Exquisite torture
Charles Spencer
Consulting my records, as Dr Watson used to say, I find that it was in June 2003 that I first wrote here about the iPod. My former colleague Caspar, now editing the Observer’s excellent monthly music magazine, produced the elegant little box of tricks from his pocket and reduced me to a state of drooling jealousy.
The idea of being able to take 10,000 songs with you, wherever you went, easily accessible and in excellent if not quite hi-fi sound quality, all stored in a gizmo the size of a packet of cigarettes, struck me as being as near miraculous as made no difference. But I also knew that such technological bliss was not for me. For the iPod relies on computers to download the music, and computers and I have never really got along.
Back in the mid-Eighties, my wife and I, glumly concluding that we should do something about our computer illiteracy, bought the Ladybird Book of Computers, aimed at children of about eight. We entirely failed to understand any of it. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity seemed a doddle in comparison.
In those days I was working for the Stage newspaper, where the edited copy was sent to a firm in Clerkenwell which typeset everything for us, processed the photographs and then stuck it all neatly on to the page. They used computers, of course, but the idea of us journos having to discover the secrets of their arcane trade seemed absurd.
Then the future came knocking at my door. I got a subediting job on Robert Maxwell’s ill-fated London Daily News, and realised that the cosy old days of paper, Pritt sticks and en-rules were history. We’d be setting the copy ourselves on a crap computer system that Cap’n Bob had clearly bought on the cheap.
My instructor was Amanda Platell, who went on to become both editor of the Sunday Express and William Hague’s more glamorous equivalent of Alastair Campbell. Amanda, then recently arrived from Australia, was, and indeed still is, sharp, sexy and funny, and she scared the living daylights out of me. I lost count of the number of times she called me a ‘Limey lame-brain’ as I got it wrong, yet again, and computers became synonymous for me with feelings of shame, fear and impotence. Nor was there the technological equivalent of Viagra to cure my electronic dysfunction.
Though I have been using the damn things almost every day ever since, my dread of computers has never entirely left me. I employ them on a strictly need-toknow basis, and luckily my wife has a friend, not nearly as scary as Amanda, who helps me out when things go wrong. But the idea of penetrating the world of iTunes, and of ripping and burning CDs, as I believe it is menacingly known, is too terrifying to contemplate. And, in any case, my desktop PC at home is so ancient that it doesn’t have the required wattage, memory, gigabytes or brainpower to handle such tasks.
At which stage my funky 13-year-old nephew Tom, no stranger to this column, enters the scenario. When it comes to ripping and burning, there is no one to touch him. Show him an Iron Maiden CD and he’ll have it on his hard drive in seconds.
So I suggested a deal. If I bought an iPod, would he show me how to work it and stock it with my favourite discs at, say, 50p a CD? He agreed, I got an iPod for my birthday, and Tom set about his task. In one weekend he got no fewer than 1,661 tracks on to the machine, and I peeled off an impressive number of tenners. The next time I visited him down in Dorset, things worked out less well. The computer was ridiculously slow, Tom got bored, and I got cross (sorry, Tom). It now turns out that the computer was crawling with viruses, and parts of it have now been taken away to be deloused by an expert. Is it any wonder that some of us hate these bloody machines?
Tom told me something frightening about iPods. According to him, you can only download your CDs from the same computer. Plug your iPod into another, and all the tracks you already have will disappear. So, if Tom’s computer proves resistant to viral treatment, I’m screwed. And, even if it is repaired, Tom seems tired of his task. Needless to say, for an addictive personality like me, having fewer than 2,000 songs on an iPod capable of holding 10,000 is the most exquisite torture.
Sometimes I find myself yearning for the simple days of my childhood. Then I had only a secondhand Dansette record player, the second Beatles album and a couple of dozen singles — yet I counted myself a king of infinite riches. In contrast, the possibility of limitless choice seems exhausting rather than exhilarating. More means worse.
Charles Spencer is theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph.
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