Media can't hype people any longer but they're quite at liberty to hype themselves

Twitter positions itself as an accompaniment to watching TV. There's a term for it - double-screening. You're watching one. The other's on your knee.

Double-screening works best with TV that requires low engagement. Eurovision, X Factor, a football match between two teams you don't support. Somebody in advertising told me that they can track the amount of conversational "noise" on programmes of that kind. It continues all the way through.

On the other hand programmes that require high levels of engagement, such as Homeland, are preceded and followed by lots of Twitter traffic. While the programme's on people are too busy watching. Makes sense.

I wish somebody would come up with a name for the shows of enthusiasm that Twitter increasingly tempts people into. I'm getting the feeling that people's desire to be seen to enthuse about some new things, particularly in music, is greater than the actual enthusiasm they feel.

Media can't hype people any longer but they're quite at liberty to hype themselves.

Waitresses, Top Forty radio and the illusion of diversity

When I wrote about something I heard on Planet Rock, somebody who didn't wish to be named took me to task for slating the station having only listened to it for five minutes. In fact it was a bit longer than that but no matter.

All the people I know in radio accept that the very most of a new listener's attention they're going to get is a few minutes. That's why they design playlists in the way they do so that they hear something familiar, something hot and something new but familiar-sounding.

I was reading John Seabrook's piece about the songwriters behind Rihanna in an old copy of The New Yorker. Here he quotes from Marc Fisher's excellent book Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation. Fisher credits Todd Storz with the invention of Top Forty radio. When Storz was in the army during the war he watched how customers in diners tended to pick the same records again and again on the jukebox. When the customers left the waitresses took their own coins, put them in the jukebox and punched up the same records. They didn't want change. They wanted familiarity.

It was this concept he took into radio - in an era when it was considered bad form to play the same song twice in a twenty-four hour period. It's this principle of heavy rotation which still underpins all music radio, whether it professes to provide all the hits and more or pretends to follow a higher agenda. Behind the scenes programmers, producers and algorithms are working very hard to make sure you're never too far from something warm and familiar.

It's the same thing when you do research around people's preferences in music magazines. When asked everybody will describe themselves as having very eclectic tastes. In practice very few of them do. They all say they want informative pieces about new bands. In practice they all read the old one about Oasis.

Meet Mr Gig

Nige Tassell, who used to write for The Word, has published a book called Mr Gig, which details his quest to discover what live music means nowadays. This takes him from a package tour of former Smash Hits cover stars through Glastonbury and Cornbury to All Tomorrow's Parties in Butlin's, Minehead and a festival on the remote Hebridean island of Eigg.

Stuart Maconie has described it as "a sweet and tender paean to a very particular lost love, the live gig". Nige is joining us at next Monday's Word In Your Ear show, which also features My Darling Clementine and David Ford, where I'll be talking to him about the live experience past and present. Come one, come all. Tickets here.

An Othello review for short attention spans

We went to see Othello at the National Theatre.

With modern dress productions I always feel that for everything you gain (this is set in a Bastion-style military encampment on Cyprus) you sacrifice just as much in lost appreciation of just how deeply sunk in his times Shakespeare was (the play starts with Iago complaining about missing a preferment, which simply wouldn't come again in his lifetime.)

Brought up on a diet of "wot me guv?" wide boys, modern audiences sneakily prefer Iago to Othello whose nobility we're expected to take his own word for. The audience yesterday snickered nervously at Rory Kinnear's asides. But by the time the bed was piled with bodies, some of whom had expired at great length, one even confirming the fact with the words "I die", you could have heard a pin drop in the full house.

No intelligent life on Planet Rock

It's always a delight to hear someone mangling a really rotten idea for a listener competition on the radio.

I was listening to Planet Rock the other day. A listener had proposed the following list of artists as a competition: George Harrison, Peter Frampton, Rolling Stones and Weezer. The thing they had in common was that they'd all once covered Buddy Holly songs. All except Weezer who had recorded a song called Buddy Holly.

It's the kind of "so what?" question that makes you want to lynch the inquisitor. The answer should always be more interesting than the question and this really isn't.

But it was made worse by the fact that the presenter hit the wrong button on the play out machine (nobody has actual CDs in the studio any more) and played Wheatus instead of Weezer. He didn't notice and ploughed blithely on with the competition, far too busy to listen to the music.

The only thing I ask of any DJ is that they be enjoying the same experience they're providing. Most of them aren't.

I see from their site they're asking "want to be a Planet Rock presenter?" Tempting.

Why modern vinyl sounds better than old vinyl

Chris Topham flies jumbos for Virgin Atlantic for a living,  runs the vinyl label Plane Groovy for a hobby and is spinning the records at our next Word In Your Ear show on May 20th for nothing.

Plane Groovy has put out records by Chris Difford, My Darling Clementine, Henry Priestman and Francis Dunnery plus lots of progressive rock, which is Chris's particular taste.

These are proper records. Hefty things, often doubles, packaged in thick card covers and tightly shrink-wrapped so that they feel special and worth £19.99. To unpeel one is to be re-acquainted with the feeling of anticipation that vanished from recorded music thirty years ago.

They sound strangely good as well. Chris says the reason the vinyl records of the 70s and 80s popped and clicked was because in those post-fuel crisis days they had to be pressed on some recycled materials. "Modern vinyl," he reckons "sounds much better."

So few pressing plants are still open that it costs £3,000 to produce 500 copies of one of Plane Groovy's vinyl double albums. He does deals with artists on a handshake. Once the records, most of which are sold mail order, have earned back their manufacturing costs he splits things 50/50 with the act.

It's not a business that would provide anyone with a living but it takes more time than a standard hobby. He's trying to do a bit less flying so that he can spend more time with his records.

Chris will be spinning all kinds of vinyl inbetween the acts at our next Word In Your Ear gig at the Old Queen's Head on May 20th, a show which features My Darling Clementine and David Ford. You can book tickets here.

The knees are the mirror of the soul - which is why rock stars can't go on stage in shorts

I was talking to David Ford about our upcoming Word In Your Ear show on May 20th.

He'd recently compiled a list of dos and don't's for live performance and his first one was Don't Wear Shorts.

Soon as he said it my mind performed a Google image search of rock stars in shorts. Here they came, a cavalcade of charismatic heads and distinctive upper bodies mounted on the same strangers-to-sunlight pipe cleaner legs. The Beatles filming Help in Bermuda. Bob Dylan diving into a hotel pool in the 60s. Keith Richards in the basement at Nellecote during those Exile sessions. There was even some long forgotten snap of the otherwise muscular Bruce Springsteen torso perched on legs that wouldn't keep Peter Crouch off the ground.

Ford concedes that there are exceptions. Angus Young of AC/DC is clearly one. Sir Freddie Mercury of Live Aid is obviously another - but gay shorts are another variety altogether.

Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys could wear shorts with pride because he looked like a beach boy before he was a Beach Boy. And obviously this advice does not apply to women with good legs.

I've been thinking about this ever since. There is something about rock stars wearing shorts that is so profoundly wrong that it makes you wonder if contained within it are the secret codes defining rock star mystique as a different species from movie star mystique or any other form of mystique.

Maybe it's because legs don't lie and they remain there as a repudiation of every other form of re-invention. You can cover your face with hair, place a hat on your baldness, even make a feature of your pigeon chest but your knees are the true mirror of your soul.