Wednesday 29 October 2014

Talking about his generation.

It was always dangerous to sing 'hope I die before I get old' - unless of course you actually do.

However rather than quietly retiring into the salon bar - or brilliantly reinventing himself in the manner of fellow rock-god Robert Plant, Roger Daltrey has chosen to vent his geriatric spleen in the Mail on Sunday (where else?) 

Apparently music is just not what it was in his day. He has told the readers of Middle England that  modern music lacks 'any sense of angst and purpose'. And just to tick off another tedious prejudice, he tells the paper the 'only movement that can be started nowadays is ISIS.'

What a wanker. The truth is modern music is of course  shit. And of course it is also utterly brilliant. Just as it was in the days when giants like The Who walked the earth. For every Led Zeppelin and Clash there was a David Cassidy and a Brotherhood of Man. And whilst we may have the X-Factor now, in the bad old days we had New Faces and a Eurovision contest that was actually taken seriously, and not a hilarious pieces of ironic camp kitsch.

Maybe Daltrey should heed his own lyrics and just f-fade away ...


Sunday 12 October 2014

Tristram Hunt and the deck chairs on the Titanic

Teachers are leaving the profession in numbers because of workload stress. There is an approaching crisis in teacher recruitment and training. And an underlying agenda of privatising education with the free-school and academies programme. So how does Labour shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt respond?

With an idea that teachers should take some sort of 'hippocratic oath' pledging to uphold the nobility of their profession.

Of course that will improve standards of education. Much like the Hippocratic oath has ensured that no doctor has ever be guilty of malpractice. Or how the oath that policemen take has prevented miscarriages of justice. Or the oath that MPs take has prevented corruption....