talking about prezzies for big kids and little kids, and then Houston himself was striding back and forth across the stage in front of foot-high chapter and verse, a bible in his hand and a flesh-coloured Madonna-mike clamped to his cheek. Swap the bible for an iPad and he could have passed for Steve Jobs unveiling his vision for the exciting next phase of the company.

He launched into some impassioned stuff about Emmanuel – punctuated with fists in the air about his GRACE and DIVINITY – which I confess was where I started to tune out. It’s not that I wasn’t listening, just that a sort of glazing over took place. The same thing happens when I listen to evangelical preachers on the radio, which I often do. It’s a little like listening to the shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4 – fantastically hypnotic, but utterly incomprehensible unless you’re in on the lingo. Very often the welcome end result is blissful slumber.

So what did this godless impostor make of Christmas at Hillsong? Was it the riot of divinely sanctioned conspicuous consumption I had feared? Not quite, but it wasn’t far off. Did the kiddywinkles have fun? Probably. Did it feel like congregation? Emphatically not – it was spectacle from start to finish. And that’s what bothered me, if I was bothered at all. It was a show, with high production values and a high impact soundtrack available in the foyer on your way out. If I was going to ‘get’ any kind of worship, then it should have been this. But Hillsong was more awards ceremony than gig – more exclusive media event than inclusive musical or spiritual experience. The live link ups were impressive and fabulously next generation, but in the end the action was always happening somewhere else. I needn’t have worried about ruining the party, because in more senses than one, I wasn’t invited.

It struck me that, right now, the opulence of Hillsong can only work in Australia, seemingly the only economy untroubled by debt, deficit or the danger of default these days. Anywhere else – including, ironically, America – the extravagant giving, the showing and the telling would seem a tad inappropriate. Shuffling out of the auditorium, I made my way by courtesy shuttle to my Christmas lunch engagement, where I handed a Transformer to my hosts’ going-on-three year-old as I walked in the door. He was thrilled of course, but I couldn’t help feeling that, in order to truly enter into the Christmas spirit, I should have splashed out on an iPod Touch.

Regular readers will know about another rock and roll journey I made to America and Australia earlier this year which, fingers crossed, will become a second book. Living it up down under I met and recorded some of Australia’s biggest names in music, and came back with hours and hours of juicy audio. Some of it will turn up in radio programmes of one sort or another, including one about AC/DC for BBC Radio 2 (no idea when it goes out – keep you posted), but there’s too much quality stuff not to start sharing some of it now. So join me as I venture boldy into the world of ‘audioblogging’, with a handful of pieces where I try my best to shut the heck up and let my subjects do the talking, playing, whatever. (I have no idea if audioblogging is actually ‘a thing’, by the way - if not, it is now.) As Tommy Emmanuel, to my mind the finest guitar player alive today, is currently touring America, here are some words and music from our encounter in ‘Australia’s Nashville’, at the Tamworth Country Music Festival in New South Wales earlier this year.

In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell argues that genius is less a question of natural talent than of sheer hard work. The theory goes that Mozartian greatness, far from being a gift, is the product of no less than 10,000 hours’ graft. The Beatles put in the hours in Hamburg – 1200 shows in under four years – and Bill Gates did likewise, coding a school computer from the age of 13. If Gladwell is right, then Tommy Emmanuel, who has been a professional musician since the age of six (yes, six) and must have put in closer to 100,000 hours in the intervening years, is something like genius squared. (Indulge the hyperbole and excuse the math.) Since hearing Chet Atkins at the age of seven, Tommy has stuck to a signature style of playing called ‘fingerstyle’ guitar which, as you’ll hear in this clip, may well have been birthed by a very unlikely midwife – the Everly Brothers’ dad:

Possibly because an audience clapping along to a man playing ‘Yakety Axe’ on a Gretsch guitar passed for mainstream entertainment in the fifties and sixties, Chet Atkins was – and still is – a household name. Tommy Emmanuel is not, but I’m happy to call him a hero nonetheless. As I’m an ‘enthusiastic’ fingerstyle guitar player myself, Tommy cosies up alongside dead musicians and French existentialist philosophers on my list of idols, despite his being ‘about as cool as James Galway’, as my Australian ex-boss once put it. Over the course of my Aussie adventure I had, in a shameless attempt at currying favour with possible providers of food, accommodation or protection from beer-swilling, outback ockers, been trying (and mostly failing) to perfect Australia’s unofficial national anthem Waltzing Matilda on fingerstyle guitar. I asked Tommy to show me how it’s done:

If your idea of ‘something a little different’ – like mine until not very long ago – involves going to see a band without beards or multipart vocal harmonies, I can heartily recommend the refreshingly uncomplicated experience of seeing one man and an acoustic guitar in a ‘proper’ venue that doesn’t stink of piss. Tommy’s US dates are just such an opportunity. He returns to Nashville – now a kind of second hometown – this month with four dates at the Chet Atkins Appreciation Society (I love that such a thing even exists), so I’ll let Tommy finish on a few words about how his hero became a mentor and friend. This clip opens on some some insight into Chet’s home life and cancer struggle:

Postscript: if you have any feedback on these audioblogs – clips too long or too short, words unnecessary or intrusive? – I’d love for you to leave me a comment. Thanks.

Exactly one year ago today, four friends – Chris Price, Joe Harland, Dan Kennedy and Matt Davey – met in a south London pub to celebrate the birthday of legendary AC/DC singer Bon Scott. Several pints of strong Italian lager later they visited the scene of his ‘death by misadventure’ at 67, Overhill Rd to pay respects to a rock and roll hero. Eight months after that, on the anniversary of Bon’s death, Chris arrived – with Adam Yee of Aussie legends Smudge in tow – at Bon’s graveside in Perth, Western Australia. A lot of stuff happened in between. If he ever gets around to writing the damn thing, you can read all about it in Chris’s next book. Meanwhile, enjoy this video of the final moments of that journey, along the real Highway to Hell – the Canning Highway in Fremantle – to the Raffles pub, where AC/DC played early gigs in the seventies. The tow-away zone you see at the end of this vid is the culmination of a 9,000-mile journey. That is all for now.

I live in Valdosta, Georgia, birthplace of American comic genius Bill Hicks, whom readers of Live Fast, Die Young will know is a hero of both mine and Joe’s. With the new Hicks movie opening in America this weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about him (proper blog to follow); I’ve even tried to find the address of his first house.

Which reminded me this morning of a similar wild goose chase a few years back, in search of Gram Parsons’ childhood home in Winter Haven, Florida. For reasons which are now lost in the fog of red wine and deadlines that was the final edit for the book, this weird episode didn’t make it into the final chapter. Luckily we have this ‘lost’ footage, which we offer to you now by way of free bonus content. Fans or fanatics? You decide.

As Amazon are apparently too busy shifting units to update our lowly book entry with the new endorsements sent to them by our publisher several weeks ago, we hope you’ll indulge a tiny toot of our own trumpet by sharing them with you ourselves. We’re very excited about these; praise is always a wonderful thing of course, but to say that we’re proud to receive it from such brilliant and qualified minds as the ones belonging to Stanley Booth (author of rock-biog-to-end-all-rock-biogs The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones) and the poet and arts critic Diann Blakely, is to commit an act of criminal understatement:

“Among those rare volumes which are not only a joy sui generis, but also – and better yet – a joy to be shared by reading aloud. Mere satire is cheap; the blood in these pages is more authentic than any Nashville approximation of Americana.” Stanley Booth, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, Esquire, Georgia Music Magazine

“I howled myself silly. But like me, readers of Live Fast, Die Young will find their aching sides soothed by the heart-warming rhythms of mutual and musical harmony pulsing from two human hearts at their best.” Diann Blakely, National Book Critics Circle, Harvard Review, BookPage, Antioch Review, Nashville Scene

“A thoroughly enjoyable ride through the American musical wilderness. Live Fast, Die Young brings out the inner geek in every rock and roll dreamer.” Zane Lowe, BBC Radio 1

“A book that shows how your obsessions can shape and change your life. Excellent.” James Dean Bradfield, Manic Street Preachers

“The thinking man’s Dumb & Dumber.” Mike McCormack, Universal Music Publishing

Toot toot!

After last night’s phenomenal Lyle Lovett show at the Charleston Performing Arts Center, and with a new adventure Down Under just days away, Chris finds himself lacing up an old and familiar pair of shoes. Today felt like the right time to shuffle the deck and bring this Townes & Lyle mini blog back to the top of the pack.

Today is a Townes day. The flat is rented, tickets bought. Soon I’ll be heading to Australia for whatever rock and roll misadventure might present itself Down Under. There just remains the now customary and symbolic purchase of a new pair of Converse to mark the occasion. Time, then, to be tyin’ on my flyin’ shoes.

Music and travel are inextricably linked in my brain, and nothing captures the space in between – the inescapable urge to push on, musically and physically – than Townes Van Zandt’s Flyin’ Shoes. If you haven’t heard Lyle Lovett’s version of this song before, I recommend headphones, a quiet corner and an economy-size box of Kleenex as you do:

Being the discerning music lover that you are, I’m sure you and Townes are already well acquainted. But in the tragic and unlikely event you’ve never come across his music before, start with the stunning documentary Be Here To Love Me (which readers in America can watch on Hulu), then pop yourself out to a record store, buy some music and make up for lost time by not leaving the house for three weeks while you get to know each other.

Steve Earle once said that “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that”. Apart from the bit about cowboy boots, I couldn’t have put it better myself. So it’s a brave a rare talent that can pull off a cover which does justice to and – dare I say – improves upon the Townes original. Ignoring for a second our own forays into the TVZ oeuvre, I’ll say now that Lyle Lovett is probably the only one who can pull it off.

Good-as-new musings from Chris – remixed, refixed and rebooted for his ‘An Englishman in Georgia’ column in the Glass Onion magazine.

After three months as a permanent resident, and several more as a regular visitor, I feel that Valdosta, Georgia and I are coming to understand each other on a deeper level. We’ve made it through those early first dates, the stilted conversations yielding to public hand-holding and balmy evenings spent dreaming up pet names for each other. Our toothbrushes, once perfect strangers separated literally by an ocean, now face one another contented and aglow across the top of a Harriet Carter ultraviolet toothbrush sanitizer. We are, it might be said, entering something of a honeymoon period.

I know this because my feelings towards Valdosta’s less appealing traits have mellowed somewhat. Like a coffee-slurping habit that might once have jeopardized a second date, I now feel permitted either to joke about her peccadilloes without fear of offense, or they’ve just stopped mattering altogether. It’s a nice feeling.

I’ll explain. Google ‘Valdosta, GA’, and somewhere among the top five entries you’ll see the phrases ‘Title Town USA’, ‘Winnersville’ or ‘Azalea City’. Title Town, of course, is the 2008 accolade handed down by ESPN in recognition of the city’s unrivalled championship football pedigree, and Winnersville the deserving title arising from Valdosta High School’s six national championship wins – ‘the winningest high school football team in the country’, according to the grammatically innovative ESPN. Azalea City – rather easier for me to grasp, this one – springs from the profusion of pink flowering shrubs abounding in Valdosta’s parks and gardens. Football and flowers, it seems, are how Valdosta rolls; to understand my winningest, bloomingest new home, I needed to experience both.

I started with the Azalea Festival, a springtime celebration of the burgeoning azalea in Valdosta’s lush and shaded Drexel Park; a chance, if you need one, to fill your face with fried dough and candy so sweet it makes your fillings tingle. It appeared on first glance to be a familiar mix of British farmers’ market – all handmade soaps and homespun basketry (sadly no Victoria sponges) – with American sideshow attractions such as Racing Pigs, Frisbee Dogs and a petting zoo thrown in to pep things up a little. (I still have to suppress an adolescent snicker whenever I pass a petting zoo. Where I’m from, petting is something you’re banned from doing in public swimming pools, not something you do to small animals. The phrase ‘petting zoo’ conjures images for me of caged, amorous couples in bathing suits looked on by stern-faced, keychain-swinging lifeguards.) Bang in the middle of all this was a wide, raised stage, tantalizingly empty on first passing but with a large PA system promising untold excitement if we stuck around until show time.

An hour later we passed again, just as a line of people, all dressed in matching white T-shirts, black jeans and cowboy boots was filing onto the stage. Thumbs hooked through their belt loops, they formed themselves into four rows of five and waited for the music to start. Garth McGraw, Travis Brooks or some such racket twanged forth from the PA system. The display team plodded left in time to the music, then briefly right, then turned to the back and clapped in unison. Now right, then left, followed by a right heel extended to the front. Clap. Repeat. This was my first taste – in the flesh – of line dancing.

Is there something I’m missing with line dancing? Would someone who knows be kind enough to drop me an email explaining the appeal of it? I hesitate to ask what the point of it is, because let’s face it what’s the point of football or cycling or singing or just dancing at all for that matter. But what’s the point of a line dancing display? What makes line dancers think other people want to watch them doing it? Line dancing is so close to what humans do in the course of their everyday lives – that is, propel themselves briefly by means of their legs in a variety of directions – that surely it barely qualifies as dancing at all. I do something very close to line dancing just moving around the kitchen, only without the clapping (unless I’m feeling especially pleased with my porcini risotto). Inviting people to watch you line dancing is a little like selling tickets to a monster trucks display and staging a series of synchronized three-point turns – only much, much less interesting. (Perhaps that’s what the clapping is for – somebody has to do it after all.)

More to the point, what hope is there for a line dancing display at an event which also lists Frisbee Dogs and Racing Pigs among its attractions? Surely when applying for your pitch it pays to check out the competition first. (‘Shit Bill, are you sure you wanna go ahead with this line dancing display? They got frisbee dogs and racin’ pigs.’) If nothing else, line dancing proves beyond doubt that not everything is a spectator sport. What consenting adults get up to in the privacy of their own community center is of course entirely up to them, and if pacing around in close formation to bad country music is your thing, then good luck to you. Just remember that, like heavy petting in the shallow end of your local swimming pool, doing it in public makes people uncomfortable.

But just as one eventually comes to overlook coffee slurping, I have forgiven Valdosta its line dancing. For entertainment value alone the Azalea Festival puts British country fairs decisively in the shadows. English village fêtes, I fear, will pale by comparison from now on, and no amount of Mrs. Postlethwaite’s admittedly divine Victoria sponge will make up for the absence of racing pigs. Now that my eyes have seen the light, Victoria sponge racing is the only answer.

Either that or synchronized heavy petting.

Some trivia fun by way of post script. There’s another reason I feel very at home in Valdosta. It’s the birthplace of a dearly-departed hero of both mine and Joe’s – first name William, middle name Melville – who appears both in Live Fast, Die Young and a posting barely a stone’s scroll from this one. The first reader to post his name on our Facebook page wins the respect, admiration and adulation of the 2,000-strong Missing Parsons social media community.

UPDATE: Thanks to YOUR clicks, CALM has *WON* the poll to receive the proceeds from the Cage Against The Machine campaign with over 1,000 votes! Thank you! You have no idea what it means to us and to CALM to win this competition.

Some of you will have seen yesterday’s Facebook post asking friends of Missing Parsons to vote for a charity called CALM, in a poll to win the proceeds of the Cage Against The Machine campaign this Christmas. Some of you – especially friends in America – might need a little extra information on both. We’ll to make this as short and painless as possible, in the hope that you’ll do one *tiny* thing for CALM at the end of it.

First, some background. In the UK, the coveted ‘Christmas number one’ – that is, the pop single which sits proudly atop the hit parade on Christmas Day – is a very big deal. We Brits get tremendously – you might even say uncharacteristically – excited about pop songs with festive lyrics concerning mistletoe, reindeers or famine in Africa, especially if they have jingle bells jingling all the way through. When the Christmas chart is announced on the Sunday before Santa arrives, we settle in by the radio with a mince pie and a glass of mulled wine, and wait with baited breath to find out what this year’s number-one-of-number-ones will be. We don’t even care if it’s Fairytale of New York every year – it’s just part of what makes Christmas Christmas.

Or rather it used to be, until one day a few sorry years ago when Christmas was taken away from us, apparently forever, by an evil dictator by the name of Simon Cowell (you might have heard of him). Simon stole Christmas and refused to give it back. He was laughing while he did it. Yes, LAUGHING.

Every year, as the Machiavellian mastermind behind The X Factor and Pop Idol (yes, I’m afraid it’s us – actually no, it’s Simon – you have to blame for American Idol), he releases a single by the winner of his tawdry little talent show and, entranced by his evil eye and shiny teeth, the British public goes out in droves to buy it. No mistletoe, no reindeers, nothing.

Then last year we fought back. A dedicated band of refuseniks stood up and said: ‘Fuck you Simon, we won’t do what you tell us‘. With the help of a well coordinated Facebook campaign, these brave insurgents pushed Rage Against The Machine‘s Killing In The Name to the Christmas number one slot, halting X Factor winner Joe McElderry’s The Climb just short of the summit. No jingle bells admittedly, just the clanging chimes of doom for the Idol monopoly. This year’s campaign – Cage Against The Machine – aims once more to deliver a decisive and festive fist to that smug face of his, with the help of John Cage’s silent masterpiece 4.33.

Now for the serious bit. CALM, a charity very close to our hearts (you’ll see their website printed in the back of the book), stands for the Campaign Against Living Miserably. It is a unique organisation aimed at reducing the suicide rate among young men, created in response to the disturbing and little known statistic – reflected around the world – that if you are male and aged 15 to 35, you are more likely to die by taking your own life than by any other means. That’s right, if you’re young and male you are more likely to die from suicide than from a road accident, drugs, disease, violent crime, anything. Take a moment for that fact to detonate in your brain, and while you do, watch this powerful poem by Mat Lloyd which says everything about why this problem exists:

Men don’t talk about their problems. They should. CALM helps them to do this. So here’s what we’re asking you to do. CALM is one of five charities in the running to receive the proceeds from this year’s Christmas number one campaign. Please, please, please would you go to the Cage Against The Machine site, select CALM on the left-hand side and then click ‘vote’. That’s it. (All five charities are doing excellent work, we just happen to know because we work with them that CALM are fine people working for next to nothing with next to no funding, tackling a hugely important but little known issue. Hope you agree.)

One last thing. If you think this is something worth shouting about, please click Like or Tweet (or both) underneath this post to share it with your friends. Many thanks.

Chris & Joe
Missing Parsons

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“Courtney and her friends all had names like characters from ‘The O.C.’ – all Jacks, Joshes, Tiffanys and Cary Anns. The girls were regulation impossibly attractive, the boys tattooed of forearm and styled of hair.” Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America

The pluralisation of the names – the Jacks and the Joshes – seems so casual and dismissive now. I suppose what I hoped to do, albeit by means of a rather lazy stereotype, was paint a picture: a crowded bar packed with hip young Charlestonians in skinny jeans and Cuban heels, a whiff of PBR and cheese sticks, the clack of cue ball over shouted small talk. A scene so perfectly and unknowingly stylised, it seemed to me, that it could almost have been made for a TV teen drama. But from this remove – four years almost – I realise that one of the names on the list doesn’t bear up to pluralisation. Positively resists it in fact. One of the faces in the crowd that night was Cary Ann Hearst.

Fast forward to 13 October 2010. George Dawes Green’s The Unchained Tour of Georgia arrives in Thomasville, its 1975 Blue Bird school bus disgorging a troupe of musicians and ‘raconteurs’ at the door of the Bookshelf and Gallery on its pretty main street. Unchained is Green’s storytelling vehicle The Moth transported to the towns and cities of his native Georgia in support of independent booksellers and, as a welcome side effect, enticing readers away from their Kindles and iPads into a room full of – gasp – real people with real lives and real stories.

Regular Moth and McSweeney’s contributor, Rock On author and plaid-wearing nerd Dan Kennedy opened with an oddly touching account of missing out to Carson Daly as host of MTV’s Total Request Live. (Thank goodness, for our sakes if not for his, that he did or we might have been denied his contribution tonight). Next, performance artist, poet and playwright Edgar Oliver gushed a shadowy recounting of a claustrophobic Southern upbringing, all the more gothic for the sinusoidal baritone delivery. Novelist Tina McEloy Ansa related a deft and poignant story of 1950s black emancipation by means of her childhood relationship with water (and its effects on her hair), and finally a heart-warming retelling of childhood in Booneville, Mississippi by Moth stalwart Wanda Bullard.

Interesting to note the choice of the title ‘raconteurs’ for tonight’s speaking contributors, perhaps pre-emptively side-stepping the narrow, rocky terrain that separates the multitude of offerings qualifying as spoken word. Even if Kennedy’s delivery occasionally felt like stand up, Oliver’s at times performance, all were story tellers of the highest calibre.

But by far the brightest star of the show, if ‘unchainedness’ is the measure of luminance, was Nashville-bred, Charleston-wed singer-songwriter Cary Ann Hearst. ‘Are You Ready To Die’, written for a moribund uncle, opened on a picked acoustic pizzicato, slowly gathering steam before unleashing a freight-train vocal performance hitherto held in check on harmony contributions for singing partner Michael Trent. My own appropriation and pluralisation of Cary Ann’s name for the purposes of scene-setting in a travel book now seems almost criminal in the face of singing and song-writing talent so manifestly singular.

Hearst’s accomplice Trent in Shovels & Rope may well have been among the cool crowd that balmy Charleston night back in 2006, I can’t remember now. More likely he was still in New York, leading moderate garage successes The Films. In any case his first name, being single-barrelled and devoid of a J, would have failed to gain him an audition for whatever film I imagined myself the star of that night. Which is a shame, because if he had been there I might have realised sooner just how perfect he and Cary Ann are for each other. To discover later that they are husband and wife was almost too perfect for words.

The Unchained Tour of Georgia continues until the end of October, taking in Newnan, Macon, Zebulon, Gainesville, Athens, Washington, Savannah, Augusta, Canton and Atlanta. Go here for full listings and tickets.

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