Greetings, or a Rant About Research

Greetings, gentle reader. No, don't click away just yet. As the great Billie "File Under 'Gay Interest' on eBay" Holiday once sang, "It's quarter to three, there's no one in the place...", and I feel the need to let off steam. Which seems to me to be the ideal set of circumstances to start a blog.

I don't know about you, but in our home the bathroom doubles as a reading room. There's always an assortment of books and periodicals developing mildew in the corner - some of them essential, some of them frankly deserving of nothing better by way of storage.

I've not decided yet, but I'm starting to think that into the latter camp should fall my current Bog Book, a paperback about the unreleased 1967 version of the Beach Boys' "Smile" album, written by Domenic Priore. The basic premise of the book is good and generally honourable. It's just a pity that the thing is full of mistakes.

Perhaps at this stage I should explain to those who don't know me that I have something of a background in research, and pride myself on my methodical, don't-accept-anything-at-face-value approach. Indeed, it was this approach which recently had me biting my tongue when the researcher of a programme being made for BBC Radio 3, for which I'd been contracted to do some archive audio restoration (my current, freelance day job), kept calling to basically ask me to do her job for her. (And all because I possess a standard reference work which she'd never heard of, relying mostly on Wikipedia for her information.)

Back to the book: the particular error which made me pull my trousers up and consult the internet was the revelation that record impresario John Dolphin was murdered by soul legend Percy Mayfield. Had the names been less obscure in this day and age, the claim wouldn't have been out of place on "Brass Eye".

Mayfield, conveniently, died in the 1980s, thus leaving his name open to libel. Dolphin's murderer, as any cursory Google will reveal, was a struggling songwriter by the name of Percy Ivy. Mayfield was probably busy writing "Hit The Road, Jack" at the time.

Some may say that the Mayfield reference was simply a minor faux pas, but it does seem to highlight a problem with the media in general at present. Many of my friends and former colleagues work within the various media, and we have all bemoaned a general dropping in standards, from publishers who assign frankly clueless supervisory editors to books, to a major broadcaster openly deciding to "fair deal" archive clips in the hope that they won't get sued by the performer or copyright holder, thus potentially tainting the reputations of the vastly experienced researchers and authors whose names are on the package.

Even the once-mighty EMI aren't above such incompetence: a few years ago, they reissued - to great fanfare - the American versions of The Beatles' albums on CD, in both mono and stereo formats. (In those days, not only did unique compilations get issued in different territories, but records were generally put out in mono and stereo mixes which were often deliberately quite different to each other.)

When the CDs of the second box set hit the stores, it took a matter of minutes for Beatles anoraks to establish that the mono mixes were not the authentic originals, but simply the stereo transfers reduced to mono. Cue widespread internet hysteria and an expensive about-face for EMI, who replaced the duff discs once lawsuits had been threatened.

Sometimes you have to wonder just who is minding the store.