How the music industry cares for its people

It's worth taking a few minutes to read The Observer piece on Brian Harvey and mental health in the music industry, even although it's not an easy read:

Harvey also talks about how difficult he finds life at Christmas. East 17’s biggest hit was Stay Another Day, which continues to be played heavily during the festive period to this day.

Harvey, who does not receive any royalties for the song, says: “We sold 18 million records and the frustrating thing for me is that I have to sit there every Christmas and listen to myself while I don’t even have the money for a Christmas dinner.

“I am sitting here eating a cold chicken burger on Christmas Day. You have got this number one record … I am just rattling around in a cold house with no food, on my own, with my record being played – but you are just a no one.”

Naturally, the people who are busy raking off all the cash and their representatives are quick to stress that they're doing things:

In a statement, the BPI said: “Mental health problems sadly affect people in all walks of life, including those in the creative community. Fortunately, there is greater awareness of what can be done to help now, and one area we are looking to develop is our work with Help Musicians UK – a wonderful charity that reaches out to artists in need of support across a range of issues, including mental health.”

In other words: "Hey, look, it's not just musicians who get depression, you know, so... anyway, there's a charity."

The Observer's Daniel Boffey deftly deflated this:

The British Phonographic Industry, which represents the UK music industry, said it supported a mental health charity called Help Musicians UK, although not financially.

Let's just repeat that:

although not financially

It's not clear exactly what the support the music industry is providing for the charity; its main contribution seems to be providing lots of cases for them to work through.

Not financially. All the BPI companies exist to do is make money, and they're not even prepared to open the chest to help clear up their mess.

'pon the playlist

There's something a little worrying about the report in The Observer which watches a Radio One playlist meeting. Can you spot it, I wonder?

A snatch of each song blares through speakers before Ergatoudis lists the artist's YouTube views, Soundcloud hits, Shazam ratings, Twitter followers and Facebook likes. "[Indie foursome] Wolf Alice's Moaning Lisa Smile video has had 15,000 views on YouTube and they've got 11,000 followers on Twitter," Ergatoudis tells the room. "James, you want to go first?"

There's a lot of this - records being weighed on how many Twitter followers the band has; the number of times a YouTube video has been played by man or machine; and so on.

A snatch of music, a bellyful of statistics. Surely that's the wrong way round? Surely Radio One should be playlisting music based on the track itself, rather than because it's already popular elsewhere? If YouTube views are the new chart, then this is like the playlist meeting in 1993 choosing records based on what Bruno Brookes had read out on the Top 40 the previous Saturday.

The Observer's Nadia Khomami asks Radio One's George Ergatoudis about this point:

It's faintly depressing to hear bands referred to as "brands" with their worth determined by online data. Stats is business talk. It isn't creative, it isn't art, it's box-ticking. It's playing people the kind of music that they're already listening to. Harding says, though, that there are exceptions to this rule. "There have been moments where we've been tempted to completely go against data. Clean Bandit have had the biggest single of the year so far and we booked them for a live lounge in January last year, purely on the basis that we had a feeling they were doing something special. They didn't have very much in terms of stats. And it took a year of us playing a sequence of singles for people to jump on to them - a lot of people think Rather Be was their first single but actually it was their fourth that we playlisted on Radio 1."

That this is an exception, rather than a rule, is something of a problem. Because if Radio One is basically deciding what to play using a 'what's already popular' formula, you might wonder why its target audience would bother tuning in.

"Hey, kids, listen to the radio - we've got all the songs you liked a fortnight ago, right here."

It's not the most exciting proposition, is it?

"Radio One: In YouTube's statistical integrity we trust."

Isn't Radio One's job to build the talent, rather than count the numbers?

Winehouse revisited

Further to yesterday's post about how The Observer presented the Amy Winehouse story...

I didn't see the print edition until quite late yesterday. In print, the interview has the same standfirst as online. But there's a crucial difference.

Even if you didn't read the main paper - which had a (sensitively written) news story about the bulimia claim - before you got to the magazine, the anatomy of the magazine meant any reader arriving at the page would have come to the "what really killed her" line through a different path. In that context, it felt less jarring.

It doesn't make the way the online piece is displayed all right, but it's reassuring to know this looks like an awkward side-effect of trying to publish something physically and digitally at the same time. Should have been picked up, though.

Amy Winehouse and the journalistic hook

The Observer Magazine has a lovely interview with Amy Winehouse's brother, Alex, today.

I'm not sure if it's just me, but while the piece by Elizabeth Day is nicely handled, the sell feels a little misjudged.

You might have seen the promotional tweet:

Cover story: Amy Winehouse's brother talks to @elizabday about his sis – and reveals what he thinks really killed her http://t.co/V5FRemmsFI

— Observer Magazine (@ObsMagazine) June 23, 2013

Or, possibly, read the standfirst:

As an exhibition opens about her family life, Amy Winehouse's brother Alex talks in his first major interview about the girl who became a superstar – and reveals what he thinks really killed her

This focus on "what he thinks really killed her" is both grisly and disingenuous. As a way of attracting attention to the piece, it might work - A killer unmasked! A challenge to the coroner? - but in effect it distorts what Alex was trying to say, and depicts an important and personal observation into a false promise of a CSI plot twist.

Maybe I should say 'spoilers' here:

"She suffered from bulimia very badly. That's not, like, a revelation – you knew just by looking at her… She would have died eventually, the way she was going, but what really killed her was the bulimia… Absolutely terrible."

What does he mean by that? "I think that it left her weaker and more susceptible. Had she not had an eating disorder, she would have been physically stronger."

I wouldn't suggest that The Observer have added something that wasn't in Alex's words, but by stripping them from the context and using them as a hook, they've not really represented them that fairly. Something important and subtle has been lost for the sake of a grab.

Neil McCormick files Observer piece for The Telegraph

Neil McCormick, friend of Bono, has given Telegraph readers a crash course in Kraftwerk.

Some readers got an uncanny sense of deja-vu. Didn't McCormick's piece, "Kraftwerk: the most influential group in pop history?" have more than a passing similarity to Jude Roger's "Why Kraftwerk are still the world's most influential band" that appeared a few days earlier in The Observer.

When challenged about this on Twitter by @theboylightning, McCormick invented a new irregular verb:

It's called sampling. It's the modern way. (I'll give you 2 sentences out of 1200 words on exactly the same story)

I sample, you lift, he/she plagiarises.

McCormick put his hands up to lifting a line from Rogers about a Melody Maker review. By this point, Jude had joined the conversation and pointed out that a big chunk of her research had turned up in his bit:

The huddling together of facts about Afrika Bambaataa, Uranium and The Model also rang a few bells. Ding dong.

McCormick claimed you can't write a Kraftwerk article without throwing those bits in. Which might be true, but it's the way they're folded in. Here's Jude in The Observer:

Afrika Bambaataa fused the melody of Trans-Europe Express and the rhythm of 1981's Numbers to create Planet Rock, one of hip-hop's pioneering tracks. Trailblazing electro group Cybotron used a loop from 1977's Hall of Mirrors; its founder, Juan Atkins, would create techno, and from there came modern dance culture.

Back in Britain, New Order would sample Uranium on Blue Monday, while synth-pop inspired by albums such as 1978's The Man-Machine would set the decade's pop mood. Kraftwerk would even get a No 1 single, The Model, in February 1982, four years after its first release. It was if the world was finally catching up with them.

And here's Neil's scamper through the history:

Afrika Bambaataa’s groundbreaking 1982 hip-hop dance smash Planet Rock was built around Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express. The same year, Kraftwerk’s The Model hit No1 in Britain, four years after its first release. In 1983, New Order sampled Kraftwerk for their breakthrough dance rock hit Blue Monday. By the end of the Eighties, a whole new dance scene was emerging.

It could be coincidence, but it doesn't half read like a precis.

McCormick then offered an even more bizarre defence:

I figured, who actually reads both the Guardian & The Telegraph (apart from me obviously)

I'm sure Neil didn't mean to make that sound like "I didn't think I'd get caught", (and interesting that he doesn't appear to know what paper the article was originally in) but it does sound a bit like that. In much the same way his Telegraph piece sounds a bit like Jude Rogers in The Observer.

Alex James tries to clear the stink of Cheesefest

The disaster that was the otherwise-successful Alex James Presents Harvest cheese-and-music bash not paying anyone gets a close look in today's Observer.

Alex James is given space to not quite apologise, but stress how bad he feels about it all:

James acknowledges how furious many of those involved have been. Although he did receive part-payment upfront, it did not, he says, compensate for the work he put into the festival. '"It wasn't about the money I lost. It's just a mess. It was easily the worst business deal I've ever done. I'm gutted that some people didn't get paid."

It's pointed out that James has been involved in trying to get money to some of those left unpaid, and is fairly generous to him.

This is quite surprising. The piece is written by Observer eating critic Jay Rayner. Rayner was a pretty strong critic of James and the cheese disaster, tweeting this just a couple of weeks ago:

Not a fan of Alex James - the failed foodfest on his land stiffed lots of people, and no apology - so this amused me: bit.ly/z0S4fm

— Jay Rayner (@jayrayner1) February 17, 2012

So, either Rayner has had his pants charmed off him, or else James' contrition convinced him.

Twitterites have pointed out to Rayner this morning the lack of any trace of contrition, but Rayner says there was no space:

@CityJohn i had 800 words, so i cut to the chase. you didn't hear the interview or how tough i was on him, which was very.

— Jay Rayner (@jayrayner1) March 4, 2012

You might think that James would have been better served by being portrayed as someone apologetic for the mess in the article itself, but I don't think Rayner would have been so warm to him if he didn't believe it was there.

The NME at 60

There's a nice piece in The Observer today looking at the sixty years history of the now-defunct NME through editor's favourite covers.

I say sixty years; there isn't anything from before 1979. And, somewhat oddly, there's no contribution from Conor McNicholas. They don't quite have the current editor, either:

As you can see, Krissi Muriso(n) has picked her Simon Cowell Christmas double from 2009 as her best front page.

It was certainly a provocative choice for an NME front, but to be honest, what else would she have gone with? The last couple of years of fronts of the NME have felt like a constant rotation of Noel Gallagher/long dead pop star/list issue/Liam Gallagher.

In fact, just how out of sorts the NME front page has become is shown by the choices of the other editors of what was 'of their time'. All the previous decade's choices have featured in the last quarter of the magazine as well.

So, Alan Lewis picks The Stone Roses cover from November 1989; They got two front pages in October 2011 (and, I suspect, will be on there again before the year is out.)

Steve Sutherland picks the Blur v Oasis battle, a clash that still rumbles on with Noel having last shown up on the front page last week and Blur, erm, this.

Neil Spencer has picked a punk cover; next week, unbelievably, the NME is putting the Sex Pistols on the cover. (Spencer's choice, incidentally, is the Slits nude-mud cover, which was genuinely challenging and part of a debate, rather than Lydon banging on like a pantomime dame again.)

Murison, whose editorship started well and has spiralled down noticeably over the last year or so, ending up with a Beatles front page at the turn of the year, attempts to sum up the current editorial stance of the paper but unfortunately ends up sounding like a letter to Smash Hits, circa 1986:

I started just as dubstep had gone from underground to overground and artists in whatever genre were generally being more experimental. People always say to me that such-and-such is an NME band but that doesn't mean much to me. There are two types of music, good and bad, and genre doesn't come into that.

Looking at the list of acts who have appeared on the front pages, or in the lists of best albums, that starts to ring a bit hollow. A magazine that genuinely believed that would be something to behold - jazz rubbing against interesting noise against folk.

But that's not what the NME is - in fact, what seems to be the definition of an NME band in 2012 is 'was it an NME band in the last century'?

Glastonbury 2011: Quick morning press round-up

You'll have been wondering yourself, but only the Mirror dared to ask the burning question: Just what has been Fearne Cotton's highlight of the festival?

She told me: “Swaying in the mud to U2 was pretty sweet, definitely my highlight. Then I raved in the dance village to ANNIE MAC. The weather has been crap and I managed to ruin my new pink jeans. So that sucked.”

Ah, those festival highs and lows.

Light and shade, light and shade.

The Mail seems to have lost interest in Glastonbury today, just finding space for some minor scuffle when somebody asked Wayne Rooney for an autograph. It's understandable he'd get annoyed if someone was cruel enough to ask him to write.

For the Telegraph, it's still the U2 set which is occupying their thoughts. In particular, William Langley wants to know why we don't respect the tax-dodging, power-loving, environment-destroying hypocrites?

Bono and his men are currently on a tour of the US, and to reach deepest Somerset they had to fly in from Baltimore and straight back out again to Michigan. But instead of showing gratitude, many among the plastic poncho-clad crusties were still complaining about things like the group’s “brand image” as the rockers arrived on stage.

To be honest, William, if you're on a massive tour of the US leaping from East Lansing to Miami as a matter of course, a detour to Bristol isn't that much of a journey out your way.

And the Glastonbury audience as "poncho-clad crusties"? Have you seen a shot of the crowd there that dates from any time after 1994?

Langley then runs through the grounds for objecting to U2's behaviour, before... well, petering out. It seems even Langley can't find any rousing conclusion as to how we're treating them unfairly, edging out with:

Glastonbury was fortunate to see the best of them. Even if some in the crowd would have preferred not to see them at all.

As one of the comments under his work points out, rather than constructing an argument that U2 are undervalued, Langley merely says 'some people don't like U2 much', which isn't really a revelation.

The Observer has had lots of letters, and one of them is about the Pilton Pop festival:

The Glastonbury festival is a feudal dictatorship with no trade union support for the workers, the equality levels of pre-revolutionary France and a private unaccountable security force. It's the modern equivalent of bread and circuses, with the green footprint of a small, coal-fuelled power station. The fresh air's quite nice, though.

The writer, David Trippas, gives his address as "Birmingham", but it's quite possible he sent that from an iPhone shortly after having asked Wayne Rooney for an autograph.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Pete Doherty

In case you've not seen it yet, there's a strong piece in today's Observer which removes what leaves of any sheen on Pete Doherty's character. Former friend, producer and collaborator Jake Fior explains what it's like to be in Doherty's orbit:

On Sunday 24 January 2010, [Robin Whitehead] died from a suspected drug overdose in the Hackney flat where she had been filming Doherty and his friend, another musician, Pete Wolfe, whom Fior had previously managed. Last month, Doherty was sentenced to six months in prison for possession of class A drugs, and Wolfe 12 months, for possession and supply of class A drugs, a conviction secured by damning evidence filmed by Whitehead on the weekend of her death. It is Doherty's third prison sentence since 2003, and follows multiple fines, court appearances, spells in rehab and broken promises to clean up his act. "The media are calling this a tragedy," says Fior, speaking before the pair received their sentence. "But for a brilliant, beautiful, vibrant 27-year-old girl to have gone into that flat and not come out, it is not a tragedy, it's an obscenity."

Downloadable: Phoenix

I still can't quite make my mind up about Phoenix - they feel like a band I should love, but they feel a bit too much like a band designed to make me love them. I shall ponder this as I make use of the Observer offer of a free Phoenix live album.

(Curious: the terms and conditions on the free offer includes "recorded live in Syndney in March 2010". Is that a term, or is that a condition?)

Despair Here: Peaches Geldof condescends to an interview

Rachel Cooke approaches her meeting with Peaches Geldof with an open mind, hoping to make some sort of connection.

Unfortunately, that attitude can't last forever:

Silly me. It seems that I am the one who is going to get the career advice. To sum up: the work that I do is pretty rubbish. Most interviews are just so... boring. Then again, I mustn't feel too bad. It could be worse. I could be on a tabloid.

'Don't get me wrong,' says Peaches, consolingly. 'Broadsheets can be scathing. But I have respect for broadsheet journalists because they haven't succumbed to degrading themselves, to writing pidgin English with all these terrible colloquialisms, the phrasing of which is just, like, embarrassing.'

Peaches has just published a magazine to which her main contribution is an interview with Viviene Westwood. I say "interview", it's more a transcription of a non-meeting of minds. But - given Peaches' new role as a keeper of the qualities of the English language, it's perhaps worth reproducing the cliche-soused opening of that piece. This, apparently, is English as, like, what it should be done:

Though known worldwide for acts of infamy in the seventies with then-sidekick Malcolm Mclaren, with whom she spearheaded what would become the Punk movement with her Kings Road shop SEX and anarchist spoutings, and nowadays as a political activist, it’s fashion that has kept Westwood at the forefront of public consciousness for decades. 
And Westwood knows fashion. It’s evident as she steps out of her Battersea office for our interview, clad in some sort of shiny, all-black bin bag dress that hugs her deceptively youthful frame, teetering precariously on skyscraper heels, her jumble of safety-pin necklaces and oversized golden chains jangling with every step, and that famous mass of hair the colour of Spanish oranges standing out starkly against the gloomy but suitably apocalyptic backdrop of south London sky. Westwood is one of the few fashion designers that start trends, that begin movements within the prudish confines of the fashion world, a desginer who constantly pushes the boundaries of what is accessible and acceptable, whose pieces are collected not as garments but as works of art, from her tartan drainpipe trousers of the punk heyday, to her French resistance themed nautical sailors coat of her last London collection. But what is it that makes this formidable fashion maven tick? And what in the world is her pet yak up to these days? I got to find out…

Yeah, come back when you can write like that, Rachel Cooke.

Peaches explains to Rachel why tabloid journalists aren't actually proper journalists, like her:

'Yes. Because I don't count tabloid journalists as journalists. Everyone has a choice. The photographer who hasn't made any money photographing his passion, like wildlife, let's say he makes these amazing jungle scenes. So then he resorts to being a paparazzi. I don't respect that. He should persevere. He should do different jobs, but keep his passion until he can say: this is me. A lot of paparazzi wanted to be real photographers but they failed, and they did that instead, and it's not right; it's stalking.'

The 'why not keep doing what you want until it happens' line is the simplistic arrogance that can only come with a rich benefactor; never having had to do a day's real work in her life, or worry about converting 'amazing jungle scenes' into money with which to buy children's shoes or mortgage repayments, it must seem so simple to Peaches. Still, it's nice that she acknowledges that you are allowed to do "other jobs" - though, presumably, not other jobs which use the equipment you already own and the skills you already have.

It doesn't seem to have occurred, either, that many paparazzi are doing the job they dreamed of; that for many the rich rewards of scooping the flotsam of the familiar are the attraction, and that they'd no more want to be shooting amazing jungle scenes for a pittance than Peaches would want a double shift behind the counter of a KFC.

Naturally, Peaches can't understand that the interest in her comes not from anything she does, but from her position in the celebrity world, and that if all the paparazzi went off to Brazil to take pictures of lizards, she'd simply cease to exist.

She doesn't see it at all:

'The other day, I was doing Nylon TV: it's microphone journalism on the red carpet. It was a fashion event. Heather Graham was there. She'd recently had a bit of scandal with her love life, and they were all asking her these really personal questions and you could see her retreating into herself. It was horrible to watch, like bear-baiting. So when she came to me, I just started asking her these bizarre questions, like what her favourite cheese was. Weird stuff. Questions about wildlife. Afterwards, she came over to me and said: "thank you so much". I only did that because I have been in that situation. It's so fucking patronising asking the same questions as everyone else.'

But Peaches, what do you think the point of a red carpet session is, exactly? It's a way of parading the famous in front of celebrity photographers and videographers. If you're really so against the paparazzi, why are taking part in an event that exists solely to feed them?

Oh, and questions about cheese: how radical and cutting-edge you are, using interview techniques from Smash Hits circa 1983.

And let's not forget she happily chats away to Heat - which, like Peaches herself, would vanish without those long lens shots of celebrities:

'I spoke to Heat because it's the only celebrity magazine with a sense of humour,' she says. 'Unlike Closer, which is...' Her publicist, sitting on the next table, tells her not to slag off Closer. 'Oh, I can't speak about Closer. So like Now, then, or Star.' Her publicist tells her that she really shouldn't slag off any of them.

Ah, yes: the publicist. Funnily enough, while one of the central tenets of Disappear Here is that it won't take material pushed from the PR industry, Peaches seems quite happy to have the PR industry pushing the magazine. Presumably when she has had her editors' hat on, she scorns the approaches from the professional publicity teams because their job is to get newspapers and magazines to write about any old rubbish; then she takes off her editor's hat and gets her PR team to persuade newspapers and magazines to write about Disappear Here. It's not clear if a single coherent thought has ever successfully made it through Geldof's head from one side to the other.

Cooke asks Geldof about the advantages her name gives her, and if it's entirely fair:

'Yeah, I feel terrible a lot of the time. Especially with my fashion line [she has designed a range for PPQ]. People say: "We went to St Martins [school of fashion] and now she gets a fashion line." I would love to help all these St Martins people, but I can't. So I would rather reap the benefits I have been given.'

Every one for themselves. And, to be fair, it would take someone with the resilience of a latter-day Saint Francis to turn down lucrative opportunities just because you know you're being used as a name to attract interest rather than for any inherent talent you might have. Besides, Geldof might reflect that aside from a couple of pieces in Disappear Here, most of the stuff is written by someone who actually can form a coherent sentence or two, so she could argue she's using her fame to create some sort of trickle-down economy.

What's lacking, though, is any sense of self-awareness, and any sense of connection with the world and people in it. By world, I mean the one that most of us sit in, rather than her world, which is upholstered. She thinks she knows:

"I married an unknown person. I've always dated unknown people. All my friends have shitty jobs, or go to university and eat beans out of a can. I don't mind paying three pounds to get in [to a gig]"

She thinks she knows. But "not minding paying three pounds to get in to a gig" is the audit line. She thinks paying a few quid - rather than getting in on the guest list - is a sign of how connected she is. It's not, Peaches. The world out here - the world in which people "eat beans out a can" to keep from starving - is one where you have to scrape together that three quid, from slummy down the back of the sofa and selling back your books. Not where you waft by and ask the door guy if he's got change for a fifty.

[Clair at the Urban Woo has a post on Peaches' approach to magazine publishing inspired by the same interview]

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

Sean O'Hagan talks to Scott Walker in the Observer:

In person, Scott Walker does not look like a living legend. His clothes are casual - faded jeans, denim jacket, trainers - and his manner diffident but charming. Throughout the interview, he sits perched, thin and bird-like, on the edge of a huge, floral-patterned sofa as if, at any moment, he might take flight. He looks much younger than his 65 years but his eyes, when I catch a glimpse of them beneath that pulled-down baseball cap, have a flickering intensity that speaks of deep unease. It is hard to imagine that he was ever a heart-throb who induced mass hysteria. For a moment, though, back in the mid-Sixties, the Walker Brothers, who weren't brothers at all, were known as 'America's Beatles'.

'Oh, it was amazing at first,' he says, smiling, 'but a little goes a long way. I was not cut out for that world. I love pop music, but I didn't have the temperament for fame.'

Noel Gallagher rails against the Berliners

While more than happy to snuggle up to the fawning flaps of Gordon Smart, there are some members of Fleet Street who will not be welcome at Noel Gallagher's house. He has no time for Guardian types, oh no. Asked about his ignorance parade over Jay-Z, rather than focusing on his own stupidity, he decides to attack:

"If people in the fucking Observer and the Guardian wanna get on their high horse about it, there's not a great deal I can do."

Of course, this is only to be expected - after all, Noel used to be married to the diarist of the Sunday Times Style Magazine, so his judgement on journalistic quality is unimpeachable.

He goes on. Of course he goes on:

"It really pisses me off," he continues, "all these spotty herberts whose mams and dads voted for Margaret Thatcher all those years are now sitting on some moral fucking high chair."

We've had a large swig of coffee to try and work out what he's talking about - a moral high chair? Is he confusing a horse with a chair? Is he suggesting that Polly Toynbee's parents used to vote conservative? Does it really matter how ones parents voted when you're developing your own politics? Or are we all supposed to always vote exactly the way our parents did? Given that Noel is vocal in his dislike of Thatcher, shouldn't he applaud someone who grows away from such a malign influence? And since The Guardian was the only paper which consistently attacked Thatcher, isn't it a paper whose views he should find at least some common cause with? Or.... could it just be that we're struggling to find coherence in a place where there is none? It's weighing down... heavy... need some... help to do heavy lifting...
[Thanks to James M]

Thom Yorke dons the green eye-shield

Today's Observer magazine has been guest-edited by Thom Yorke; it's a climate change special and in his introduction he suggests that his larger-than-average global footprint is a help, rather than a hindrance, in spreading the message:

At first I told Friends of the Earth that I was absolutely the wrong person to be associated with their campaign. I've based my life on touring and the rock industry is a high energy-consuming industry. But they persuaded me that that was exactly why it was a good idea for me to be involved, that they didn't want to present a holier-than-thou message.

That's true - and makes a certain degree of sense - although how far would you take that? There's a sense that this is the environmental equivalent of those times when Keith Richards tells pop stars to not take drugs, isn't it?

But, for a whiskey priest, Yorke is pretty passionate and takes well to his brief - interviewing Ken Livingstone about plans to bring bike rental to central London, for example. Sadly, he doesn't get his hands dirty with testing alternatives to bin liners.