Daily Archives: November 5, 2007

Missing column

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As a result of some — as yet unexplained glitch — yesterday’s Observer column didn’t make the leap from print to Web. If you’re interested here’s a pdf.

Who said there isn’t life after death? Hard on the heels of Radiohead’s ‘pay what you like’ experiment — in which fans were able to decide how much (or how little) they wanted to pay for the group’s latest album — comes news that Cliff Richard is also testing new online business models. He’s asking his fans to determine the price of his forthcoming meisterwerk, ‘Love, the Album’. The maximum anyone will be charged is £7.99 (the price of an album on the iTunes store) but the the final price will be determined by how popular the album is — as measured by the volume of advance orders.

Ingenious, eh? It just shows that there’s still life in these old codgers. Sir Cliff says he had no choice but to embrace new technology. ‘Who’d have thought I’d get a buzz from creative marketing?’ he told the Daily Telegraph. ‘As artists we face a stark choice. We either keep one step ahead of the technology which is changing our industry so radically – or we throw up our hands and quit. Personally I’m not for quitting.’

Right on…

Correction: The column was published on the Web edition, but in a different location. Phew!

BuzzMachine in Cambridge

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Jeff Jarvis came to Cambridge yesterday and had lunch with a group of us in the Eagle. I’ve been reading his blog for years, and greatly admire his sharpness and clarity. As he talked over lunch, I was reminded of something Noel Annan said once about a colleague. “I wish I was as sure of anything as that man is about everything”. Afterwards we went on a stroll down Free School Lane past the Old Cavendish laboratory where the electron was discovered (by J.J. Thompson) and the atom was split for the first time (by John Cockroft and Ernest Walton) and the structure of the DNA molecule was elucidated (by James Watson and Francis Crick). We paused by the plaque commemorating the discovery of the electron and Jeff pulled out his camera.

So of course I photographed him doing so. What I didn’t realise is that Quentin was at that moment trying to get into position to photograph me photographing Jeff. But the main subject moved and so what David Good described as a perfect postmodernist photographic moment passed unrecorded.

Thanks to Bill Thompson for arranging a great lunch.