The Vinyl Solution
This is one of 52 twelve-inch vinyl records I now own. When I woke up this morning, I owned somewhere in the region of 2,000. In the ongoing life laundry, a very nice man called Rob drove down from Newcastle this afternoon to take my record collection off my hands. He runs a second-hand record business called Steel Wheels, from which you will now be able to buy all my old records. I have been hanging on to my vinyl for too long. In fact, it's moved house three times and it's bloody heavy. So, when Rob and I transferred it from the spare room down into his car, that was the last time I will ever have to break sweat over it.

I kept back 52 records - no more than a BBC record box's worth. This is mainly my 80s-themed DJ set, should I ever be called upon to provide it in the future, plus one or two that I know aren't available on CD, such as my Age Of Chance collection, including the above, One Thousand Years Of Trouble. Interestingly, I was contacted the other day by Steven E, formerly of Age Of Chance until he left, fairly acrimoniously, before their second album, the disappointing Mecca, my copy of which, by the way, now resides at Steel Wheels. It's always nice to hear from your heroes. Steve confirms that, unlike Cud, whom he's mates with, AOC won't be reforming. He wonders if One Thousand Years should be reissued on CD. I say, YES! It really is one of the truly great lost albums.

It feels good to be free of the vinyl. I kept back my seven-inch singles too, by the way - they really are like a photo album and represent a much more formative time of my life, when all I could afford were singles. Also, they don't take up so much damn space. On a related note, we moved out the final carload of videos and books yesterday, to Oxfam in Purley, who did promise they'd take some stuff after their refit, and they were true to their word. After driving round the roundabout twice, circling the plum parking space right outside the shop, we eventually pulled up on the kerb, kind of daring a traffic warden to punish us for our act of neatly-boxed charity. It was 3.30. The shop closes at 4.30. But as I approached, an elderly lady was flipping the CLOSED sign round. I look at her through the glass with such an urgent expression, she opened the door, and said they were closing early due to staff shortages (they had to get to the bank). But after my pleading, she agreed to stand at the door and unlock it for each batch of boxes. It was such a relief to to leave it all with them and drive away with an empty car.

So, the act is done. No more videos. No more vinyl. No more magazines (except for my New Yorkers and a collection of vintage Mad magazines from the 60s and 70s). And less books. A lot less books. So hats off to Oxfam, the most accommodating of all charity shops (I know, they are the biggest and best-established, but you can't beat a bit of organisational and shopfitting skill), and Scope.

Not the World Cup 2006: a New England



England 4 Greece 0
Hard to get worked up about a friendly, which this was, but seeing as it was the first of the Steve McClaren Era, there was much riding on it. And what a triumph it was for the man who has promised to launch "an England style", with "blend and balance". Without Beckham, Rooney and Owen, for various reasons, McClaren was able to present a New England, in which Defoe actually plays, and in which Downing and Richardson and Bridge can have a crack, and - even more significantly - in which old hands like Lampard and Ferdinand and Cole and even Gerrard to a degree, can find their best form again. It was a minor miracle. John Terry made a solid captain, scoring the first of four goals, and Hargreaves seems to have comfortably settled back into his role of Popular Player. Crouch seemed his usual awkward, comical self, and missed a couple of easy crosses, but redeemed each with two goals, and the lovely Lampard, with his boring autobiography behind him, broke his recent duck. It was pouring with Mancunian rain, the England fans gave it as much welly as if the score had mattered and only one question resounded around Old Trafford, which I'm almost relucant to repeat:

Why the fuck couldn't they have ... etc.

(Oh, and special mention to Jonathan Pearce in the BBC commentary box for his valiant pronunciation of the Greek players' names.)

Ah-ahh-ahh-ahhh-ah-ah-a-ah-ahh
Kasabian at Brixton Academy. First time we've seen them live. A cosmic experience, hampered only by being in the circle - first time I've been up there, and although you get a good view of the stage, and the sound is unimpaired, there's an occasional steward telling you not to dance in the aisles, which is irritating, and you feel just that little bit detached from the communal experience. None of this could take away from a terrific performance. They played eight songs from Empire, which, considering many of them were new to the partisan crowd, went down incredibly well. They even risked playing three in a row (Me Plus One, By My Side, The Last Trip). Lighting was simple but effective, with blocks of red, projected spider-web shapes and additional pulsing green lights, but nothing too distracting and you could see the faces of the audience for a lot of it, which adds to the communality.

Tom Meigham (pictured) is a formidable frontman, albeit not one with much to say between songs ("Cheers, Brixton! Thanks a lot, London!") - he's more like a conductor, in fact, cheerleading the audience, leading them in song. A rangy, almost comical fellow in a red top, he was counterpointed marvellously by the much more sultry Sergo Pizzorno in his cowboy hat, and his stern instruction, "I wanna see every single fucking one of you moving." They make a great team. This is a band who've been touring non-stop since 2004 (I think they did three tours in one year), and for a band who go off at impressionistic tangents, they're tight. I was chuffed to hear my favourite song from the album, The Stuntman, but inevitably, the old ones drew the most fevered response: Club Foot, Cutt Off, Processed Beats, arms in the air, overhead clapping, nothing like as much beer thrown as you get at Arctic Monkeys gigs, but then again, this seemed anecdotally to be a moderately older crowd. There were certainly more females in the audience than you might expect for a laddish lot like Kasabian, but maybe that's down to the handsome Serge.

Highlight was, handily enough, the last song of a 15-minute encore: L.S.F (Lost Souls Forever). Such drama in those instrumental bridges between verse and chorus, giving Tom an excuse to further whip up the crowd! And though the obtuse lyrics are hard to sing along to ("The troops are on fire! ... I'm trading just a little more ... step on it, electronic ... I'm carving through a letterbomb etc."), you can't go wrong with the chorus:

"Ahhh, oh come on!
We got our backs to the wall!
Ah!
Get on!
And watch out!
Sayin', You're gonna kill us all!"

The climax was an audience singalong, at which the band reduced the song to near-silence, with just a bass drum going, and the "ah-ah-ahh-ahh"s resounding around Brixton's caverous hall. When the house lights went up, the crowd carried on chanting, and I mean out of the auditorium, down the stairs, out into the foyer of the Academy and onto the Stockwell Road. According to the Kasabian forum, this continued in the pubs. What a fantastic night. Glad I saw Kasabian here, in a relatively small venue, so that I don't feel the need to see them at Earls Court on their December arena tour. I wish them well though, and since they're already such a festival hit, I'm sure it'll work. (They're coming in to play the 6 Music Hub next Wednesday, while I'm sitting in for Gideon. Life is sweet.)

This excellent photo was taken by Bubbs, and the full set can be found at the forum, under the "Live" thread.

The ONE Show: daytime TV in the evening
First, it's not the new Nationwide. Yes, it's a live, early-evening regional news magazine show, bracketed by the actual news, on BBC1, but it's new, not Nationwide. This is what they'd have us believe anyway, and comparisons will always be odious. When Nationwide went live in 1969 it was part of a restructuring of BBC's news output (the Early Evening News went from just ten minutes long to 20 minutes at the same time), and its regional bias was radical and, in many cases, just beyond the technical capabilities of the time. The programme stayed black and white for two years after the rest of the network had gone colour, because not all local BBC stations were geared up for the changeover. However, once it had found its stride in the 70s, anchored not just by the man who spoke its first words, Michael Barratt, but also Bob Wellings and later Frank Bough and Sue Lawley, Nationwide gripped the nation to the tune of 11-12 million viewers, with its mix of hard, often consumer-based news, authored reports from the regions and "lighter" items (its skateboarding duck story still dogs the programme's very name). I remember it well from my youth. I had a particular liking for Tom Coyne - anybody remember where he reported from? I know a lot more about Nationwide's genesis thanks to a terrific article by Ian Jones on Off The Telly, which can be found here.

I was reading up on Nationwide, which ended in 1983, because I was called in to review new incarnation, The ONE Show by Radio 4's Front Row this evening.

It went out not at the old time of 6pm, but at 6.55pm, anchored by Adrian Chiles - whom surely not a man or woman in this land can dislike - and Nadia Sawalha, who described herself as the "wacky" to his "wonderful" in the opening preamble, which is worrying. Far from the sober, deskbound Nationwide (I'll try not to mention it again), which Barratt introduced in 1969 with the promise of "the facts, the people and the background of the country we live in," The ONE Show is set in the now-statutory open-plan studio with the real world seen outside the huge picture window behind the presenters - in this case, attractive canalside development in Birmingham, This Morning-style. There is also the standard-issue low, frosted-glass coffee table with logo etched into it. It's significant that the show was launched in late summer, as it means that bright sunlight floods in, making it seem even more like daytime TV in the evening. Gravitas is nowhere in evidence. Nationwide covered the resignation of Ted Heath in 1975, live. Would The ONE Show (I hate those capitals) do the same if David Cameron resigned between 6.55 and 7.25? (Answer: it wouldn't happen - politicians resign in time for the news these days.)

For a programme whose modus operandi is regionality, and which begins with a computer-animated map of Britain, it was an own goal to have no report from further north than Birmingham: a live interview (with delay) from Pontypool with the new Doctor Who companion, who's having the time of her life and "living a dream"; a hard-hitting hidden-camera investigation into our lack of manners on a train to Milton Keynes, which prompted the inevitable phone-vote (if someone took their socks off in a train carriage, would you a) confront them, or b) say nothing? - phone or text now); Kate Humble topping and tailing a pre-edited film about red deer in Exmoor; back to Brum for a crunching gear-change and an in-studio interview with David Oakley, the drugs-trial unfortunate who now has cancer; and finally, a quick word with Dan Snow in Dover to flag up his report from Dover tomorrow. It was all over very quickly. Nadia said they were going to "poke around" in "every nook and cranny" of this country, which they didn't, but we must give it a week.

Unlike Nationwide (oops), which made TV stars of regional footsoldiers like Stuart Hall, Hugh Scully, Sue Lawley, John Stapleton and later Des Lynham, The ONE Show risks nothing and starts with well-established names, like Humble and Snow and, on tomorrow's programme, Charlie Dimmock. This suggests a different approach, one more attuned to the celebrity culture we now live in, and one less about the regions. After all, Humble's not from Exmoor, Snow isn't from Dover, they're merely roving reporters, reporting from wherever the story is. Then again, it's not the new Nationwide. It's a light magazine show, low on news, high on ... what? Lawley described the original as being like a "local paper". This is much more like a local paper. Give it time to bed in. The important thing is that the March of Chiles continues unabated, and for that we must be truly thankful.

Oh, and the result of the phone vote? 49 per cent said they would confront, 51 per cent said they would say nothing. An attempt to break this down regionally was half-hearted. I think 86 per cent would confront in the South West. Or was it say nothing?