Dusty, fusty, underfunded - tucked away inside civic architecture or ignored by schoolkids - the lending library's long been literature's ugly sister. And while the latest Dan Brown flies off the shelves in Waterstones, the scribblings of the less well-known are passed from hand to hand, dog-eared and date-stamped by mousy ladies in cardigans.

Switch the concept across to music, however, and something strange happens.  What's Spotify - the online music streaming service - if not an enormous music library? Like those fusty town libraries, it's legal, and free (or close to it). It's equitable. It offers a range of material, unaffected by current hype, marketing, sales or image. But unlike them - somehow it's become sexy.

It's altering our attitudes to music at basis.  For years now, the music industry has been all about ownership. Rights, royalties, contracts, possessions. Now all that's changing. More and more artists are parting company from major labels and making their own arrangements for sharing their music - even, as Radiohead demonstrated, for a voluntary payment. Increasingly, at the click of a mouse button you can access pretty much anything, from any era. "My stepson...was telling me how he's currently into Cole Porter, music from the 1920s and swing music from the 40s," said 80s pop star John Taylor in a recent speech given at UCLA, "...the availability and accessibility of music on the internet today is truly incredible." 

With something like Spotify, you don't OWN a copy of the music you're hearing - you're streaming it in high quality over the Internet. But the chief point of that kind of ownership has already been steadily eroded by the growth in digital downloads.  No longer do we buy weighty vinyl albums with gatefold sleeves, artwork and lyric sheets all designed to annotate and sell the idea of music as an artefact.  For many people, even shelves of jewel-boxed CDs had already given way to a bulging computer hard drive. So what difference does it make - really - if that song coming out of your computer speakers is hosted on your own computer or a remote server somewhere else? Unless you're a hopeless hi-fi nut or one of the few unfortunates left who can't get broadband, the answer is very little.

And maybe there's another upside to the new lending-library approach to music. Buying, owning and collecting all the CDs by a particular artist used to be part of what made you a superfan. Collectors and completists felt they had invested in their idol's career, putting money in their pocket and contributing to their success. All that might have helped build a loyal fanbase - but sometimes also limited an artist's freedom to evolve. The power of money does strange things to art: angry fans whose artist has changed direction or explored other avenues of music-making, have sometimes behaved almost like company shareholders whose investment has failed. That has produced more pressure on artists to produce more of the tried-and-trusted, via a tightly-controlled brand or even through revivals of past successes. Change and experiment meant uncertainty and diminishing returns.

The effects of that pressure are still showing up via a rash of predictable comeback albums, reunion tours and legacy reissues. Now that a new generation of fans isn't being asked to make that continuing financial investment to its acts, could we be seeing the death of the whole idea of music as something we can own? As target markets age and sales of CDs plummet, there are already signs that the old breed of tribal superfan might weaken, terminally distracted by the allure of infinite choice.  When the whole world's laid out to enjoy for free, why limit yourself to what you already know? And as we learn how to live without owning the music we love, perhaps that music's original currency - discovery, imagination, innovation and experimentation - will flower anew.

Does this sound wonderful or what?

It's a difficult question. Where does entertainment bleed into art? Can art itself be a form of entertainment? Or does the very word "entertain" imply something trivial, a way to fill up time, while "art" has the altogether nobler job of moving us and unsettling? If we're talking about the Huxley-esque division between that which disturbs and that which merely sedates, what's soma and what isn't?

Human beings love to put things into categories. It makes our lives tidy and easy to track – but however much we struggle to contain life's chaos, it has a nasty habit of breaking free and running riot. Living things grow and change, people especially - and so do the things they make, like art. Genre labels in libraries, music stores and broadcast media only tell us so much about the weirdly mutable stuff in which they deal.

The latest storm to blow up in the X-Factor teacup is over the winner's single, Hallelujah. Originally written by Leonard Cohen, it was memorably covered by the late Jeff Buckley on his 1994 album Grace, a sublime piece of work which almost deserves its acknowledged status as art-rock's Holy Grail.

However, for some people music made by dead guys is Art while music made by hungry talent show contestants is "inevitably soulless". Sadly, grace of any kind is in fairly short supply on Facebook pressure groups like this one, which overlook the fact that X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke's gospel-inflected reading of the song actually has the kind of passion, soul and commitment which might well have made Jeff Buckley smile in recognition.



It wasn't a matter of misplaced credit – Buckley had always said his recording followed John Cale's arrangement of the song, and Burke's very different performance was really nobody's but her own. Meanwhile, songwriter Cohen, recently relieved of his liquid assets by an unscrupulous manager (see this story), is all too happy to see his work coin in a bit of Christmas cash. The boycott campaign protects nobody: it merely spotlights the kind of snobbish outrage which sometimes ensues when artists overstep category guidelines and the line between art and entertainment is blurred.

Which could mean a lot of adjustment is needed to both ears and preconceptions. In an era when big-name musicians from wildly different genres are busy pairing up like wallflowers at a tea-dance, categorising music is becoming more and more difficult. Where do you file Alison Krauss and Robert Plant? Chris Cornell and Timbaland? Alicia Keys and Jack White? James Taylor and Yo-Yo Ma? The music created sometimes turns out more compound than mixture – a new substance which defies its origins, a huge risk which may please everybody or nobody.

Crossover, once seen as a moneygrabbing dilution of artistic purity, is now becoming responsible for some of the bravest and most interesting music being made. Rather than typecasting creativity, it can be a source of growth and experimentation for musicians of every stamp. After all, travel broadens the mind. The more so, once audiences begin to disregard cultural signifiers and leave their narrowcasted comfort zones behind.

Which brings us back to the original question. If, as Jim Morrison once said,  everything is broken up and dances.......what makes art? Where is it found? How can you recognise it? Does it differ from entertainment at all? Let's have your thoughts....

When the musician Prince wrote the word "slave" on his face back in 1993, he made a powerfully iconic gesture. Not only was he pointing up his own frustration with his record company and the terms of their contract - he was also invoking his own country's history at a time when a civilised society felt able to buy, sell and enslave a human being. Although liberators from Abraham Lincoln to William Wilberforce put an end to slavery across much of the world, elements of serfdom still held sway within the music business. Artists felt they were being bought and sold by corporate entities, prevented from owning the master tapes of their own work while being forced to dance to the tunes of their masters.

The pressures of digital piracy and easy music downloads have since forced the record companies onto the back foot. Although much remains that is restrictive, most artists - whatever their level of success within the industry - now make much of their living by touring. Music is increasingly seen as a kind of loss leader, a free inducement to tempt in those in the market for mobile phones, designer clothing or social networking. The focus for experiencing music has moved back to perhaps where it should have been all along - the live stage. And whether you're a squillion-selling country or R&B singer, an arena rocker or a folkie slogging round the DIY circuit, that's where you'll be plying your real trade.

Sadly though, the idea of ownership of art has been harder to shift. Painters and sculptors have long had to accept the fact that the things they made could be bought and owned by others, and have had to adjust to the loss of original artefacts on which they have lavished care, passion and love. Those whose work was able to be copied and reproduced, like musicians, writers and photographers, have maybe had an easier time of it. When J.K. Rowling sold her Harry Potter books to Bloomsbury, the manuscripts stayed in her study along with the bound and published evidence of her success. And unlike yesterday's composers who needed an omnipresent orchestra to charm their imagination off of the printed page and into reality, today's musicians can rediscover their own fully-realised work at the touch of an iPod button.

But even today's artists experience one last powerful barrier to artistic freedom - and from an unexpected source. Sometimes, the most powerful constraints can be placed not by a publisher, a gallery owner or a record company, but by those who buy into and consume the artist's vision. The fans.

In his 1987 novel "Misery", Stephen King writes about an author kidnapped and imprisoned by one of his readers. Obsessed with controlling his output to suit her own requirements, Nurse Annie Wilkes shackles him to a bed and cripples his body to stop him escaping. Then she treats and cares for him, force-feeding him painkillers and saving his life only as long as he dedicates it to her vision rather than his own.

Reputedly inspired by the murder of John Lennon by crazed fan Mark Chapman, it's probably the ultimate nightmare for any artist - and a powerful metaphor for all those who become the victims of their own success. Actors who become typecast in a role or musicians who are not permitted to overstep genre expectations are primary examples of this kind of mindset as it operates in the marketplace. Although they may not be moved to direct action of the type King imagines, fans do become invested in the product they are buying, identifying with its familiar associations and demanding that it does not change. Just as confectioners get angry letters if they change the packaging of a chocolate bar or a breakfast snack, music fans rebel if a favourite artist experiments by wrapping his art up in something new.

Bob Dylan was famously called a "Judas" when he went electric in 1965; his work was developing but many felt betrayed. Arguably, some were invested more in the idea of an acoustic troubadour in the Woody Guthrie mould than they were in the man and his continuing musical vision. Alt-rock darlings Radiohead were reviled in some quarters for dropping the guitars and resorting to electroblippery on 2000's "Kid A". Even celebrated changelings like David Bowie suffer from reinvention anxiety. Despite having moved through modernism, hippie folk, heavy metal, glam, retro, art-rock and soul over a decade and a half, his multi-platinum "Let's Dance" encountered more prejudice from fans than ever before. Conceived as a deliberate mainstream breakthrough, this 1983 collaboration with Nile Rodgers of Chic outraged those who had seen him as an alternative, if changeable messiah.

That situation may be about to repeat itself with grunge icon Chris Cornell's new alliance with urban music's own King Midas, Timbaland. Cornell spent much of the 1990s making edgy art-rock with his band Soundgarden, picking up a cultish audience who bought into his dark and often depressive emotional landscape. When their hero later kicked the booze and the pills and re-emerged as a family man with a couple of cute kids and new line in sensuous love songs, many of his older fans experienced abandonment issues. Sounding reminiscent of Stephen King's anti-heroine, they wrote blogs and forum posts urging him back into the emotional shackles from which he had escaped.

For many of them, his Bowie-like aspirations towards mainstream success with forthcoming album "Scream" are the very last straw. The grunge voodoo dolly they bought back in '94 has changed and developed, as real living things will, and the changes have robbed some fans of their original emotional investment. And that's where the flames kick in. For the last few weeks, music forums have been full of the kind of seething rage and recrimination Bowie was lucky enough to escape in those far-off, pre-internet days. Fans furious at the Timbaland collaboration have demanded statements, explanations, even apologies: many have insisted, without irony, that Cornell has become an industry puppet whilst volunteering to hold the strings themselves.

Plainly, an "alternative" artist owes it to his fans not to explore too many alternatives. One fan even declared that Cornell would be better off dead than left alive to dishonour his own myth. Or, perhaps, merely crippled and shackled by the pre-existent expectations of his audience? Maybe Stephen King's gothic fantasy wasn't quite so paranoid after all. Or perhaps the concept of slavery has as much currency in 21st century art as it ever did in 19th century commerce.

In the end, those writers, musicians or thinkers who seek to explore and experiment will stand or fall by the extent of their own courage. Some may be cowed, dropping wearily back into the shackles of Nurse Wilkes and her real-life counterparts, grateful for her deadly care. Others will persist, knowing that keeping their nerve and their will intact is the way through and the way forward. No-one now thinks of Bob Dylan as merely an acoustic troubadour. Radiohead's reviled "Kid A" is now an integral part of their oeuvre. Hopefully, Cornell's new album will follow the same healthy trajectory.

Such eruptions will continue as long as people feel. Because the need for slaves, or enemies, or scapegoats is in the end driven by our own fears, jealousies and longings. We forbid artists to change because we are jealous of their freedom: we have to go to work every day and allow someone to tell us what to do, so we resentfully try to bind those who write our books and make our music with the very same ties. What we forget is that it was their very freedom that drew us to them in the first place; their liberty to express whatever they wanted, whoever they were, whatever they felt. Their ability to move, redeem or simply or communicate with complete strangers, anyway, anyhow, anywhere they choose. The ultimate irony is that in enslaving them to our own selfish needs, we deny our own most basic link with the art they make.

Eleven years today since Jeff Buckley died. I can't believe it's that long. I used to drop flowers into water every year on this day, streams, rivers, the sea, wherever I was...I figured that all water in the world joins up somewhere in the end. And then one year I was in Spain on 29th and I couldn't, and after that the continuum seemed broken. But a long time ago I wrote a set of poems for Jeff - called Selkie - and in 2006 they were published in a poetry magazine called "Northwords Now". Anyway, now they're being set to music and will be performed here in this corner of Scotland as a choral work sometime later this year.

So....maybe the line isn't broken after all. Sleep well, Jeff.

....maybe it's time for Simon Cowell to power down the motormouth and stop pretending he knows anything about public tastes.

On Wednesday night in LA (results show screened Friday on ITV2 in the UK), Cowell had to eat humble pie after backing the wrong horse in the final of American Idol. He'd dubbed David Archeluta's overwrought rendering of John Lennon's Imagine "a knockout", but the great American public didn't agree. They chose the workmanlike David Cook, who'd wooed them throughout the contest with a series of famous covers-of-covers. Offering just the right amount of reassuring brand awareness with a frisson of borrowed imagination and carefully toned-down rock "attitude", Cook walked away with the crown on a 12 million vote margin.

He may be a successful businessman, but Cowell – a former A&R man and longtime talent show judge - has become famous for his extreme reactions to artists. Despite having inflicted Westlife, Robson & Jerome and Teletubbies novelty songs on the world, he sees nothing wrong with calling a contestant a bushbaby or reducing a singer to tears.

Or with failing to give creative credit where it's due. Cook made some canny song choices, xeroxing Doxology's makeover of the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby and then  Chris Cornell's reinvention of Michael Jackson's Billie Jean as a dark, bluesy ballad. When the American Idol judges mistakenly gave Cook the credit for Cornell's arrangement, Cowell said "David, that was brave. It could have either been insane or amazing and I've got to tell you, it was amazing." Unsurprisingly, fans of the cover's originator Chris Cornell were up in arms.

What did Cowell do when the error was pointed out? Apologise? Nope. He got testy. "I know where he got the arrangement of the song from, but that doesn't really matter," he insisted to Entertainment Weekly. Cowell plainly had his take on it all worked out, and wasn't gonna be swayed by the facts.

Contrast that performance with Cowell's reaction a few weeks earlier to contestant Jason Castro's version of the late Jeff Buckley's cover of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. "The Jeff Buckley version of that song is one of my favourite songs of all time", he gushed – despite the fact that even Jeff admitted that he'd lifted the arrangement from Welsh maverick John Cale. Funny, Buckley's recording didn't appear in Cowell's choice of Desert Island Discs for the BBC back in 2006 – that was full of MOR ballads by Bobby Darin and Herb Alpert.

Cowell's comments are looking less and less like genuine insight and more like attention-seeking. He may have made a career out of being the man you love to hate – but his pantomime villain act is beginning to pall. Soon, no-one will even bother to hiss.

Audience figures for American Idol are in decline both in the US and here in the UK, and in August last year Cowell told UK tabloid The Daily Mirror that he'd step down from the show after completing his last three contracted seasons. "The public will be sick to death of me," he admitted. "It will be time to go."

Carry on like this, Simon, and that day may come sooner than you think.

Branded!

Marked with a coward's shame.

What do you do when you're branded,

Will you fight for your name?

When I was a kid there was a fairly rubbish western on TV called Branded. It was about a US cavalry captain who'd been falsely accused of cowardice in battle - "scorned as the one who ran."  Back then, branded was a pejorative - implying an indelible mark, an ugly label you'd never be able to shake. Something limiting and restricting, which marked you out as a coward or a slave. If you were branded, you were owned, conquered, shamed.

A little later, when I was at college in the 70s,  my friends and I would buy supermarket toothpaste, butcher's loose sausages, no-name ketchup. It was usually as good as the stuff made by the companies that advertised on TV, and it was cheaper.  Not buying the big names was a matter of pride, a kind of small-scale piracy which kept us free.  We weren't lured in by the big-budget ads, we declined to worship at the temple of Heinz and Cadbury. We didn't think Colgate could give us a ring of confidence and we suspected Wrigleys wouldn't double our fun.

Yes, there was a touch of teenage elitism about all of this. Yes, we thought we were clever. But our cool was homemade, not bought in ready-designed, and even when egg-white Mohicans and safety-pins replaced cheesecloth and lovebeads, it was our imagination that shaped the trends as much as anything from the chain stores and the high streets.

I don't know when branded goods became a badge of allegiance instead of a mark of slavery.  Maybe it was some weird takeover, like the pod-people in Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers. As I struggled in various capacities with the world of late c20th business and commerce I heard terms like "consumer confidence" and "brand equity" and wondered what they could possibly mean. The world was changing, and the brand names and logos we had laughed at in college were deemed to have real value.

Some businesses seemed to consist almost entirely of their brand names, the goods or services they offered fairly irrelevant by comparison to the name they bore. There were even "premium brands", strangely aristocratic items whose value - like that of the old upper class we'd all rejected -  seemed more imaginary than demonstrable. This is worth more of your money because I say it is, the ads barked. Pubs, hotels, restaurants were not to be judged simply on the food, ambience and service, but on the size of their name and the strength of their presence, like an invading army. Even the term "rollout" suggested tanks advancing inexorably across the countryside, eradicating the friendly anarchism of seaside B&Bs, suburban corner shops and village pubs.

Brands fought for our allegiance, sometimes to ludicrous effect. In a retail park in our nearest cityof Inverness, a branch of Pizza Hut and a drive-in Burger King glower across the car park at a new J&B Sports fitness centre.  Drive in, pay, get fat, pay all over again to get thin.  All this in a city surrounded by rugged countryside where you can shoot rabbits and game, gather wild food and walk for miles.  But that doesn't stop people flocking to the lure of slave-jobs that pay cash to buy all the things the city offers. And I'm no better. I may walk past Burger King with my stomach full of home-grown organics, but I'll greedily chomp through the latest fodder from Hollywood in the big fat multiplex a few yards along. 

Even virtual worlds like the net's Second Life - created, perhaps, to provide an escape from the first - are being invaded by brands. Recently, Starwood Hotels became "the first hotel brand to place a 3D computer-generated property inside a virtual world". The irony of this seems to have escaped almost everybody, as has the daftness of spending real money to buy designerwear for your computer-generated avatar or dollar-a-go "gifts" for your Facebook friends.

The adage about a fool and his money is an old one. But considering web inventor Tim Berners-Lee sacrificed a personal fortune in order to give us virtual freedom, it's hard to understand why anyone would want to use it to buy designer snake-oil for an imaginary projection of themselves.

But maybe that's the secret.  Maybe it simply doesn't matter whether we get anything real for our money or not.  It's the brand we're buying - not the trainers, not the perfume, not the coffee.  That might just as well be pixels for all the use it is.  It's the idea.  The association. The cachet...or  the catch. Because sooner or later, be it Jimmy Choo, Cadburys or Coke, we're hooked.

What do you do if you're branded? Nothing.  That's the point. Unlike the poor old cavalry captain, we're conniving at our own slavery, baring our backs for the hot iron. We want to be abused. We want to be owned. When we buy our little nuggets of nonsense, we want to display that ownership. Because in some weird, weak, way, it makes us feel safe.

I've always felt vaguely displaced. Despite never having been homeless, I've never really felt I really came from anywhere.

There was the faceless London suburb I grew up in - a wasteland of lamp-posts and gutters, tarmac streets and forlorn scraps of woodland on the edge of what had once been green. Endless vistas of interwar "semis" with cars tucked away in back-lane garages, railway embankments where ox-eye daisies danced through the chain-net fences.

Then there was Norfolk, where I escaped to university and afterwards to dream in a haunted farmhouse, plotting escape from a marriage that was suffocating me even as the vast skies mocked me with freedom.

There was London, where my parents were born,where I slaved in offices like killing machines, got sacked for being "too ginger" or for writing poetry when there was no work to do. Once, even because my boss discovered I played in a band. In London there was the river, one or two bridges, alleyways and churches...sometimes, a night in a theatre or a concert hall. But that was all.

And there was Cambridge, where I looked after choirboys and tried to fit in to something which was too old and set in its ways. I had two babies with my new husband and tried to be a good middle-class mother, but the other women knew I wasn't a true believer.

None of these places were home.

In 1999 I moved to Scotland because it gave me a sense of exile from everything I'd learned to loathe. To an edge where land and sea met under the mountains and the changing skies and I could breathe without the world breathing down my neck. My half-Scottish children soaked up the speech of their fathers, said "aye" and learned Gaelic at school. I grew vegetables and walked for hours. I wrote. I left only when I had to. I loved the place and everything in it, but something still wasn't quite right. I'd never felt English, my blood being a migrant mixture; I still didn't feel Scottish as my husband and sons did.

And then, in the last few days, two things happened.

I lost a major English freelance client. I'd worked for them as a weekend writer/editor for years, producing international business news on the tourist/hospitality industry. Suddenly - and what a shock it must have been to them after so many years - they realised I couldn't do the job from Scotland. They needed a Londoner, because of course only Londoners can report on the things that Londoners want to read. Scotland, of course, doesn't have a tourist industry. So they put their foot down, and I lost £500 a month. Just like that, and just before Christmas. God bless us every one.

The other thing was perhaps a random incident, perhaps just the accidental coincidence of a Scottish flag, an American musician and a Melbourne stage. But even before I got my marching orders from corporate London, the sight of Chris Cornell wrapped in the Saltire suddenly meant the world to me. It made my heart swell with pride and love and it made me feel that maybe I'd been getting steadily more Scottish all this time, without anyone (least of all myself) ever really noticing. That was my flag. This was my country. And looking at those pictures, I felt that I was looking at a magical defence against all the bullshittery of the world. And I felt that finally, somehow, inside my head, I had come home.






With thanks to Soph and Ami for their photos. And I'll add this one of mine...

Just a few more things of mine that have got into print recently.

Here's my interview with Chris Cornell guitarist Yogi in Subba-Cultcha - you can also find it on my Chris Cornell Fan Page.

A couple of interesting album reviews - punk survivor Siouxsie's Mantarayand cello-wielding Finnish band Apocalyptica's Worlds Collide.

On the classical side of things, here's a review of film composer Helen Jane Long's new album Porcelain, and a profile of acclaimed British opera singer Kate Royal - both from HMV's customer magazine HMV Choice.