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A short-form Smashed Hits piece for the BBC News Magazine about Shipbuilding, pegged to the closure of the Portsmouth shipyards.

It would have sounded very different if Costello had written the song for himself – or written the music. Shipbuilding was originally a piano piece written by Madness’s producer Clive Langer for a gentler performer, Robert Wyatt. Langer bumped into Costello at a party and suggested they go out to his car and listen to a cassette of the tune. Costello subsequently called from an Australian tour to say he had “the best lyric I’ve ever written”. Wyatt’s song was made – and in 1983 Costello recorded it himself.

No room, sadly, for Chet Baker playing at London supper-and-jazz club The Canteen, approached by Costello and offering to play on EC’s version for scale. “I think we probably doubled it,” remembered Costello.

• See also: Is London Calling the best anthem for a city?; How political is What A Wonderful World?; What is Killing In The Name all about?; Two Little Boys, but in which war?

A piece about Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World for the BBC.

It’s also irrepressibly public-spirited, people shaking hands on the street are, apparently, ‘saying I love you’ – illustrated in the Attenborough video, oddly, by two hippopotamuses fighting each other in the Okavango river.

And this is not the first time What A Wonderful World’s generosity of spirit has been juxtaposed with less-than-cheerful imagery.

No room, sadly, for Armstrong’s 1957 refusal to join a goodwill visit to the Soviet Union, saying: “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell.”

• Smashed Hits on perhaps-unlikely politics: Down Under; Two Little Boys
• Bright blessed day photograph taken in Richmond Park; dark sacred night in Almondsbury - both in voguish Pano format Accidentally permanently deleted and replaced with Mont St Michel

As the countdown to the 2012 Olympics kicks off with an unlikely theme song, I look London Calling and its zombies and heroin for the BBC.

“The Clash were supporters of pirate radio and considered launching their own station; this love song to the wireless signal recounts what, in punk terms, is up-to-the-minute and truthful news. But it isn’t saying ‘come and enjoy the canoe slalom’.”

Major hoorays to Marcus Gray’s Route 19 Revisited for the key fact that London Calling was originally inspired by Joe Strummer’s dislike of sports fans visiting London, as he explained to Kosmo Vinyl (Clash On Broadway box set booklet, 1991). Awkward [Update [1 Aug]: Praise be! Route 19 is imminently in paperback. There is nothing more interesting to say about 1979; I know – I tried! Buy it – it is The One.]

Sadly there was no space to mention Clash fan of Indian origin Harraj Mann, questioned in 2006 under the Terrorism Act after a taxi driver taking him to Heathrow airport became alarmed that he was listening to London Calling and called the police. The incident was seen as a massive overreaction, suggesting either that the song has lost its incendiary power, or that the authorities were being over-cautious – or both.

Also neglected was the way Strummer starts “doing” Tommy Steele’s Singing The Blues at the end (“I’ve never felt so much a-like…”), never better described than by Tom Ewing: “No consonant is safe with Steele around, words pool into one another in a shrugged gush of pre-meditated moodiness.”

Update [30 Jul]: Here is wireless nabob Scott Simon of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday yakking with me (see also NPR’s blog The Record):

• Image of comedy London punks in Westminster, 2006. It turned out, as they snarled at me, that I’d broken some implied contract where I’d pay to photograph them in a public place.
• Here’s an old BBC “London Calling” poster: “Throughout Europe, men and women are risking imprisonment, and even death, to hear the news from London, because they know it tells them the truth.”
• Some overlap with an earlier piece I wrote about (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais.
• People who like to know about mixing an instrument DI with a Neumann U87 on the cabinet will appreciate Mix’s Classic Tracks feature on the song; this BBC audio slideshow on the London Calling album is less abstruse.

Radio 4 listeners have chosen Queen’s opera-headbanger as their favourite Desert Island piece of pop; I explain all in a feature for the BBC News Magazine, What is a Bohemian Rhapsody?:

“Freddie Mercury used a piano as the headboard of his bed. The double-jointed Mercury would awake with inspiration, reach up and back behind his head and play what he’d heard in his dreams. This was how Bohemian Rhapsody began.”

Update [22 Jun]: Here is Scott Simon of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday yakking with me about Bismillah and Scaramouche:

• Other florid lyrics I have enjoyed dissecting: Flowers In The Rain; A Whiter Shade Of Pale.
• More American public radio below; I discuss Daniel Powter’s Bad Day [article here] with John Schaefer on WNYC’s Soundcheck.

• Photo taken at the Alhambra in Andalucía‎ and included in tribute to Dr Matthew Beaumont‘s evocation of Moorish architecture. [More Beaumont in his book with Patrick Keiller, Chris Petit, Iain Sinclair et al, Restless Cities.]

I’ve written a feature for the BBC News Magazine about how pub quizzes can survive the smartphone era.

“Text-messaging Is Destroying the Pub Quiz As We Know It, noted the Super Furry Animals in 2001. Little did they know that the pub quiz of 2011 would start with the host insisting: ‘OK, iPhones away, please. Yes, very clever – and Androids. All phones away.’

“Cheating has always been possible in pub quizzes. But while once the dishonest quizzer had to pop out to phone a friend, or wait for a text message reply, phones with fast internet access have taken cheating possibilities to a new level.”

• Related: a piece by me for the BBC about Google getting us to teach it to see.
• Sadly, I was only able to talk to Stuart Jeffries, who sets the King William’s College Quiz, after publication. Perhaps next time.
• The last time I talked quizzes for the BBC was in this report by the excellent Chris Vallance for Broadcasting House on Radio 4.

• Photo taken at Bekenscot Model Village.
• One type of question which there wasn’t room for was the Blurred Cover. Below are four best-sellers. But what are their titles and authors?