Taking a short walk on the stodge side ...

(Above: oh dear).

And now just a short note of bewilderment and despair.

Why is Fairfax reprinting James Delingpole scribbling about Lou Reed?

Apart from anything else, the piece is available to anyone who cares to read the UK Daily Terror, here, and with a less puncturing header to boot.

The Fairfaxians seem to think they can lather up a little controversy of the "puncturing" kind, but it turns out that Delingpole's piece is relatively soft core, and meaningless snide gibberish at that, which concludes with the enormously banal observation that it's all show business.

There have always been these two strands to popular music: the easy and the difficult; the raw and the smooth; the real and the fake. But, really, they are just two sides of the same coin. Whether you’re the Byrds or the Beatles, the Velvets or the Sex Pistols, it’s all just showbusiness in the end.

Politics? That's just show business.

The climate? That's just show business.

An argument with the spouse? Sheesh, that's just show business.

Life? Don't you know? Haven't you guessed? Just show business, make sure you go out with a bang.

And so on. Fling in a quote from Elton John about shallowness and you're done and dusted, and as a bonus, you've stayed resolutely at the shallow end of the pool.

Yet it turns out that Delingpole was scarred by his encounter with Reed:

Lou Reed, who is reported by Rolling Stone to have died aged 71, was the most terrifying rock star I have ever interviewed. Partly it was his look that was so unsettling: all those amphetamines in his rock n roll years had taken their toll. His sunken cheeks, intense staring eyes and perpetually macerating jaw gave him the look of a malevolent praying mantis in a poodle fright wig. Partly it was because he took especial delight in giving the journalists who came to see him as hard a time as possible – especially if, as I was, they were young, nervous and clearly out of their depth. (The scary genius that was Lou Reed)

Scary genius? Terrifying? Sorry, that's just showbusiness in the end ... you know, like climate science ...

It turns out that Delingpole asked an asinine question in the interview, just as he writes asinine nonsense these days, and Reed gave him a good smack down by demanding to know Delingpole's source:

He did warm up a bit later, actually to the point of asking me what I thought his best song was. I named his bleakest and most depressing. The one from Street Hassle about trying to get rid of the body of someone who's just O-Ded in your flat. "Hey that ****'s not breathing….." it begins. This seemed to cheer him up immensely. I liked him very much.

Hey that cunt's not breathing is the actual lyric, but hey you can have too much realistic showbusiness. Remember, asterisks are also showbusiness ..

Never mind, it turns out that Delingpole liked Reed so much that when he came to write the farewell reprinted by the Fairfaxians, he found the time and the energy to breezily dismiss Reed as just another showbiz hack ...

The point, if there's any to be discovered in this bleak show biz world, is that the Fairfaxians could have acquired any number of farewells to Reed, yet they selected Delingpole as their stocking filler, a glib bit of nonsense that settles on the stomach like rancid porridge and almost makes you forget everything that's interesting about Reed.

And they make this part of their bamboo wall, while Delingpole is freely available peddling his superficial views of rock music and his climate denialism elsewhere?

Take a walk on the stodge side, Fairfaxians ...

A shout out to all the pond's TG friends, but as everyone on the planet is publishing links to Reed's Walk on the Wild Side on YouTube, here (ad attached) and elsewhere, how about the pond links to The Kinks doing Lola?

It's all showbusiness, but some songs are better than others, and some climate denialists worse than others...

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