Classic Pop Ballads (The 14 Most Beautiful Popsongs)

I know right?  Sounds promising doesn't it?

At least that's what I was thinking as I idly flicked through the Alto Sax music books and spotted this one.  I'd only come in for some new reeds: having bought a pack of ten from the internet at a price that had turned out to be a little too good to be true; but as we know - you can't just go into a specialist shop, buy the thing you came in for and go out, oh no: you have to see what else they might have.

And it's not that I was looking particularly with any hope: I've already got enough music books to start my own lending library and it's getting harder and harder to find one with tunes that I don't already have: but here I was, all the same, in the music book isle, you know...just in case...

14 Most Beautiful Popsongs eh, I thought: musing to myself.  It wasn't a publisher that I was previously familiar with and I'd been burned once before by a New Publisher I Didn't Know (the "tutorial track" turning out to be a bad keyboard zylophone sound that set your teeth on edge the way ice cream can sometimes do if eaten too quickly) and am more careful these days. 

My preferred type of book is the one that comes with a CD, or sometimes two CDs.  Usually CD one contains the "tutorial" track for you to play along to and a sax-free CD that allows you to go out into an unsuspecting world and make loud blarts and squeaky noises at passers by in random attempts to approach a tune.  This one was slightly different, in as much as, along with the aforementioned CD, it came with a pull out section of piano music (for those of you out there with a friend/relation/partner who is willing to play along with you)

14 Most Beautiful Popsongs: right then, I thought: let's have a look.  OK first track - "Fields Of Gold", ah yes: the Sting track oft covered by Eva Cassidy and the like.  Fair enough, that's a really nice tune.

Father And Son.  Yep, that's a nice tune - good ole Cat Stevens, I thought: mentally adding "or whatever he's calling himself these days"

You've Got A Friend.  Ah yes, lovely stuff.  Carole King/James Taylor.  Lovely stuff.

I Shot The Sherriff....

Wait a minute, back up there - I Shot The Sherriff????

In what universe is that a) a ballad or b) beautiful?  Arguably you could say that if you took the word ballad to mean "minstrels wondering around Merrie England randomly jumping out and singing tales of bravery at innocent passers by" then I guess it could pass that test - but beautiful??  It's a great song, don't get me wrong - but I doubt any one ever put it on their stereo as they watched their boyfriend/girlfriend/pet frog walk away for the final time and sang along with a glistening tear in their eye

And therein lies the problem with music books of this ilk: or at least one of the problems.

Problem The Firste: The Song That No Sane Person Will Ever, Ever Play On (Insert instrument of choice here)

For every book you buy there are always around three, four or even as many as five of the songs that you actually bought the book for; two or three that you can kinda live with and may attempt one day and at least three songs that make you wonder about the sanity of the person who put them on there.

Just at a random flick through my Saxophone books I found: Yellow (Coldplay), Theme From "Friends", A Spaceman Came Travelling (Chris De Burgh) and Reach (S Club 7) - and I'm sure if I tried I could find much worse (there is a whole Sax book dedicated to the songs of Adele)

Problem The Seconde: The Repetition

And this is the big problem with these books - there's a hell of a lot of the same tunes, with the same backing, spread across different ones.  As you start to build up a collection it gets harder and harder to avoid buying the same song two, three or even four times in order to get the One New Song you were after.

Problem The Thirde: The Wrong Key

OK so you're a publisher of Popular Music Playalongs, right?  And there's a big audience for this in a variety of different instruments, ok?  But you want to save some money? And paying backing bands to play the tunes can be costly, true?

And so of course the obvious decision is to issue the same songs with the same backing you recorded but with the words "for Flute", "for Flugelhorn" or even "for Yodellers" (bound to be a market for it somewhere) - only to alter the notation of the music for said instrument...

Which inevitably means that the music you've just bought may not actually be in the best key for you to play on your particular instrument - the result of which is saxophonists all over the globe blowing their lower intestines out of their noses as they try to hit that high F sharp

Problem The Fourthe: The Akwardly Timed Page Turn

Anyone who's ever played or sang with a band using music will be aware of this one: because sooner or later you will have to turn the page when both your hands are engaged in producing a note.  For some songs a good response to this is to learn the first few bars of the next page, or to photocopy the additional page and have it laid out next to the rest of the song on your stand (I recommend a small piece of bluetack or a clothes peg on the stand to stop it falling off at an inopportune moment)

The answer, of course, is simple: create a website where players can pick and chose the songs they actually want and will play and print bespoke music books especially for them - even if it came at an additional cost I would cheerfully buy such a book - but with this there is another problem

Problem The Fifthe: Copyright

Which usually means that a lot of the songs you want to play, and seem obviously to suit your instrument, simply don't seem to exist.  For instance: a while ago I bought a Rat Pack Sax book and it had some pretty good songs: but what it didn't have was Strangers In The Night or New York, New York - both of which you'd expect to be there right?

Problem The Sixthe: There Always Has To Be An Extra Problem In My List-O-Fives

And how long is it since I did one of those, right?

Still: on the whole they're pretty good books and looking through my "14 Most Beautiful Popsongs" I was, on the whole, pretty pleased.

But don't even get me started on why Hotel California was in there too...

Fifty Shades Of Crepe

I'm going to start this post by saying something that I never thought I would say.

Michael Grade was right.

There: I've said it.  No doubt even now thousands of Doctor Who fans around the world are stampeding their way to my door, replete with tar, feathers, kindling and matches (and possibly a 14 foot wooly scarf to hang me with): but before the lynch party gets into full swing let's backtrack slightly...

The year is 1989.  Michael Grade, son of legendary TV Magnate Lew (responsible for commissioning Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlett and almost anything that was any good on ITV during the 70s) is Director General of the BBC.  Michael is cutting away at the dead wood of programming; taking anything he deems as too expensive or not sufficiently ratings worthy and removing it from the air.

He is not a fan of Science Fiction.

He takes a look at Doctor Who - a programme that at it's apex was drawing in 14 million viewers a week and decides it is dated, costly and at only 5 and a bit million viewers on a Wednesday (a rating that people would kill for on a Saturday evening these days, let alone midweek) is a ratings failure.

He starts by suspending the programme for 18 months and sacking the then incumbent Doctor, Colin Baker. He moves it to the aforementioned midweek slot and then - a mere three years later - cancels the show.

At the time I was up in arms.  Michael Grade is wrong, I said; all it needs is a better budget, I said.  Well: I was wrong.

And here is the reason.

At the start of the 90s there was a sudden influx from the States of expensively made programming: gone was the cheerful naff-ness of Airwolf, The A Team and (yes) Knight Rider and in their place was Star Trek: The Next Generation (and it's multitude of spin-offs), The X Files.  Even Quantum Leap somehow managed to look like it had a bigger budget.  The programme simply couldn't compete.  Taking it off air, waiting for special effects to come down in price and re-vamping it was entirely the right thing to do (and by the way both David Tennant and now Peter Capaldi's Doctors are well worth 45 minutes of anyone's time)

But then a strange thing happened.  A little known business, owned by a bearded entrepeneur (OK ok, it was Virgin) got hold of the rights to publish a range of new, standalone novels that carried on from where the series had left off.  The Virgin New Adventure (and later Missing Adventure) novels came into being

And with that came an offer from their Editor: submit your stories, we will read them and by God we may even publish them (....but probably not)

I even had a go myself...and ok yes, looking back my idea was derivative, cliched and not very well written.  I got a very kind note back saying that the Doctor should "never use time travel to solve a problem in the present by going back into the past" (and I wish I'd kept that so I could send a copy to the current series producers who do precisely that at least once a season)

If I'm honest: the New Adventures were a bit of a mixed bag.  There were one or two really good ones (Human Nature was later made into a 2-part story for David Tennant and I still think that Nighshade by Marc Gatis was excellent) but the reality is that far too many of them fell into the trap of what we call (shiver) Fan Fiction

All of  a sudden The Doctor would be trundling around the TARDIS listening to The Stone Roses because that happened to be the writer's favourite band, characters would be behaving in different ways and so forth...and there was a lot of So Forth going on as well, if you get my meaning (not with The Doctor, I hasten to add - a character who, to date, has managed to avoid any So and veered away entirely from Forth)

And this, really, is the crux of my post today - what is this obsession with sex that fans of TV shows and books seem to have.

Some time ago I fleetingly had a really interesting idea as to how you could take Sit-com The Big Bang Theory in a new direction and thought about submitting a story to an online site (knowing there would be no realistic way of me submitting a script without moving to America and living there for many years)

But every story seemed to be about Penny hooking up with Sheldon, or Howard hooking up with Shelton or....well, you get the point: it was all stormy love affairs and tears galore and anyone would be forgiven for wondering if the original show was actually a Sit Com or not.

This problem is particularly replete in Sci Fi - there are a thousand and one stories about Kirk/Spock/Bondage/Fluffy Dice (ok probably not the latter) and, as George Takei himself would say - oh my!

Fifty Shades Of Grey started out as fan fiction about an insipid vampire with sunblock issues and his death-obsessed mopey goth girlfriend (and if the Dr Who fans aren't already on their way then surely the Twilight fans are now beating a track to my door) - and went on to be a publishing phenomenon.

As an Englishman I find this all a bit unneccessary...for as you know we Brits have servants to do That Sort Of Thing for us...but honestly...

All this started the other day when, on a train, I happened to see someone's laptop screen between the backs of the chairs in front of me and realised that the owner was writing a novel.  Good for her, I thought - for she was indeed a she...and then I saw the words Yellow Brick Road being bandied about on the page and realised that she must be writing Oz Fan Fiction (a thing I had never previously thought could exist)

I only hope there's no sex in that one - for the love of Oz, just think of poor Toto!

No One Survives The Bear Apocalypse

I went to the toilet recently.

Not the most inspiring of starts to a post, I know - but this wasn't just any old toilet: it was a toilet on a train.

Trying to negotiate your way down the corridor, then around the array of buttons that open, close and lock the door - let alone the half-hour dilemma previously as to whether you can make it to your stop or failing which whether you can a) trust the other people on the train sufficiently to leave your bag, hat or coat on the overhead rack, b) to leave your seat empty for your return- are bad enough without the toilet suddenly talking to you.

This one was on a train owned and run by a certain British bearded business mogul originally known for his record company, then later for his music shops, condoms, hot-air balloons, trains and space rockets - not directly run, you understand: I'm not suggesting he was sitting on the driver's plate pulling the whistle chord: oh no - just run by him in the sense that somewhere along time ago in an office far, far away he had waved his hand and trains had come into being.

Anyway: back to the toilet that talked.  This one was very friendly, talking in a gentle female voice about how happy the company was that I had chosen to patronize their toilets (in fact I wasn't even so much as slightly sarcastic, but that's another story...) and hoped that I would refrain from flushing paper bags, nappies, sanitary towels, scarves, jumpers and finally hopes, dreams and goldfish down the toilet.

For a moment I assumed I had imagined the entire escapade and could well have come to question my sanity if it wasn't for the handy invention of YouTube that enabled me, upon returning home, to establish that I wasn't the only person to whom this had happened.

But, being me, it got me thinking.  Not so much about talking toilets, but about dreams and their fragility.

Let's face it: we all have dreams - both the kind that happen during the night and the kind that we aspire to happening - and both are as easy to lose hold of.  Most of mine, at least the ones I remember, are anxiety dreams - the kind where you are trying to get back to your car, but it's not where you left it or you are not where you left you.  Once I dreampt that a famous radio star moved my house.  I've often meant to have words with him about that.

I can remember being told at school that if you didn't wake up in time from a dream where you were falling then you would die.  At the time it never occurred to me to question: how could anyone possibly know?  I mean - presumably the people who hadn't woken in time hadn't survived to tell the story right?

Then there's the other kind of dream - the one we hope one day will come true.  Think back to your own childhood.  I doubt that there has ever been a child who, when questioned about their future, replied that when they grew up they wanted to do a hard-to-define white collar job that sort of paid ok but actually, at the end of the day, wasn't particularly hard and a tiny bit dull: oh no - they wanted to be a train driver, a space pirate.  I wanted to be a policeman, or a photographer like my dad, but instead have sort-of bumbled from position to position with no particular plan of where I was going (and been perfectly happy doing so on the whole)

As we get older though, or dreams tend to get smaller: slipping away between our fingers unless we are careful. The day-to-day activities get in the way and suddenly the days have flown past.  That's not to say that some of those dreams can't come true.  I mean: it's unlikely now that I will ever become a famous writer, artist or musician - but that doesn't stop me getting published, maybe selling a few paintings and putting some tracks down.

But what, exactly, is wrong with small dreams?  When you look back at a life it's often the small, almost unnoticed, steps that brought you to where you are and it's the small steps that will take you forward - not the giant leaps (unless you're Neil Armstrong clearly): the important thing is to take those steps and not be afraid of where they might lead - to leave yourself open to the opportunity that if you take those small steps then somewhere down the line some of your dreams may just come true.

On a final note I was dozing lightly at work a few days ago: not at my desk, but in a small break out area where I sometimes go at lunch.  I was in that state between sleep and wakefulness: where you're not quite asleep but fragments of dreams slip into your head like a breath of wind blowing under the door as it moves on by - never equating to much but just offering glimpses of what may lie behind those heavy oaken doors.

And one of those little slices left me with nothing more than a sentence - meaning nothing on it's own and leaving no clue as to it's relevance: no one survives the bear apocalypse.

Which is true enough I guess.  After all, we all know the saying:  Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Except bears: bears will kill you