On Q Radio ("essential tunes, intelligent chat"), Paul Heaton, the former frontman of the Beautiful South, had come in to pass sentence on the latest music releases. "You well?" checked the presenter and Q magazine editor-in-chief Paul Rees. "I'm OK actually, yeah," said Heaton, but he didn't sound it.
More accurately, his tone was that of a man standing behind a plastic partition of the type people used to complain through about errors in their housing benefit. First record up for dissection was "Standing Next to Me" by the Last Shadow Puppets.
“Paul, what do you make of that?" asked Rees, as the final twangs faded.
“I didn't like the chorus," shrugged Paul. "I'd give it a 6.5. I found it irritating. I just really didn't like the repeat of 'standing next to me'. I already knew where he was standing after the first chorus."
(As a critical epistemology, this doesn't pass muster, Paul. Are you suggesting, for example, that the reiteration of the phrase "LA Woman" in the Doors' "LA Woman" is unnecessary because quite evidently the love object hailed from a Hollywood bungalow from the get-go? And what might you say to Keats, strumming "On first looking into Chapman's Homer" on his square-necked resonator? "I just didn't like that repeat of 'I' - 'had I been told'; 'felt I like some watcher of the skies' - it's just so . . .")
“Actually, you can only go up to 5 on Q," interrupted Rees, sombrely.
“Well, can I go up to 3 on that one, then?"
“OK."
God, how depressing can a station get? It makes me think of a line of once-smart houses turned into less-than-adequate flats. Windowless bathrooms, the apologetic stair that intrudes into someone else's space . . . Off the back of a Saturday night from hell, I wish right now I was dead. Next, Paul objects to a guitar solo care of the Feeling. "I don't know what to do when people play guitar solos. It's really painful. It's just an easy way back into the last chorus, isn't it?" Totally mad!
Plus, he's lying. I once watched him enjoying a guitar solo very much indeed when he was playing a gig with the Housemartins at the Arndale Centre in Manchester back in, well, back in the days when I got a lift to such things with my friend Lucy and her mum, who would let us out of the back of the car to buy her 20 Winstons, which she would smoke slowly, working out how to win the fight with her faithless husband. I'd hand her the fags through the window and look into her eyes - temporarily and uncannily composed - and hope I, too, would one day be involved in the glamour and drama of adultery.
Anyway, let's just say I've got Paul Heaton's number. But then Q Radio is, however sweetly, a bit of a mess. (Its idea of small talk: "Attic Lights got their name from the dark attic light in their rehearsal space. Which is interesting.") The website, for example, seems to be in total denial of the very existence of two of the station's presenters, Hywel and Jamie, who chatter aimlessly between tracks on a Sunday morning. But possibly I just dreamed them. Like I said, people - dark days.
DAB - radioplayer.qthemusic.com
