Help me, The Massive. I want to feel I’m not alone. I rolled up at Islington’s unlovely O2 Academy last night where a collection of jobsworth thugs insisted they search my bag. Why was it empty, they asked, handing it back? It wasn’t, I told them. I’d just done an interview for Time Out so there was a tiny cassette machine in the side pocket. They went into red alert as if it was a ticking bomb. Arms across the doorway. “You’re not coming in here with that, mate!” I wasn’t going to use it, I assured them. If I was, why would I have told them about it in the first place? And what kind of recording on this pathetic little device with no microphone was going to destroy The O2 and bring down the music industry? They closed ranks to ensure I didn’t step into building until I had paid – PAID! - two pounds with no receipt (straight into the staff pocket) to take it off me for the evening. How charming. I could barely see the group anyway for the forest of mobiles and cameras. Anyone else had a cheery welcome from a rock venue recently?

Graham Jones writes: "A friend of a friend's called Rupert once queued for two hours at Tower Records to get an album signed by Brian Wilson. By the time he got to the front he got the impression Wilson was tired and losing interest, but asked him to sign it "To Rupert from Brian". He left the shop delighted - until he checked what the great man had written: "TO BRIAN FROM RUPERT". Any other members of the massive enjoyed any record-signing catastrophes?"

I think I'm going through some sort of lifestage - like wanting a seat on the tube or complaining that you're out of marmalade or getting irritated by Lily Allen. I LIKE this record. It's the first pop song I've ever heard that addresses infirmity and death and parents and friends falling off the perch without trying to be poetic. In fact it's very specifically the opposite - it's about the results of routine medical tests, hospital wards, kids not returning from parties at night, police knocking on your door saying "We've got some bad news, sir". I guess you've got to be of an age where those things have started to happen to you to appreciate it, and if you can look past her slightly kooky Americanness and some of the self-satisfied graphics, a very good and moving song is what's left. IS it any good, the massive, or am I just getting old and soft in the head?

So my wife Clare and I head off to the 20,000-seater O2, normally a 50 minute journey door to door. We decide we're going to leave 80 minutes early so we can muck about in bars and cafes of this giant tent and take our seats, relaxed, drink in hand, for the kick-off at 8pm. We leave at 6pm. By 7pm, after various delays on the tube, we receive the information that there is no Jubilee Line. Close inspection reveals this is the ONLY route to North Greenwich. No other tube line passes through. But we're offered "replacement buses" at Embankment which will presumably take the best part of a fortnight.

So we decide we're going to salvage the evening by spending an additional £16 and going by boat - quite pleasant actually, small bar, crisps, a lovely sunset - but the mood’s not lifted by our fellow shipmates: angry and hyperventilating Dylan fans. We arrive after a 2 hour 20 minute journey at 8.20pm. No chance of a beaker of electric soup, straight to the bunkers to discover the seats are so far away we can only assume Dylan is the one in the white hat. Two useful options are available for enhancing the O2 experience - as deployed by Leonard Cohen, Springsteen, Led Zeppelin et al - 1) the radiating speaker system, lowered from the roof half-way down the hall, and 2) the diamond vision. Neither of these has been taken up The Bard of Hibbing. He's also invented an irritating keyboard figure which he trills manically with this right hand through virtually every song and sometimes while he's actually singing. I nip out, in no great hurry, and buy a pint of lager, a small white wine and a bottle of Becks for WORD’s Andy Gill (covering it for The Indie): £12.80. The corpses of mangled songs start to pile up stage - Chimes Of Freedom, Hattie Carroll, Hollis Brown.

I've told C that we’re on 9.50 boat out otherwise we will NEVER EVER leave The O2 as there is NO WAY off the south bank unless you have a car. And the 10.30 boat will presumably have around 10,000 people trying to clamber aboard: it'll be like Dunkerque, though with a greater sense of urgency. Dylan doesn't come offstage till 10.15 but our boat is RAMMED. And the kind of person who leaves an expensive concert half an hour early is not going to be someone who particularly enjoyed it. A boat-load full of people HOWLING about how terrible it was, people who'd paid 50 quid a ticket (ours were free), who'd (some of them) waited all their lives to see him, who'd travelled from places like Brighton and were staying in hotels in Canary Wharf. And were sitting above the exec boxes where apparently - and unsurprisingly - the sound was so catastrophic you couldn't make out as single syllable of the vocal, mumbled - if not actually spoken - at best. None of this a breeze for me, outed as "the guy who used to do Old Grey Whistle Test" and thus somehow responsible for this dark catalogue of woe - "Have a word with him, mate!" One couple (our age) arrived breathlessly at the quay asking for "a boat to anywhere". When the official said "the next clipper's in ten minutes", they talked comically about swimming. "We HAVE to get away from this place," the woman told me, putting on a brave face. One guy announced he didn't know which one Dylan was - "lucky, 'cos if I had I'd have run up to the front and punched him".

And yes, since you ask, two hour journey home. Sorry, had to get that off my chest. Feel strangely better now.

I'm looking for a few stories from the world of the amateur concert promoter. College bands, local folk festivals, raves in disused warehouses etc. If you've got any memories involving musicians we might have heard of, do get in touch with me direct.

I don't know if anyone else was listening to Morrissey on Radio 2’s Radcliffe & Maconie last night but I was absolutely gripped. My
wife kept telling me to calm down – "He’s over, isn’t he? Does anyone still care?" – but I couldn’t miss a single syllable of it.

Stuart elected to interview him and Mark to introduce the live performance. It’s pure agony for me to hear stuff like this as you can see why – increasingly, and with more and more media to choose from – artists of the stature of Morrissey so rarely talk to the press. If Morrissey submits to an interview with THE WORD, he runs the risk of some vaguely critical observations. The writer can
be as judgemental as they like about the great man’s work without having to offer these opinions to him personally. But if he goes on Radcliffe/Maconie then he’s completely and utterly in the driving seat and calling all the shots. If Stuart flatters him, he can appear impossibly modest. If Stuart attempts to pry into his personal life, he can appear bruised and offended. If he leaves even a split-second of dead air then it’s Stuart’s responsibility, not his, to leap in and keep the big red balloon off the carpet.

The age-old trick that Morrissey employed last night – twice – was to attempt to interview Stuart, a brilliant piece of false modesty simply intended to wrong-foot and destabilise his interviewer – though Stuart recovered with enormous speed and grace and managed to deflect the conversation back to his subject asap, but was clearly rattled by it. Stuart’s skills as an interviewer are second to none - particularly on a live programme with several million listeners - and he managed to steer towards sparkling topics like the fear of mortality and Morrissey’s (possibly theatrical) declaration that he was “over the hill”. But the moment it threatened to become revealing Morrissey started asking sarcastic, evasive questions about how Stuart felt about HIS own great work – "like those articles you write in the Radio Times".

You were reminded of the countless times that musicians and actors you’d asked to be included in THE WORD went instead direct to some chat show like Jonathan Ross where a) they had complete control over the proceedings (which, as a direct result, often don’t plumb any great depths), and b) how broadcast media is so perfect for simply communicating the basic points that the star is interested in communicating – that they’ve got a new record/film out, and that they’ve got a new haircut/body shape and/or celebrity love interest. My agony last night was a combination of intense sympathy for Stuart – who did the best job possible - and enormous regret that, had Morrissey been talking to the print media, those conversational tangents are highly likely to have been further explored before all the self-consciousness and manipulation that live radio attracts took over the debate.

I was expecting a file this afternoon from a WORD correspondent, a piece about a blues singer. But he sent this instead - a recording of himself with former MC5 manager John Sinclair. Onetime White Panthers activist Sinclair delivers a poem called The Delta Blues and the mystery WORD scribe plays acoustic slide guitar. Name that masked man!

(answer tomorrow).

Re the current rumours in the papers about Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow splitting up, I'm here to report to I went to see Coldplay at London's O2 Arena last Sunday (the 14th) and my view was partially obscured by a blindingly attractive girl dancing to the band in the most self-contained way imaginable. She was on her own, apart from a security guard at about ten feet. She had very expensive clothes and the most fantastic blonde hair pinned back with long bits dangling either side of her ridiculously chiselled cheekbones. She appeared unaware of anyone else in the auditorium apart from the band, and particularly its lead singer. She had positioned herself here - first row of the banked seating above the floor for a reason: in front of her was a walkway extending from the main stage and ending into a little rectangle about 15 foot wide. Onto this tiny stage, after about 25 minutes, poured the band to perform two songs with minimal equipment, which put this girl in the best seat in the entire 20,000-seater venue (if she'd been sitting in it). Who was it? Gwyneth Paltrow. Literally HER. Whatever the body language is believed to be for a woman splitting up with her other half, she wasn't demonstrating it.

I thoroughly recommend this: a place where Laurel And Hardy meets Iggy Pop (can it GET any more WORD?). Watch the final 10 seconds for a completely literal execution of the phrase "lock them up and throw away the key".

On the left, Def Leppard bass player Rick Savage. On the right, a 17-year-old version of THE WORD'S Fraser Lewry, fresh from a Savage-inspired trip to the hairdresser.

Have any of you got photos of yourself when you were young that look as though you were modelling yourself on some particular rock star? I have a vision of a magazine spread of WORD readers' photos all congregated in their own particular sections - four Richard Thompsons, two Frank Zappas, three Sandy Dennys, five Joni Mitchells, assorted Liam Gallaghers, a Brian May, a Morrissey, a Robert Smith or two, perhaps a Madonna, maybe a Weller, four Ozzys, a Brett out of Suede - you know the sort of thing.

If you'd like to feature, e-mail a scan of your picture to word@wordmagazine.co.uk. Picture resolution should be as high as possible, and be sure to include your real name as well as the identity of the star you're paying tribute to.

Some poor souls have been cast into outer darkness for far too long. It's time to forgive, forget and let them back in again. I would like to nominate:-

ROLF HARRIS: made the 'novelty' record Sun Arise with George Martin at the age of 32, a ground-breaking piece of production full of exotic aboriginal noise. Solicited the most revealing and extraordinary interview from The Queen while painting her portrait - like a hairdresser with a relaxed but slightly bored subject - in 2006, at the age of 76. Enough to overshadow anything irksome in between.

PHIL COLLINS: tremendous drummer, perfectly acceptable singer, veteran of such almighty prog excursions as The Return Of The Giant Hogweed on 1971's Nursery Crime, produced a lovable John Martyn album, been sampled to death, makes good speeches. Fine fellow.

Any more suggestions?

In an idle moment, mighty WORD correspondent JOHN NAUGHTON finds himself extending the 'Sleepless in Seattle' minor ailment franchise.

Breathless in Baltimore
Incontinent in Indianapolis
Anaemic in Anaheim
Constipated in Concord
Flatulent in Flatbush
Asthmatic in Albuquerque
Jaundiced in Jacksonville
Nauseous in Nashville
Anxious in Anchorage
Bronchial in Baton Rouge

Any other readers care to add?

It doesn't come much more WORD than this, just in from Love Trousers lead guitarist Neil Brockbank (doing the sound on the current Nick Lowe/Robyn Hitchcock US tour). It's Nick and Robyn joined by Elvis Costello in the Grand Ballroon at New York's Manhattan Center on Wednesday April 9 for a three-part harmony encore of The Beatles' If I Fell and the Elvis Presley standard Mystery Train.

More of this, I'm saying. It's from a recent edition of Bob Dylan's Theme-Time Radio Hour. Thirty seconds into this one minute clip about the origins of the word 'posh' he throws in an impersonation - "as Sean Connery would say,'on the shady shide of the ship'".
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