We felt decidedly unworthy when writer Karl Dallas (above right with RBP’s chief archivist Mark Pringle) paid a visit to our Hammersmith lair yesterday and regaled us with tall tales of folk clubs, jazz renegades and wife-swapping in ’50s and ’60s London.

Karl was revisiting his Melody Maker writings in our archive, having ventured down to London from his adopted hometown of Bradford to be interviewed for a doc about Mike Oldfield’s Virgin-launching Tubular Bells (which he famously slated in the pages of the aforementioned Maker…)

See you again soon, Karl!

Our heartfelt gratitude to Lucy O’Brien – former Catholic Girl and She-Bopper extraordinaire (left) – and Miki Berenyi, former Lush goddess-guitarist (sporting a Clem Burke cut specially for the night) – who joined us at last night’s RBP Album Club to talk about Blondie’s breakthrough pop-punk meisterwerk Parallel Lines.

Much fun was had by all as Lucy ‘n’ Miki talked us through the background to the Mike-Chapman-produced album, then played and discussed most of its tracks from “Hanging on the Telephone” to “Heart of Glass”.

Thursday July 11th brings “the Two Nicks” – Messrs. Hornby and Coleman – to Notting Hill’s very groovy Idler Academy to revisit I Don’t Want to Go Home, the 1976 debut by Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes. Buy tickets here…

With Mark Pringle I have created the Facebook page Stop Working For Free. Please join it and keep the momentum going…

Calling all freelance content providers (musicians, writers, actors, photographers, designers etc):

Join me in WITHDRAWING UNPAID LABOUR from the creative and media industries.

The exploitation of freelance content providers has gone on too long, and we are all responsible for letting it happen.

Please do not:

• Write, act, photograph or design for free

• Provide images, music or performances for free

• Do radio or television interviews for free

If a company or corporation asks you to provide your time and skills for nothing, TURN IT DOWN. You have nothing to lose by saying NO.

If you have any concern at all for your economic future as a content provider – and for the future of subsequent generations of such providers – please don’t ignore this issue.

PASS THE WORD ON to any content providers you know (and join the new Facebook group Stop Working For Free…)

Further thoughts for those with a slightly longer attention span…

TO THE EXPLOITED:

• If you allow yourself to be seduced by the myth that your unpaid labour will “look good on your c.v.” (or equivalent blah), please try to see that you jeopardise not only the welfare of your replaceable elders but your OWN long-term economic future.

• You set up a paradigm whereby you in turn become replaceable. The rolling exploitation of unpaid workers and perpetual interns is based on a false notion of deferred reward.

• If we do not start demanding recompense, ultimately humans will have no value. As Jaron Lanier states in his essential new book WHO OWNS THE FUTURE?, “Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be the customers.”

• How is it that our online habits have huge big-data value to tax-avoidant entities like Google, Facebook and Amazon yet NO VALUE WHATSOEVER when we request payment for our contributions to the networked information economy?

• We must return to the core humanist principle of valuing not just institutions and material things but actual living humans.

• If the present economic paradigm prevails, it will vindicate Margaret Thatcher’s contention that there is no such thing as society. Wouldn’t it be nice to prove her wrong?

TO THE EXPLOITERS:

• If you are making money from the labour of others, then you should share that wealth with them.

• If you knowingly exploit somebody while telling yourself, “Why would I pay someone if s/he’s willing to work for nothing?”, how do you sleep at night?

• If you habitually hire interns, at what point does their work experience end? At what point does somebody actually become WORTH PAYING?

• The culture of internship and work experience sustains class inequality, because only privileged kids can work for free. Only THEY receive the economic subsidy the government withholds from those born poor and with little hope of educational betterment.

• This is not only a moral but a MARKET imperative. In the long term markets will collapse if there aren’t enough people sharing in the wealth.

THANKS FOR LISTENING.

One from the RBP vaults: the late Doors keyboard maestro answers ten questions for Sylvie Simmons in MOJO, December 1997…

Ever since Jim Morrison’s death there have been many Elvis-style, alive-and-well-and- pumping-gas ‘sightings’. Has it ever crossed your mind they may be right?

I’ve heard lots of stories – Jim’s in Israel, Jim’s living in Africa a la Arthur Rimbaud. Once I got a telegram saying, ‘I know where Jim Morrison is. He’s in the outback of Australia and he has a broken leg. Please send me $1500 so I can get his leg taken care of’. And I thought, that wasn’t an unreasonable amount to get Jim out of the outback. Had I been in Australia at the time, I might have looked in on him myself. I don’t think these stories are right, but they are delightful And really you don’t know – Jim’s body was actually never seen by anybody that I know. Pamela saw it, I suppose, but I was never ever able to talk to her about it, she was always so broken up. Bill Siddon, our manager went over to Paris to check out the rumours. He called me and said ‘We buried Jim’, and I asked how Jim looked. He said, ‘I don’t know, it was a sealed coffin’. I said, ‘ It could have been anything in there, you fool – 150 pound of bricks or sand.’. He said ‘No, Pam was distraught and everyone was crying so I knew he must be dead.’ So Jim, to the best of my knowledge, is lying in Pere Lachaise cememtery, but who knows? If anyone could pull off a disappearance, Jim could.

Are you surprised the rest of you survived?

Yes actually. There were several times when I found myself decidedly drunk and disorderly. My wife told me stories of me driving down the train tracks here in LA; I made a left at the track and just kept driving on the train track. Fortunately no train came amd I eventually made another left off the track. We all could be dead, except none of us drank to the extent Jim did. Ultimately that’s what killed him.

Why and how did you bring Jim back to life on the new Doors track ‘Orange County Suite’?

‘Orange County Suite’ is like The Beatles’ ‘Free as a Bird’. Just like. Jim was at the piano, just like Lennon was; we had Jim’s voice and a piano track, just like The Beatles had. We overdubbed the other parts and completed the song for him. He wrote the song in late 1970, early ‘71 and nothing was ever done with it. It was one of the things we discovered sitting in the vaults. Then lo and behold there’s The Beatles doing the same with Lennon – though I think they did an awful job; I couldn’t hear John Lennon. John wrote the song and his mates completed it for him; that’s exactly what we did with Jim.

Yeah, Jim wanted the song used. but unfortunately he decided to join Elvis up there – or out there – and the completion of it is something we thought he’d would have loved.

Did it feel strange, recording a new song with Morrison?

It felt strange – but everything the Doors do is always strange. Being there in the studio with Jim, the disembodied Jim, was like recording with a phantom; but that phantom was your friend.

You’ve described Jim Morrison as a split personality: Jim the poet genius, and Jimbo the evil genie. Did you never contemplate kicking him out and getting a sane frontman?

We couldn’t kick Jim out! He was my friend, we were college buddies, we put a band together and the band became famous, and we realised our artistic vision. Who’s going to write better poetry than Jim Morrison? I wasn’t going to kick him out of the band for the sake of normalcy. Jim was great; Jimbo was a fool, but Jimbo wasn’t always around. Sometimes a mad man creates; sometimes a mad man destroys himself.

What was the biggest untruth in the Oliver Stone movie The Doors?

It was not close to the truth. It was a gross exaggeration of the persona of Jim Morrison. Jim Morrison was much more artistic and spiritual – not a drunken jerk like Stone portrayed him. There are many untruths: Ray and Dorothy get married in the film, and there’s a big fight with the other guys that never happened. Our wedding was delightful: Jim and Pam were the best man and best bridesmaid, the four of us went to City Hall then had a wonderful afternoon together at Olivera St. where we had enchiladas and margaritas, and the next night we played with The Grateful Dead at the Shrine Auditorium and the Psychedelic Ballroom here in LA. The biggest? And at the end of the movie there’s a party going on for my daughter. I have no daughter.

The box set opens with ’5 to 1′, recorded at the infamous Miami concert where Jim got his dick out for the audience. What are your memories of that moment?

We don’t know for sure whether or not Jim actually exposed himself. In the trial there were 200 photos offered in evidence – of everything: the stage collapsing, rioting, Jim holding this lamb, Jim in somebody else’s strange hat with a skull and crossbones on it, Jim kneeling down in front of Robbie, photos of Jim with his hand inside his pants – whether he was scratching himself or playing with himself who knows. But out of 200 photos there was not one with Jim’s magnificent penis. Why there were no photos, I can only surmise that people were shocked at the sheer heft of it – or it never happened.

What went through your mind while it was going on?

Sheer panic, madness, craziness, some laughter – I thought it was absolutely hysterical, what he was up to, but I knew if he went any further they’d haul his ass off to jail. So I was afraid for Jim but also having a grand time, because it was so ridiculous and the audience was so worked up. It was more fun than the vision of Lourdes, for god’s sake!

What musically was The Doors’ high point for you?

L.A Woman. It represents to me a drive across the great American South West. Driving on the freeways and highways through the desert – Arizona or New Mexico – or driving up the coast of California on Highway 1, from L.A to San Francisco. It’s alive, it’s free, it’s young and it’s wild.

Will this be the last Doors album?

There’s never an end. One only thinks about the eternal present and I’ve no idea what’s coming in the future. We do have plans for some interpretations of Doors’ songs some time, but that’s all I can actually say at the moment.

The first official account of the iconic 4AD label, from RBP scribe Martin Aston…

This Mortal Coil, the Birthday Party, Bauhaus, Cocteau Twins, Pixies, Throwing Muses, Breeders, Dead Can Dance, Lisa Germano, Kristin Hersh, Belly, Red House Painters.

Just a handful of the bands and artists who started out recording for 4AD, a record label founded by Ivo Watts-Russell and Peter Kent in 1979, a label which went on to be one of the most influential of the modern era.

Combining the unique tastes of Russell and the striking design aesthetic of Vaughan Oliver, 4AD records were recognisable by their look as their sound. In this comprehensive account of the label’s first two decades (up to the point that Russell left), music journalist Martin Aston explores the fascinating story with unique access to all the key players and pretty much every artist who released a record on 4AD during that time, and to its notoriously reclusive founder.

With a cover designed by Vaughan Oliver this is an essential book for all 4AD fans and anyone who loved the music of that time.

Last night’s RBP Album Club was really something, especially if you’re a paid-up member of the Incredible String Band cult – as Robyn Hitchcock (centre, above), Green Gartside (left) and our “host for the evening” Mark Ellen so clearly are.

All three of these immensely tall gentlemen were insightful, funny and very moving about their deep love for Mike Heron and Robin Williamson (and Rose, Licorice et al), plus the “transformative” impact of 1968′s Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter and the pain of the occasional abuse they’ve taken as worshippers of the ISB.

In addition to the learned and always illuminating conversation, we were treated to scintillating renditions of “Swift is the Wind” and “Three is a Green Crown” – Hangman’s tracks that by Robyn’s and Green’s own admission are fiendishly tricky to play – that set a new benchmark for the Album Club which will be tough to match in the months to come.

Our gratitude to these three amigos for the time and care they put into what was a “very cellular” evening for all concerned!

Van Dyke Parks and his friend Loudon Wainwright III mug for my iPhone after Parks’ sublime show at London’s intimate Borderline on Sunday night. It was my cherry-on-top birthday present after Chelsea’s late three points at Old Trafford.

Parks was magnificent in a set that included “Cowboy”, “Orange Crate Art”, John Hartford’s “Delta Queen Waltz”, “Sail Away” and “FDR in Trinidad”, performed with a small and respectful quartet (cello/harp/drums/double bass), and a superb solo encore of “The All Golden” (on RBP’s Spotify playlist this week); also a duetted rendition of Little Feat’s “Sailin’ Shoes” (a version of which was included on Discover America, lest we forget) with the impressive Guatemalan singer Gabi Moreno.

Between songs, Van Dyke was at his wisest and inimitably funniest. “My mother told me, ‘Don’t try to be interesting’,” he said early on; “‘instead, stay interested.’” Sage advice, though Parks couldn’t be uninteresting if he devoted the entire sum of his energy to the effort – as the rapt gathering at the interview I was privileged to conduct with him at Oslo’s By:Larm conference in February would surely attest.

I’d barely started Who Owns The Future?, the sobering sophomore tome by Silicon Valley maverick Jaron Lanier, when my eyes fell on this paragraph:

“As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle classes in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education and health care. And all that destruction will come surely enough if the dominant idea of an information economy isn’t improved.”

I loved Lanier’s first long-player, You Are Not a Gadget (2010), and am gripped by his grasp on what is happening out there in an ever-more networked world where everything non-vital is getting cheaper and more accessible but fewer and fewer of us can afford to buy any of it. Lanier is an optimist but it’s hard to see how things will turn around any time soon. Meanwhile we all continue to “work” gratis for Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Only the other day my RBP colleague Mark Pringle was asked by the Amazon-owned business Audible if they could use one of his author photographs for free. “We’ll give you a credit,” they bleated when he remonstrated with them. The illogic of this is only too self-evident: if Amazon won’t pay you for a photograph, then what use is a credit?

If everyone in the devastated “creative classes” joined hands and refused to work for free, the undercutting, tax-avoidant likes of Amazon would be screwed. It’s hard to see how that could happen – or how almost everything else (including education, health care et al) won’t go the same way as music, journalism and photography.

At some point, lack of customers will force a rethink and a U-turn, but right now the future (owned by the digital giants with their super-computed algorithms and “siren servers”) looks bleak indeed.

Messrs Schmidt, Henley, Frey & Walsh line up for their press conf. last Thursday at Mayfair’s Connaught Hotel. See my report on RBP today…