And I’m as much to blame as anybody, I own an officially licensed Blue Hawaii Hawaiian shirt (see what they did there?), an ‘Elvis pig’ (in mitigation, a gift), and book-after-book both scurrilous and fanboy. But I love the King, it’s where me and Chuck D part company (“Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me”) and one of the few touchstones that I’m sure I would have with bum-sex comedian Frank Skinner (who paid silly money for a shirt that may have belonged to EAP).

It’s a love based on the iconography as much as the music, the belts and glasses as much as the sultry vocals, That’s The Way It Is as much as the Carson show and really; ’75 as much as ’56. We’re around the 33rd anniversary of the death of Elvis Aaron Presley, and if there’s anything more undignifying than “dying on the toilet” it’s Elvis Week 2010. A week long excuse to bombard fans with emails for inglorious tat: Jailhouse Rock Flip Flops, the Elvis Hot Sauce Sauce Gift Set (including Elvis Don’t Be Cruel Hot Sauce), the Elvis and Dale Earnhardt Fantasy Race Car Magnetic Guitar Bottle Opener and left over Elvis Week 2009 Golf Balls. But, there’s still the music. In October a new Elvis Complete Masters 30 CD set is being released at the paltry sum of about £573.78 plus shipping, containing all 711 master recordings and a hundred or so rarities — no better way to make sure that it’s the music that matters.

I couldn’t justify a pre-order for that, but I could beg and borrow all studio recordings released to date—and I can listen to all six hundred and ninety-eight of them in order. I could do the listening bit as I was ill with a stodgy cold and home alone as my other half was away to visit friends for the weekend—had she have been in situ there would have been no chance of getting through it in a sitting. A ferociously opinionated music fan, Jules has banned many of my favourites from play in her presence, mainly what she calls “wimpy indie music” (The Smiths, Belle and Sebastian, Black Box Recorder amongst them) but my recent obsession with listening only to covers of the Stones’ Satisfaction didn’t go down well either.

So I did, I loaded them all into iTunes, ordered by recording date as best as I could, from 1953′s My Happiness to 1976’s recording of Way Down (a posthumous Number One in the UK in 1977). That’s 1.2 days according to Apple. I started at 1pm on a Saturday, with intentions of attempting it in one go.

I wasn’t actually sure what I was attempting: it had something to do with sorting out my reactions to Elvis, something to do with wanting to make my own mind up on all those film soundtracks and deciding if the early years and the Vegas years were the same guy in anything more than physical body. Also, it was there, er, they were there, a mountain of Memphis to drag myself up with the use of ropes and crampons.

The foothills are easy, and seem so far in the past: the first couple of recordings were self-financed, are scratched beyond repair, and seem odd song choices if they really were presents for the venerated mother Presley. They, and almost all Elvis songs are based on love—romantic love to start with, then there’s the love of God, you sometimes have to look past the hard headed metaphors (cows, lots of cows early on. And moons). It’s not until Old Shep, 53 songs in for me and the King that there’s anything other than the birth of rock and roll. We’ve passed the echoing inventions of Sam Phillips, heard the bass slapped and the snare ratted, we’ve heard Elvis’s voice buckle country music out of recognition and into something dangerous and now it’s time for the dog. I’m a huge fan of epic, maudlin, Elvis whether it’s lost love (ooh loads), society’s ills (In The Ghetto), eternal damnation (all of the gospel recordings by implication) or a dead pooch.

In the fifties we get the templates for almost all of Elvis’s later output, and much of everybody else’s too — there are times, especially in the first big rush of success (Tell Me Why, 61 songs in) in 1957 where the material available to band isn’t anywhere near good enough. The vocals hold it together, and it’s a relief when the gospel recordings start they have a depth and sound less old—by virtue of sounding ancient to start with— than (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear (1957, 76 songs in) et al.

Could anyone of a similar pop standing (not that there is anyone) pull this off today? Could a major star change tack and record such openly religious music? Even 80s Dylan struggled with a Christian phase, maybe a chart-y soul singer could have a go but it’s unlikey that anyone would have the guts. It Is No Secret (What God Can Do) (68 in) has a wonderful oo-ee-oo at exactly 1:39.

It’s a while ’til we hit real movie detritus, but recordings from Jailhouse Rock offer a deathly foreshadowing of that which is to come—poor lyrics and simple melodies. It’ll get worse, but we’re okay for a while. What was Elvis in jail for in Jailhouse Rock, are these the stylings of an innocent man—did he just want to “stick around” to “get [his] kicks”? Forget this for a while, I tried to. Like I tried to forget that I’d made a terrible error at the Asda before starting the marathon and bought sugar-filled Pepsi rather than the similar looking caffeine-and-sweetnered Pepsi Max, a mistake that may well have lead to my dozing off later during a particularly one-note run of soundtrack sounds.

Crawfish from Kid Creole (122 songs in) was, I thought for a while, a new piece of non-metaphoric Presley. Was it the forerunner of the first few Beatles songs to leave that basic love/sex pop fascination—a song as dirty as this about a fish would have been way ahead of its time. Further reading or actual listening to the words revealed the crawfish to be ‘little Elvis’, and I was disappointed. By this stage I was keeping a tally of odd metaphors, three about cows, four moons (three of them blue) but this the first fish. I lost count eventually while looking for Elvis Firsts—and as I was so excited to find the classic ‘Elvis Talky Bit’ so early. Are You Lonesome Tonight (1960, 155) is the one with the “someone said the World’s a stage” line and is the most famous and best time that the King drops out of character, turns directly to you and solves your problems.

It finishes on the line “and then came act two” and that’s a good a point as any to really hit the long dark movie years of the soul.

Everyone knows that Elvis movies start okay, with proof that when given the right roles (young punk singers in the big city, not too much of a stretch) there is acting talent, and songs that mostly wouldn’t sound out of place on ‘proper’ albums. Everyone knows that the  movie business was eventually what killed the King, that Colonel Tom loved the film deals and the art could go hang. Everyone can point to Elvis’s Greatest Shit the in-no-way official compilation of the biggest musical atrocities and say that it’s almost exclusively from the movie years. Song of the Shrimp (Girls! Girls! Girls! 1962, 279) Old MacDonald (Double Trouble 1966, 411), and Dominic (Stay Away Joe 1967, 485)— a song about a shag-shy bullock—prove that.

But everyone is wrong. A bit.

Without exception, unless I was hallucinating on Onion Ring-style corn snacks, every film contains at least one great recording—the single from the album if you will. I started to save details of these lesser spotted flashes of ’56: Black Star (from Flaming Star 1960, 164) is county cowboy Roy Rogers done right, Charro! (Charro! 1968, 489) is the title track from his only non-singing role film and has a Joe Meek-eque production that really works.

In the days of limited media access, it’s frightening to think that the films were the only way you’d glimpse your favourite artist, and the awful soundtrack albums with terrible artwork. There no wonder that a whole pop and rock tradition built up while he was away. I took many an opportunity to pop to the toilet around this time.

The bad-film era does give us the first real batch of those gospel classics—enough to keep me going until the promised land of 1968. The ’68 special is, by some, held up as Elvis Presley’s last great work, but I find it a rehash of stuff that had gone before. Necessary to cleanse the palette perhaps, but nothing new recorded around this time has any great worth, we really do need to wait for the full big band sound to get into place before he becomes great again. I’ve been listening for over 24 hours now (I did drop off, but restarted at last remembered song) and I’m aching for the big sound of the Vegas years.

He can sing anything by this point, it’s all in place—band, producers, strings, horns, the Jordanaires. The only way it can go wrong is the song. When the song is right—I Washed My Hands In Muddy Water (1970, 570)— it’s perfect. When it’s wrong l’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen (1971, 615) it just doesn’t work.

Elvis is making me cry with regularity now, no-one hits a note of drunk self-pity better and even when you’re not inebriated you can remember those pissed moments when the only man that can understand how wronged you are is Elvis Aaron Presley. Well, him and Him. For we get that gospel thread back at this stage.

I spent most of my time at this point musing not on lyrical content, for Elvis is long past hiding behind anything the truth (whoever is writing) is laid bare, but on how Elvis is very much a religious figure. If my experience is coloured by the traditional Irish household I first heard Elvis records in, then perhaps that’s it. I see the EAP, JFK, and the Pope as the parts of a Catholic trinity almost as holy to people in the late seventies as the ‘real’ one. It’s something to to with the redemptive power of song, the way in which Elvis confesses every  sin—all borne through love—powerfully and honestly. Though they are others’ words, it’s Elvis’s truth. The greatest interpreter of song and emotion ever.

It takes Elvis 690 songs before he has a knock at Danny Boy (1976, 690) and it breaks the spell a little. Drawn in to the religiosity and expanse, I’m not buying that sentimental guff and it’s obvious that his heart isn’t in it.

Way Down (1976, 698) picks me up—despite containing the lowest note sung by a human on a recorded release by J.D.Summer— it’s a fitting end. I still love Elvis.

I tweeted throughout the experience at @elvismarathon, an archive of the Tweets is here.

A Spotify playlist of my ‘discoveries’ is here.

Sometimes anger is both justified and honourable.

I popped and got an iPhone 4 the other day, it’s nice (and it won’t cost me much once I recycle the old 3G – and the battery was dying).

I decided to stay with O2, I’ve not had problems with them and changing providers is fraught with hassle. The guys in the shop made it quite easy — except that I’ve discovered that the salesman lied to me to sell an insurance policy. This is a proper O2 shop (the receipt says Telefonica O2 UK Ltd and everything).

The salesman told me that insurance was compulsory on iPhone4 upgrades. That sounded fishy and I said I did not want it, only to be told a that it was free for 14 days and that I could cancel without being charged. I asked how, just to confirm, and they said by phone.

Then received my bill via email this am and that charged me for insurance at £15. The customer service rep on the telephone has refunded that and cancelled the insurance — confirming that there’s no such thing as compulsory insurance. But as it is credited in the next month’s bill,  how many £15s are O2 receiving and getting interest on for one month? How many people don’t check or cancel. How much commission is the liar (fraudster?) making.

Watch yourselves.

I guess it may have been one of the famous (how many other TV guest spots have songs written about them?) Match of the Day episodes — both when Altrincham were doing “well in the F.A. Cup” — or perhaps it was when he was booted from The James Whale Show, I used to watch all sorts of crap. Getting the Spanish archer from what was such a disorganised show was an achievement that later touring partner Charlie Chuck never managed, proof perhaps of an anarchy of spirit belied by the colouring pens and deference to his elders.

I don’t remember the first time I saw or heard Frank Sidebottom, it’s sort of like he’s always existed. But I do remember the first time I met him, or Chris Sievey to be pedantic.

The battered leather aviator’s jacket didn’t identify him, nor did the mess of black oiled curly hair or the ever so slightly bulbous nose — mind you I had absolutely no idea what Chris (as opposed to Frank) looked like at all. However there were no other middle-aged men sitting outside New Street Station with luggage big enough to house a Casio keyboard, and the boxy suitcase had a suspicious papier-mâché head shaped bulge. “Chris?”, I said. It was him

The Reading Festival has always been the strangest mainstream gig in the British summer calendar, a three-day festival where the rock hangover meant that it was completely possible to go and find yourself after two days of indie’s finest suddenly confronted with a sea of plaid shirts and not a single discernible tune. So that’s the reason I was in the comedy tent that Sunday evening in 1995 and instead of seeing Neil Young muscularly backed by a lumpen Pearl Jam, was shouting “spiders!” in an attempt to put off the apparently arachnophobic singer. Frank was leading that, and I was as smitten as one man can be with another who has a perfectly spherical fake head.

So that was why, almost ten years later I’d bullied — apparently — the man out of semi-retirement to play a hugely shambolic gig upstairs in a pub in Moseley. We, mate Gavin and I, were intent on “bringing back Variety” and after one, equally shambolic but way less good, night (band, comedian, raffle, bingo essentially) we’d decided that the only act that could top it was Timperley’s finest. I’d stumbled on a fantastic set of arty pictures of Frank online and established a route in via the photographer.

So, after a gushing phone call in which the subject of money was only lightly touched upon, Chris reckoned that Frank would be able to make it, that he was looking to get back into showbiz, and that £250 and a cut of the door was plenty.

As I drove him to the venue he talked non-stop: about other gigs he’d done in Birmingham, asking after Dave Travis, about Tony Wilson and the Channel Four show Remote Control. There was one anecdote about how he’d made an African tribesman Frank and it hadn’t gone down well with the director, it was brilliant stuff that I couldn’t do justice even if I could remember it.

The show was the most disorganised I ever saw Frank perform, crawling along the floor pushing his suitcase, interrupting my weak-assed comedy turn as a camp NUM shop-steward (don’t ask), going off after a couple of songs so as to encore all night — fantastic. He even pinched my backing band Wedge Grundy and the Big Rons for a medley of hits where they didn’t know the chords. That was okay though, because Frank didn’t know the words and it became the funniest jazz-funk work-out I’ve ever seen — as well as the only one I’ve ever watched all the way through.

Frank was out of practice, not unprofessional, although Chris had definitely had a good drink. We had too, the night was wet with booze, and I even — whisper it — got to try the head on, it didn’t fit. At this stage I hope it doesn’t break any illusions to tell you that without the head it was Chris, with it, Frank. Supremely method, but there was one other piece of preparation — Chris would wind electrical tape around his nose, presumably to get the nasal voice just right. I didn’t have the heart to mention that it made almost no difference to pitch or rhythm.

After the gig we went to the curry house over the road, where Chris held court. He ordered twenty-seven poppadoms, as the World Record was “twenty-six actually” — he’d apparently eaten twenty-five in an restaurant before where he was told of the record: “I could have  eaten two more but… I couldn’t be arsed”. He then picked up the tab for the whole crew, costing almost all of his fee I’m sure.

But the best Chris moment didn’t come then, nor the next day when he regaled us with tales of Manchester City which drinking shandies made with coke instead of lemonade, nor even when clinking with bottles of Bacardi Breezer he climbed into the back seat of Cookie, our bassist’s wreck of an MG for a lift back to Timperley and promptly fell right asleep. No, the story that I’m proud to tell most happened back at Woody (née-Wedge)’s flat where there was nothing but Prince’s Purple Rain that would satisfy him — it was played many time that night, and the following morning too when Chris discovered that he needn’t have slept sitting on a stool in the kitchen “oh you do have other rooms then”.

I only met Chris that once although we talked on the phone and over email a bit, most recently to arrange a slot for him on my radio show. But when I heard of the cancer I was upset, and upon hearing the news yesterday I felt an hollowness that I can only match with deaths of people I’ve known and really cared about, so I think I was touched. I saw Frank quite a bit though, each time at a bigger and better organised gig: Little Civic, Jug of Ale, Wulfrun Hall and on Manchester’s Channel M and heard him in recent months on Manchester Radio Online. He’d finally got that second Greatest Hits compilation out, the marvellous E,F, G. & H, and seemed to be heading back to something like his peak.

In truth he was rediscovering an old audience, one with more opportunity to enjoy him and more money to pay, rather than developing a huge new one — but it was growing again and he was playing regularly again.

More importantly he was creating again, I’ve been searching iTunes over and over these last weeks waiting for Three Shirts On My Line (his World Cup anthem) to go live for download. At the moment it hasn’t yet, but there are Internet People awaiting to propel it into the charts.

Frank never got to do Guess Who’s Been On Top Of The Pops, although he outlasted the programme, and while the power of the number one has long since faded you can bet that Frank Sidebottom would have loved it. He was pop all the way through.

A giant of light entertainment, and a man I’m proud to have spent time with. You know I am, I really am.

Thank you.

(John Robb’s tribute is well worth a read, as is ex-Oh Blimey Big Band-er Jon Ronson’s article for the Guardian of 2006, video of the Variety Is Back gig does exist, I shall try to dig it out.)

• The knowledge that what the England team lack is passion, monotone decide-to-be-Irish pundit Andy Townsend will have dulled that into you.
• A greater-than-before awareness of what Sir Clive Woodward and Nigel Benn look like these days. As they appear with numerous other English champions in an unashamed advert.

Except that they’re sort of the same thing. One is an ex-player’s easy statement on a team’s failure without having to do such things as explain tactics, the other a Danish lager PR machine’s attempt to associate themselves with football, without having to understand anything about it bar the jingoistic assumptions made by sections of the press.

Passion is an odd thing, it’s the only piece of the gamut of emotional reaction to sport that advertisers and the media will attempt to engage the public over. You’ve seen John Barnes, a player torn apart by the press during his playing career for a perceived lack of it held up as someone to connect over just how much of it he has. If it can be whipped up to involve some cheap nostalgia so much the better. Barnes’s appearance is linked to the current wave of re-imagining the golden era of Italy 1990, there’s even a film out One Night In Turin based around the tournament — with the tears and kisses and penalty misses that do nothing so much as remind me how much the video from only twenty years ago has degraded.

It’s not quite how I remember that World Cup, the headlines were about how bad things were, not how memorable. It existed as one of the great last sorties of English hooliganism abroad, there was constant footage of it raining plastic glasses and plastic chairs in picturesque squares all over Italy. The film is based on a book by Pete Davis called All Played Out (now re-issued as One Night in Turin), which is a fantastic, if depressing, read about how Planet Football is divorced from all reality and the lives of the fans. Davis quotes a distressed Englishman — no doubt dressed in too-small shorts and one of those headache inducing plastic flat-caps we used to have — after a disappointing draw against North African opposition: “fight you bastards” he says “like we fight for you”. Sound familiar? The film doesn’t touch too much on that.

Do players really have less passion now than two decades ago, and if so can that role-call of famous English help. Can a naked-from-the-waist (up, thankfully) Jeff Stelling inspire, does our greatest living World Champion — The Power — chucking a ‘good arra’ mean anything to our current team? I’m not sure it goes far enough, these are media savvy young men who will assume well wishes from the stars of stage and green (and have you noticed Steve Davis CGI’d into recent transmissions?). What they need is inspirational figures alongside them when it really counts.

It’s said that the great Liverpool team of the 80s could afford to play Sammy Lee as they “could have covered for Thora Hird at left back”, never mind a player who’d just been transferred a little above his ability. So with that in mind, can’t the England team cover for the lack of experience or fitness of a sententious Englishman who will lead them in all things passion?

If Beckham can travel without being fit to play, surely the presence of a great who can play (without them being able to really play) is a possibility. And we could stick them on the wing that Gerrard doesn’t seem to be using anyway.

Of the advert crew, we have to excuse Dames Holmes and MacArthur for FIFA are not enlightened enough to allow a female winger, but surely Ian Botham could do a job? Beefy is so English that supposedly preferring the charms of the West Indian dressing room to that of his own team hasn’t dampened his iconic status, and he had a few games for Scunthorpe and Yeovil too.

He can’t do everything of course, but not every game needs so much of the passion and we have a lot of national treasures around. An easy qualifier against the Faroes for example might only need the passion of a Bradley Walsh or a Jonathan Wilkes, a friendly against a local side pre a tournament could be the opportunity to rest the big guns and use a Duncan Norvelle or a Stan Boardman (who pioneer Fat Ron Atkinson used extensively in the build up to big Villa games in the nineties).

A vital qualifier away in Turin might be the time to use Brian Blessed, where you could use a home game to blood David Mitchell, maybe he and Robert Webb could be twin raiding wing-backs.

Roy Race knew all about the power of celebrity, and also blow-driers, when he picked Steve Norman and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet for Melchester. Imagine the faces of the opposition when we bring on The Actual Mayor Of London for a corner. And BoJo has experience.

It’s the World Cup and we need to show that passion, so we need to lay every card we have. Princes William and Harry were in the stands on Friday, and the dressing room after — luckily before anyone touching cloth came in to ask to use the bog — why were they not in the room before, kitted and booted, three lions over their royal right-nipples ready for battle. Where their ancestors lead England into the breach, they could be leading Aaron Lennon onto the bench and playing themselves.

Forget Gaddafi’s son somehow making the Libya side (and oddly the squad at Sampadoria), forget Kevin-Prince Boateng. We might just have found a use for our Royal Family, just not Fergie in charge of the sponsorship deals please.

You wouldn’t dismiss all of ‘art’ or ‘science’ (or at least not easily or seriously), but the cultural, historical and social elements of the most popular sport in the World (and its global celebration) are okay to be sniffy about it seems. It’s disrupting your television viewing, or making your surrogate living room a little too busy for your liking, and that’s reason enough.

But, dismisser of “the football” is that the root cause? Because you seem to associate the sport with the event, the event with the supporting, and the supporters with a conflation people you don’t much care for.

Because not all football supporters are racist, boorish, loud, suntanned, drunk or even English.

And not everyone will be “supporting”.

Some will be watching, sharing, discussing and enjoying the best players in the World — playing for once without too much financial imperative and on a fairly level playing field (no transfers, no buying success). It can be beautiful.

Football exists not only as a sport, but as a metaphor and conduit for society. Ignore if you will, but don’t dismiss. It’s not clever.

In New York for a week and without being able to afford to use 3G on my phone I was sniffing for wifi a lot — and again became obsessed with the names given to the wireless access. I tried not to let it overtake me though, so I only wrote down the good ones. NY’s grid system of streets would facilitate a great psychogeographic experiment of walking the grids and laying the names on a map — but until I get a chance this little snippet will have to do:

Of course, I’ve mocked this up, but you could at times see this many networks at once — and they were almost all locked.

Haircut Menu, Broadway on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

Spotted in the window of a barbers on Broadway (hence poor reflection and that). I’ll have a number 24 please.