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Three years after being relegated to the Conference, the club leads League Two with a perfect start to the new season

Back at the start of April things did not look good for Torquay United. A difficult season of readjustment to life back in the Football League left the Gulls perilously close to the relegation zone in League Two. A 2-0 defeat at Morecambe left them just six points clear of the dreaded dotted line. Only eight games remained for the club to preserve the league status that it had fought so hard to win back in 2008-09.

To say there has been a turnaround since is something of an understatement. The goal Paul Buckle’s side conceded in their next game, a 2-1 win over play-off chasing Shrewsbury, was the last they allowed in the league until Anthony Griffith scored a consolation for Port Vale last weekend – a run of 10 successive league clean-sheets, and a combined club-record 998 impervious minutes in total. Since April Fools’ Day United’s record in League Two reads played 12, won 10, drawn two, lost zip. No team in the country have amassed more points in that time.

It is a turnaround that the manager puts down, in the short term at least, to some tough transfer decisions. Having delivered on his promise to give the players who had won promotion a chance to prove themselves in the league, Buckle opted in January to let players such as Tim Sills and Chris Hargreaves (both goalscorers in the previous season’s play-off final) leave the club. “Letting those players go mystified a lot of people,” Buckle says. “In my opinion that’s what needed to happen. Since March, we’ve had a very young squad that have reaped the rewards. It was a turnaround of three or four players that we had to do, and those players had been terrific for us. But it had to be done.”

Torquay now sit at the top of the division, the only side in the country to have won four out of four games. The success story, though, did not start five months ago. The real recovery began with the appointment of Buckle following the team’s relegation to the Conference in 2007. Leaving the assistant manager’s job at Exeter City the then 36-year-old arrived at Plainmoor with the club at its lowest ebb. “I took the job just after it lost its league status, having been in the Football League for 80 years,” he says. “I walked into the manager’s job with four players, with probably only three of them worth anything to us. There was literally nothing at the club, there was no groundsman, no training ground, absolutely nothing. Really and truthfully it’s been a massive success story so far.”

That first season in the Conference saw the club finish third, 15 points behind the runaway champions Aldershot. Painful defeat to Exeter in the play-offs followed, as did defeat at Wembley to Ebbsfleet in the FA Trophy final. The Gulls again bounced back, however, finishing fourth in 2008-09 and beating Cambridge United at Wembley to secure their return to the Football League. The club’s five-year plan to return to the league was completed three years early.

That brought its own problems last year, but with United’s form since April you could be forgiven for thinking that coping with rising expectations would be a problem this time around. “To be honest I don’t feel one ounce of pressure,” Buckle says, “because every week when we were playing in the Blue Square [Premier] you were expected to win. Even though I didn’t inherit a league side, and it was a work in progress, there was pressure there because when you’re an ex-league side everyone wants to beat you.

“We suffered disappointment in the first year, losing at Wembley in the Trophy final and obviously missing out in the play-offs. Then in the second year we went up and won at Wembley, and now I don’t feel any pressure at all because we’re not spending bundles of money, we’re really not. I can’t go into the details of what our budget is but I can assure you it’s a lot, lot lower than the vast majority of sides in our division.

“We’re not expected to do anything, we’ve seen that from the bookies and the pundits. If we finish higher than we did last year then it’s a successful season because that was the remit.”

That financial situation means Buckle and Torquay have to make use of free transfers, and it is not a job made easier by the location of the town. “I’ve tried to educate the football club, and the board have been great with it, of how important scouts are to us,” Buckle says. “Geographically where we are in the country it’s very difficult for me to get out and see players. It’s not like you’re round the M25 – you can’t finish training and go and watch a reserve game. So I’m dependent on good people, and I’ve got good people around me.

“We do have to bring players in like Mark Ellis, Elliot Benyon, Danny Stevens, Eunan O’Kane, Billy Kee – they’re all players who are 19, 20 years of age who haven’t made it somewhere. We have them watched, we sort of know about them and bring them in. I bring them down with their families, show them around Devon, show them what they’re coming in to and we take it from there. It’s not easy to attract players down to the West Country.”

The key for Buckle this week has been preventing players being attracted away from it. Ellis, a 21-year-old defender-come-midfielder, was the subject of a bid from an unnamed League One club last month, while several other squad members have been the subject of speculation. But deadline day passed without any departures and the Gulls can look forward to the rest of the season with strong cause for optimism.

“One of the directors said to me the other day as we came back from Port Vale: ‘Well, Bucks, we’re 10 points off the bottom now’,” the manager says. “That was the remit at the start of the season, but I’ve got high standards and the players have too. We will try to push this as far as we can this year. I’m not going to be someone who says that we’re happy to stay up. We’re not, we want to try and win as many games as we can.”

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A sequel to the superhero hit has been greenlit, according to the writer of the original comic book. But doubts have been raised over the film’s production schedule

Kick-Ass was always rather nicely set up for a sequel, what with that open-ended denouement, so it’s hardly surprising that Mark Millar, who wrote the original comic book, has been talking up a second film. Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live, Millar said the film’s success on DVD in the US, where it sold 1.4m units in its first week, meant the project was finally greenlit.

“The estimate is that Kick-Ass will do 100 to 150m on DVD based on the American sales, so it’ll end up making a $250m (£160m) on a $28m investment,” said Millar. “So it should be OK. The sequel’s greenlit, we can go ahead and do the follow-up now. The first made so much compared to what it cost, it would be crazy not to.”

Millar’s announcement, however, has been greeted with a degree of scepticism in the blogosphere, not least because Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn and screenwriter Jane Goldman are tied up with preparations for X Men: First Class. In a later interview with MTV, Millar said the film was “probably about nine months away from production starting, at the earliest”.

He added: “Matthew’s got to do X-Men: First Class. He just wants to get X-Men done next year, then hopefully we’ll just go straight into Kick-Ass 2. That’s the plan.”

All of which sounds a little less concrete. And there’s the small matter of Vaughn’s comments immediately following Kick-Ass’s release, when he seemed to indicate there would probably not be a sequel.

Could Millar, who clearly stands to benefit from a second film, be over-egging the biscuit? Probably. Having interviewed him, he’s a refreshingly candid chap, saying that film-makers attempting to bring less well-known superheroes to the big screen were “fucked”, following the arrival of Kick-Ass’s postmodern take. And this is a man who works extensively for Marvel Comics.

The truth probably lies somewhere between the two positions. What we do know is that if Kick-Ass 2 does get made, it will likely centre on Dave Lizewski’s encounters with a new breed of wannabe superheroes and supervillains, inspired by his adventures. The film will show Hit Girl struggling to lead a normal life, and I can’t imagine there not being a prime role for Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Red Mist.

Millar said in March that he was planning on writing the second book in April. “The idea of Kick-Ass was: what would happen if people in the real world tried to become superheroes?” Millar told IGN earlier this year. “The second one is: what if people tried to be bad guys as a reaction to the superheroes?

Millar adds: “And it’s just that simple: The same way these wee guys were contacting each other on Facebook and trying out superhero costumes, what if bad kids started to do this? You’ve got this horrible Clockwork Orange kind of scenario going on, where these kids are happy-slapping.

“They’re out there with their mobile phones dressed up as villains doing horrible things to people, recording it and putting it online. And that becoming massively viral all over the world.”

It’s a vivid image that one can imagine working well for Vaughn, if the sequel does end up being made. For me, Kick-Ass was an enjoyably throwaway, fluid and vibrant slice of comic-book silliness, which made great viewing on the big screen. I’d very much like to see a sequel. They’d better get a move on though – Chloë Moretz won’t stay 13 forever, and a grown-up Hit Girl would rather defeat the object, don’t you think?

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Everyone’s a critic these days – so how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? And who is reviewing the reviewers?

A few years ago, at a weird corporate dinner, an actor from a satirical sketch show turned to me and said, “I’ve always wondered, what exactly are your credentials to review me?” I could have obligingly set out my career path. I could have argued that the qualities qualifying a reviewer to review are as ultimately unquantifiable as hers to sit on stage naked in a bathtub doing impressions of the Queen. I could have reassured her that I made a point of never reviewing people I’d sat with at weird corporate dinners. Instead, in the absence of a critic’s exam certificate, I said: “Yes, I see what you mean.”

I remembered this while reading the Scotsman’s recent article about an apparently suspect glut of four- and five-star reviews at this year’s Edinburgh festival, which has led many to pose the question – who is reviewing the reviewers? A new body has now been set up to do just that. Festival Media Network, a trade organisation for independent media covering the Edinburgh festival, hopes among other aims to establish a code of best practice for reviewers, with numbered passes that can be used to verify the holder’s membership.

Declaring conflicts of interest, striving for objectivity, promising to post a review within a reasonable timeframe, agreeing on pain of death not to use the phrase “a good time was had by all” – these should be established standards for any reviewer. The only question for me is: why aren’t we talking about rolling such a network out across the country?

It used to be that the name of your publication stood your credentials to both artists and audiences. But theatre review websites have proliferated in the past few years, and with them the numbers of critics vying for readers’ time and venues’ tickets. Culture Wars and the Arts Desk are both staffed by professional critics, some of them ex- or current newspaper writers. Fringe Review, which reviews in London, Edinburgh, Brighton and internationally, uses a combination of theatre practitioners and journalists. Three Weeks, which has also sprouted roots far outside Edinburgh, is a training ground for mostly student writers. Since 2006, something called the Public Reviews has been taking this all to its logical conclusion, on an international scale, by vetting theatre reviews by members of the public.

One member of staff at a small London pub theatre told me she’d had five reviewers call for tickets one week but recognised the name of only one publication. (One, she thought, had said they were from something called “Kangaroo Reviews”, suggesting either an Australian zine with a particular interest in the work of Frank McGuinness, or that cash-strapped drama students are getting cockier). Even if a reviewer writes for a well-known publication, there’s no quick way of guaranteeing they’re an experienced professional rather than a volunteer enthusiast: financially squeezed regional newspapers in particular are supplementing their professional review teams with unpaid amateur critics.

You may be able to tell within the first few lines of a review if the author is someone in whom you would place your trust (basically, don’t fork out on a theatre ticket on the basis of one that starts “Walking into the foyer of the theatre, I …” or, possibly, “G’day, Mr McGuinness …”). But the majority of reviews aren’t consumed in this way – they reach us stripped down to a line, or simply a star rating, on a piece of promo. How seriously should you take those five stars from the unknown website with no declared policy? Or the solitary star from the person who could, for all you know, be the director’s arch-enemy?

The truth is, most of these review organisations aren’t out there to wangle free theatre tickets or turn their friends’ flyers into minor constellations: they’re there to do a useful job. In Brighton, sites such as Three Weeks and Fringe Review have been welcomed with open arms by a fringe that has been underserved by the mainstream press. And their reviews often bring good shows to the attention of high-profile critics. At the moment, it’s too easy for more established organisations to turn their noses up and not acknowledge them. So maybe, if amateur reviewers were more organised – even with a formal code of practice – then they could be the ones who benefit most.

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Why do writers whose prose is clean and clear turn into gushing Kate Winslets in the thank-you pages of their books?

The title story of If I Loved You, I would Tell You This, Robin Black’s debut collection, is a shimmering, skewed tale of domestic disturbance and urban disaffection. It’s one of 10 glacially poised stories that stand out for their simplicity; that quietly dissect the minor dramas of life and love, and blaze with understated emotion. However, on finishing the collection something else stayed with me almost as clearly as the stories themselves: the fulsome four pages of acknowledgements at the end.

Black stops short of thanking the baristas in the local coffee house or the manufacturers of the computer she uses, but it wouldn’t have been a surprise to see them mentioned. Friends, fellow writers and her family are given long, involved thank yous explaining exactly why they are great critics, writers and/or friends. For someone whose prose is so lithe and without adornment, these pages seem gushingly unreal: as though a literary hybrid of Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet has wrested control of the keyboard.

Acknowledgements are one of the few places in a book when a writer can break out of their fictional world and address readers in their own voice. This is something that perhaps is more powerful than we realise. While I know the text is supposed to be the most important thing, and I’m well aware that the biographical details of a writer’s life should be incidental to the reading experience, the acknowledgement pages can have a subtle effect on the way I read a book.

The best thing to do would be not to read them; to ignore those pages and stick with the story. But in moments of distraction I can’t help flicking to the back to see whether I recognise the name of their editor, or if there will be gracious thanks to famous novelists or artistic grantors. I can’t help but slightly judge an author by the way they acknowledge their debts: too effusive and they seem a bit needy and try-hard; too brief – a list of names in alphabetical order – and you run the risk of appearing cold and dismissive. It’s probably the difficulty of treading such a fine line that makes me read long lists of names of people I have never met.

Despite my enthusiasm for them, there is a sense of the juvenile about acknowledgements – they seem longer and more sweated over in debut novels and collections than in books by more established names, from which acknowledgements are regularly entirely absent. Where they do appear they are often to express thanks for “Big” Jim Marshall, the Texas Ranger who taught the author the ins and outs of surveillance techniques, or Dr Ahab O’Shaunessy who explained the history of sickle cell anaemia, or captain Bryce Jones whose experiences informed the Afghan section of this book – normally suffixed by that staple of acknowledgement pages “all mistakes are of course my own”. These kinds of acknowledgements can often appear to have been given with one eye on letting the reader know exactly how much research has gone into their fiction.

Let’s be honest: it would most likely be safer for an author to eschew an acknowledgments page altogether and give the people they want to thank a bottle of wine and a copy of the book. But that somehow doesn’t cut it when you’ve been writing a collection for years and have been helped immeasurably along the way. I can understand why Robin Black might want to pour her heart out to her nearest and dearest, but perhaps she might have done better by taking a leaf out of the rest of her book and keeping things clean and clear.

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Carluccios shares soared 44% after the Italian restaurant chain said it agreed to be taken over Landmark group, a Dubai-based retail firm, for £90.3m.

The deal valued Carluccios shares at 142p in cash, sending the stock 43p higher to to 138.6p.

London restaurant entrepreneur Richard Caring is the company’s largest shareholder with a 12% stake. Caring, who has also owned the Strada and Belgo chains, as well as Annabel’s club in London, ranked number 146 on the 2009 Sunday Times Rich List, with a fortune in excess of £350m.

David Bernstein, Carluccio’s Senior Independent Director said in a statement: “The Offer from C1 represents an excellent opportunity for all those involved with Carluccio’s. For our Shareholders, it represents an attractive premium, in cash, at a time of continued macro-economic uncertainty. For our employees, it represents the opportunity to benefit from belonging to an international organisation of enlarged scale and breadth. Our customers will, however, see no change in our focus on quality, value, authenticity and the highest standards of service.”

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Today is 09/02/10 – time to celebrate a US import that hit the perfect balance between teen angst and superficiality

It is not, admittedly, a date that most people will have marked on their calendar. It’s not even a date that most British people will have properly noticed. But jot down today’s date in an American format while reminiscing about 1990s teen TV and all will become clear. Today is 09/02/10 – which can only mean it’s time to wish yourself “Happy Beverly Hills 90210 Day!”. Or, if you’re a British fan who decided to celebrate the enduring Californian show in February (which doesn’t quite feel right, given the weather and the quintessentially American feel of the show): “Happy International Beverly Hills 90210 Day!”. If you happen to be in the vicinity of Beverly Hills today – and who wouldn’t be? – there’s even going to be a celebratory event featuring cast members.

It was 20 years ago that Beverly Hills 90210 hit British screens; the first US show aimed specifically at teens to be aired in the UK. Created by Aaron Spelling and Darren “Sex and the City” Star as a young person’s aspirational alternative to Dynasty and Dallas, 90210 captivated its adolescent audience – chronicling the interests, obsessions, and fashion faux pas of a generation. Teenagers couldn’t get enough of 16-year-old twins Brenda and Brandon Walsh struggling to adjust after moving to sunny California – and the show ran for 10 years.

The launch of a new, updated version of the show in 2008, which is now in its third series, seems only to have underlined why the original was so successful: the modern characters seem bland and the storylines too sensational in comparison. But for me, version two’s biggest mistake has been to give the (hip and young-looking) grown-ups almost as much screen time as their kids. Teens loved the original 90210 because Jim and Cindy Walsh were the perfect parents: untrendy, happily married, and with no lives of their own. They provided the moral centre of a show that concerned itself with a range of social issues, from rape to cancer, eating disorders to AIDS. Sure, most of these problems were wrapped up within the hour, which wasn’t realistic – but it was comforting. And in terms of viewers and longevity it was clearly the smart strategy.

Unlike other teen shows which attempted to delve more deeply into the darker side of teenage life, Beverly Hills 90210 hit the right balance for its audience between teen angst and superficiality. (My So-Called Life for instance was critically acclaimed, but was cancelled after one series; the super-glossy OC got the chop after four series due to declining ratings). Its characters were good-looking, but not so gorgeous as to be alienating and the characters weren’t obsessed with romantic relationships to the exclusion of everything else. Even when Brenda started dating Dylan, the most lusted-after guy in school, he wasn’t her only focus – and notably when the pair had sex for the first time, Brenda was allowed an enjoyable and regret-free experience. Although the resulting public outcry also meant she then had a pregnancy scare.

I was 11 when the show started, with no idea of what “90210″ even meant. But I instantly knew I wanted to be a part of it and idolised this strange new world with its exotic traditions like spring break and homecoming dance. I was obsessed. And I wasn’t the only one – Beverly Hills 90210 fitted the teenage niche perfectly, and in doing so, inspired dozens of imitators. But for me, the original will always be the best.

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Former prime minister’s views run counter to those of Labour leadership contenders on cutting the public deficit

Tony Blair devotes relatively little space amid the 718 pages of his autobiography to David Cameron or the Conservative party. But in comments set to rile the left of the Labour party, the former prime minister makes some positive noises about certain strands of Tory policy, prompting Mark Hoban, financial secretary to the Treasury, to claim Blair is backing Tory economic policies in the book and rejecting the policies followed by Brown and the Labour party.

On the economy, Blair counters the consensus view among Labour’s leadership candidates, who are criticising the government for trying to cut the deficit too quickly amid claims that doing so will put the economy at risk.

He writes:

If Labour simply defaults to a “Tory cutters, Lib Dem collaborators” mantra, it may well benefit in the short term; however, it will lose any possibility of being an alternative government. Instead, it has to stand up for its record in the many areas it can do so, but also explain where the criticism of the 13 years [of Labour rule] is valid. It should criticise the composition but not the thrust of the deficit reductions. This is incredibly difficult.

He adds:

We should also accept that from 2005 onwards Labour was insufficiently vigorous in limiting or eliminating the potential structural deficit … Labour has no option but to be credible in its own right. That means, as I say, having a coherent position on the deficit.

The British public elected what they want to be a Tory version of a centrist government, Blair claims.

Tellingly, we lost business. This was crucial. When the Tories brought out 30 or so chief executives who were against the national insurance rise, I knew the game was up … Labour’s case in 2010 was that the Tories would put the recovery at risk. If 30 chief executives, employing thousands of people in companies worth billions of pounds, say it’s Labour that will put the economy at risk, who does the voter believe? Answer: the chief executives. Once you lose them, you lose more than a few votes. You lose your economic credibility. And a sprinkling of academic economists, however distinguished, won’t make up the difference.

What the public ended up doing, in that remarkable way they have, is elect the government they wanted. They were unsure of the Tories, so they put a strong Lib Dem showing alongside and urged them to get together. They elected what they want to be a Tory version of a centrist government (whether they get that is another matter!) … The danger for Labour now is that we drift off, or even move decisively off, to the left. If we do, we will lose even bigger next time.

On the economic policies that he believes Labour should have pursued, he seems to broadly endorse the Tory plan to accelerate the pace of deficit reduction:

What should we have done? As I suggested in my analysis of the economy earlier, in my view we should have taken a New Labour way out of the economic crisis: kept direct tax rates competitive, had a gradual rise in VAT and other indirect taxes to close the deficit, and used the crisis to push further and faster on reform.

On coalition policies, Blair says the Tories will be “at their best” when unfettered by “old Labour” instincts in the Liberal Democrat camp.

The real challenge for the coalition will be simple: the Tories and the Lib Dems don’t really agree. In many areas of domestic policy, the Tories will be at their best when they are allowed to get on with it – as with reforms in education. They will be at their worst when policy represents an uneasy compromise between the old Labour instincts of the Lib Dems and the hard decisions the Tories will instinctively want to take, or where, as with the Tory and Lib Dem insistence on being “the civil liberties” proponents, they end up failing to meet genuine and legitimate public concerns about public security.

About Cameron himself, Blair says little, but he records his view of him in 2007, two years after Cameron succeeded Michael Howard as Tory party leader.

David Cameron was clever and people-friendly, and I thought he had some real steel to him, but he had not gone through the arduous but ultimately highly educative apprenticeship I had gone through in the 1980s and early 1990s.

On the Tories’ weak points, he says: “Where the Tories will be vulnerable is where they always are vulnerable: their policies will be skewed towards those at the top, fashioned too much by the preoccupations of the elite (which is why they despised action on antisocial behaviour), and too conservative, particularly in foreign policy.”

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Comedy gems to look forward to this autumn – from the return of The Inbetweeners and Peep Show to new sitcom Him & Her, via Chekhov and Chevy Chase

There’s a near embarrassment of comedy riches this autumn – with established programmes returning for new series and interesting projects hitting television screens for the first time.

Inbetweeners fans don’t have long to wait before the third series comes to E4. After a somewhat slow start, DVD releases, repeats and word of mouth have seen the show establish itself as must-see television – the new series sees Simon Bird and the rest of the boys finishing their final A-level year while dealing with the usual myriad embarrassments of being a wanky 18-year-old. Over on C4, the indefatigable Peep Show returns for a remarkable seventh series in November with the fallout from the birth of Soph and Mark’s baby, while the C4 stable also has a handful of brand new offerings plucked from last year’s Comedy Showcase: E4′s PhoneShop boasts scriptediting chops from Ricky Gervais, while The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (More4) stars US comedy heavyweight David Cross alongside British stars Sharon Horgan and Blake Harrison (Neil from The Inbetweeners).

Harrison also pops up in what ought to be the breakout show of the season, BBC3′s Him & Her. Written by Stefan Golaszewski (Cowards) and starring Russell Tovey and standup/actress Sarah Solemani, it’s set exclusively inside the couple’s tiny bedsit, giving it the feel of a series of short plays. It’s a touching, tender, funny look at an almightily ordinary couple. Anyone who’s seen Golaszewski’s stage work and monologues will recognise that his could be one of the most important lightly comic voices of his generation. It’s the best thing on BBC3 since Pulling.

Sky Arts continues its burgeoning role as one of the UK’s most dynamic channels this autumn with a series of Chekhov’s comic plays made by Steve Coogan and Henry Normal’s Baby Cow Productions. Mat Horne stars as Lomov in The Proposal; Coogan is Nyukhin in The Dangers Of Tobacco; real-life partners Julian Barratt and Julia Davis star in The Bear, while Johnny Vegas and Mackenzie Crook resurrect their, um, glory days in Sex Lives Of The Potato Men in the slightly more highbrow A Reluctant Tragic Hero.

Also from Baby Cow comes The Trip on BBC2, which sees Coogan and frequent mucker Rob Brydon working in a similar vein to their meta turn in A Cock And Bull Story. The two play versions of themselves on a culinary trip around the north after Coogan is commissioned by the Observer to write some restaurant reviews. (BBC2 will be dishing up more foodie comedy in Whites, in which Alan Davies plays a past-it chef at a country hotel.) The channel will also be playing host to Matt LeBlanc, who is following Coogan and Brydon’s lead and playing himself in Episodes, a Showtime co-production about a hit UK comedy which gets picked up by a US exec and — like so many have — gets destroyed in the mid Atlantic. (For those who can’t wait, sneak a look at this preview clip here).

Meanwhile, tiny MTV offshoot Viva is on to a good thing with NBC’s Community featuring Chevy Chase and John Oliver. Set in a shoddy community college, it’s been one of the most acclaimed US comedies since The Office and 30 Rock and is pencilled in to start here on October 4. Channel 4′s Campus – which comes from the makers of Green Wing and was also shown as part of C4′s Comedy Showcase – is in a similar vein and will appear in the new year.

So let us know: what can’t you wait to watch – and which shows will you be giving a wide berth?

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The New Yorker blends electronic music with Ethiopian jazz and South American rhythms, but refuses the ethno-techno tag. So how to describe his debut single, The Student?

What do you call Nicolas Jaar’s music? The 20 year-old American may be closely associated with New York’s Wolf + Lamb label, but the music he makes has only a tangential relationship with house or techno. For his debut release, The Student (you can listen to his music here), Wolf + Lamb had to request Jaar underscore this crumbling meditative piano piece with a beat, to give it dancefloor traction. Meanwhile, the man himself often takes his live club sets down to a jarringly slow 70bpm, interested, as he is, in creating atmosphere and emotional resonance, rather than physically moving the crowd.

“I never really made club music until I started playing in clubs,” explains Jaar (pronounced “jar”). “For me, electronic music didn’t equal dance music.” Indeed, this young producer, around whom there is currently the sort of excitement that the nascent Villalobos or Aphex Twin once enjoyed, has some deeply idiosyncratic ideas about clubs and club music.

Jaar talks of dance music accelerating and shrinking through the 1990s; increasing in speed but narrowing its emotional range, in the process becoming a one-dimensional, escapist soundtrack. The attitude, he says, was: “Let’s forget about ‘the system’, because capitalism won.” Personally, he sees nightclubs as forums for a far richer, far more variegated experience.

As befits the son of Chilean visual artist Alfredo Jaar, he explores clubbing at a conceptual level. Clubs, Jaar feels, are about escape, but there is a sadness implicit in that “separation and forgetting”. That people need nightclubs is an indictment of ordinary day-to-day life. “Everyone who goes to a club is heartbroken, I think. You can take that two ways. They’re heartbroken, so they want to forget. Or they’re heartbroken, so let’s give them an ambience where they can be heartbroken.” Better still, why not give them both? Jaar has talked about his desire to create “rhythmic anguish”: music that you can dance to, with uncomplicated joy, but which is full of melancholy “above the bass”.

Moreover, if clubs are places for breaking free, then, says Jaar, the soundtrack should reflect that structurally. “If the music, within itself, is about breaking and separation, then the club experience becomes meta, bigger, and it’s very fulfilling.” He pauses: “Maybe. I’m trying it out.”

Little wonder, given that modus operandi, that Jaar’s music refuses easy categorisation. Where others, aged 14, would have heard Villalobos’s Thé Au Harem d’Archimède or Trentemøller’s The Last Resort and simply tried to mimic them, Jaar wants to match them. He aspires to the originality of the former, and the emotional heft of the latter. Indeed, it’s entirely different influences: Erik Satie, Keith Jarrett or Mulatu Astatke’s Ethiopian jazz, that are useful reference points for Jaar’s most extreme music. Tracks such as The Student or Dubliners are fraught reveries, ambient enigmas, auditory hallucinations of fumbling, tumbling double-bass; stark, poignant dabs of manipulated piano; chirruping percussion and environmental noise. Danceable rhythms and yearning voices drift in and out of the mix, almost whimsically, like restless ghosts in the machine.

If, in rhythmic terms, such tracks tantalise, the likes of El Bandido or Mi Mujer deliver. They have a funk impetus, a loose, fluid grooviness, a radiant and distinctly Latin American rhythmic lightness. Yet, even then, Jaar’s music retains an otherness. His unlikely club hit, Time for Us, is what? A screwed, slow-mo R&B banger? “Things might have to slow down for us to be conscious of them,” says Jaar, “as opposed to making them so fast we’re just escaping with them.”

Of course, some people don’t buy it. Non-believers have dismissed Jaar’s work, and its “world music” elements, as a lazy continuation of the La Mezcla ethno-house trend. Jaar, who grew-up in Santiago de Chile, insists such sounds are encoded in his DNA: “I lived in Chile, I have French and Arab heritage. The last thing I have is American or German electronic influences. I don’t know how to make techno. I don’t know how to make that perfect kick.” For the record, he describes the welding of “ethnic” samples to western beats as: “Literally, the most disgusting thing that can happen to music. It’s colonisation all over again.”

When the Inès album arrives in October, on Clown and Sunset – Jaar’s collaborative label with his Russian and Ethiopian friends, Nikita Quasim and Soul Keita – there will still only be 20 or so of his tracks in circulation. Completed between university classes (comparative literature at Brown University) and gigs at Fabric and Berlin’s Bar 25, they, none the less, already constitute a fascinating body of work.

Jaar thinks it’s “humbling” anyone should care, and is so carried away with the hype that, naturally, he’s thinking about staying at college, and doing a master’s degree. Clearly, he is a musician apart. But are you excited by Jaar’s music? And, if not, which young bloods are rocking your world?

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The former Lehman Brothers chief executive Dick Fuld was in the hotseat today for a quizzing over the bank’s spectacular 2008 collapse at a hearing of America’s bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in Washington

In written evidence, Fuld has made it clear he’s in no mood for an apology. Although he owns up to a few “poorly timed business decisions and investments”, the fallen financier tries to turn much of the blame onto the government for refusing to help Lehman. He insists the bank was brought down by inaccurate rumours, unjustified speculation and irrational fear over its finances.

Since Lehman’s demise, Fuld has kept an ultra-low profile. Fortune magazine’s William Cohan recently provided a good round-up of what Fuld’s been up to. Cohan quotes sources who say Fuld has been through the “denial and mea culpa” stages over Lehman’s implosion and has moved on to the “combative stage”.

Fuld is still a bit of an enigma, though. Apart from a couple of appearances before congressional hearings, he’s kept his counsel. The only partial interview he’s given was to an intrepid Reuters reporter, Clare Baldwin, who tracked Fuld down to his ranch in the wilds of Idaho and ended up getting a surprisingly friendly hug from the former Lehman supremo.

I’ll be following the action as it happens with live updates here.

5.00pm: We’re expecting defiance, bluster and anger as the former Lehman Brothers boss Dick Fuld takes centre stage today at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which has a mandate to probe the causes of the credit crunch that brought the global financial system to its knees. The action is likely to start at roughly 12.30 ET (5.30pm UK).

Fuld, 64, was nicknamed “the gorilla” during his Wall Street heyday for his uncompromising style. He will face a quizzing over Lehman’s questionable solvency, the use of alleged accounting tricks to mask its mounting liabilities and about the controversial purchase of much of Lehman’s US operation by Barclays Capital for a modest sum.

5.31pm: Fuld has just been sworn in by the panel’s Democratic chairman, Phil Angelides, and they’re reading to go.

The Lehman chief is appearing alongside three others: a former general counsel of the Federal Reserve of New York, Thomas Baxter; a former JP Morgan chief risk officer, Barry Zubrow and Harvey Willer, a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a law firm that advised Lehman.

5.35pm: JP Morgan’s Barry Zubrow is kicking things off with a written statement that essentially denies that his bank contributed to killing Lehman Brothers by making huge collateral calls of billions of dollars on the ailing Wall Street bank. Zubrow says JP Morgan was one of the victims of Lehman’s demise.

“As a result of our continuing support to Lehman, JP Morgan ended up with more than $30bn of calls on the Lehman bankruptcy estate.”

5.43pm: Dick Fuld is reading his opening statement which can be found in full here, declaring that his bank’s demise was caused by “incontrollable market forces” and “incorrect rumours” about its financial position. He reckons Lehman’s bankruptcy was “mandated” by the government and that regulators opted not to step up and save the firm.

Wearing a jaunty pink tie and a pair of glasses, he’s speaking in a strong, confident voice and sounds ready for a fight.

5.47pm: He’s good quite a decent suntan and doesn’t look too much like a threatening gorilla just at the moment. Says he’s “proud” to have spent his business career at Lehman Brothers, culminating in 14 years as CEO.

5.51pm: Thomas Baxter of the Federal Reserve says the central bank didn’t simply allow Lehman Brothers to fail – it tried “incredibly hard” to save the firm and tried to put together a rescue by a consortium of Lehman’s counterparties.

An “indispensable part” of any salvage, however, was a merger partner for Lehman. There were two candidates – Bank of America and Barclays. The first of these dropped out, while the second needed a shareholder vote, which would have taken months. The US government tried, unsuccessfully, to get Alistair Darling to waive this requirement – but the Brits refused.

“The UK government was not amenable to a waiver. Thus, Barclays ceased to be the capable partner that we needed to rescue Lehman and we had not other suitable buyer.”

5.53pm: Now it’s time for Q&A. First up is panel chairman Phil Angelides who wants to know whether risks taken by Lehman didn’t contribute to the bank’s demise, as well as unprecedented market positions. He points out that leverage ratios exceeded 30-to-1 by 2007.

5.58pm: Fuld: “I would say that ‘aggressive risk posture’ is not an accurate position of how we ran Lehman Brothers.”

He admits Lehman did have too much commercial real estate. About $129bn to $130bn of “less liquid assets” – a level that was brought down to $69bn as the bank “de-risked”. Including $50bn of real estate – that was brought down to $30bn.

“By the time we got to the third quarter of 08, had a tier one capital ratio of 11% – by most standards “fairly solid”.”

Fuld says that he believes “to this day” that his actions, that included bringing down the balance sheet, raising capital, pursuing solutions with the regulators, were right: “We pursued everything we possibly could have to have prevented what occured on that Sept 15th.”

6.06pm: Angelides wants to know if the witnesses think it was a “conscious strategic or political decision” by the Bush administration not to assist Lehman in an orderly wind-down, or just a cock-up.

Fuld, after several long pauses, says Lehman had the capital – the bank just needed liquidity. He says the bank into its last week with $40bn of liquidity but lost $30bn in the last few days. He’s implying that the bank could have survived with a little temporary help – possibly from the discount window, whereby the Fed lends cheap funds to banks.

“I really cannot answer you, sir, as to why the Fed, the SEC and the Treasury, chose not…not only to provide support for liquidity – but also not to have opened the [discount] window to Lehman that Sunday night as it did to all of its competitors,” says Fuld.

6.10pm: Why couldn’t the Fed simply issue a government guarantee to back Lehman Brothers, tiding it over a temporary run on the bank?

“As a matter of law, that cannot be done by the Federal Reserve,” insists Baxter.

6.15pm: The panel’s Republican vice-chairman, Bill Thomas, now gets a chance. He’s adopting an ingenue approach: “I’m willing to admit I’ve never, ever had an interest in, never followed, all the intricacies that we’re trying to discuss. So I’m going to ask some questions that are just questions anyone would ask.”

6.21pm: What, asks Thomas, was the “mental set” of people at Lehman after the demise of its rival Bear Stearns in March 2008?

Fuld responds by repeating his mantra about how much capital capital Lehman raised as part of its “de-risking” in the months before it went bust. He admits it was a worrying time: “This was clearly a time of loss of confidence, a ton of rumours swirling, stock prices going down, investors saying ‘if there continue to be asset sales, will these firms have enough capital to support those losses?’”

6.26pm: In hindsight, Thomas asks, was Lehman “too big to fail” based on the turmoil that gripped global financial markets in the wake of its collapse?

“I do believe Lehman was systemic. I don’t believe Lehman was the only systemic trigger,” says the Fed’s man, Baxter, pointing out that the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had already run into trouble and that Lehman was swiftly followed by AIG and Washington Mutual.

It wasn’t about timing: “Lehman would’ve been systemic in May, it would’ve been systemic in March and it was systemic in September.”

6.31pm: Next up to ask questions is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican who served as an economic adviser to the Bush administration and to John McCain’s presidential campaign. He’s asking about the timing and the extent to which the Fed opened the discount window, allowing cheap liquidity to flow to troubled banks on the fateful weekend when Lehman collapsed.

There’s a lot of technical talk here but essentially, the Fed’s Thomas Baxter maintains that cheap credit from the government was available to Lehman on the eve of its bankruptcy. Fuld rejects this, saying Lehman was denied access to the discount window. Lehman’s lawyer, Harvey Miller, suggests the picture was foggier – the Fed imposed a condition saying that Lehman could only have access to the discount window on condition that it pledged to file a bankruptcy petition.

6.35pm: The Fed’s man, Baxter, insists the central bank didn’t impose any condition requiring Lehman to file for a chapter 11 bankruptcy in return for cheap liquidity – “that’s not right”.

He says everyone was exhausted at the time, though: “If I could take you back in time to Sunday September 14 and you could be with us, having been up for several days, you might understand better why there could have been a lack of clarity in terms of communications.”

That’s an interesting admission – basically, all those involved were knackered and it discussions were degenerating into a bit of a shambles.

6.45pm: The government tried to “put foam on the runway” to mitigate the consequences of Lehman’s collapse, insists the Fed’s man, Baxter. He points out that accounts, employees and investment positions at Lehman’s US broker-dealer were smoothly and swiftly moved over to Barclays, which bought the bulk of Lehman out of bankruptcy.

6.48pm: Even if the Fed had the legal authority to backstop Lehman’s liabilities and prevent bankruptcy, Baxter says it wouldn’t have done so “because of the potential cost to US taxpayers”. So all this waffle about how the Fed didn’t have the power to avert Lehman’s demise is rather irrelevant – the government intended to let the bank fail anyway.

7.09pm: Finally, a direct question to the former Lehman boss. Byron Georgiou, a Democrat on the panel, asks Fuld what he should have done differently, looking back. The lengthy answer is the closest Fuld has come to a “mea culpa”.

“I clearly made mistakes.,” replies Fuld, listing a few – too much commercial real estate on Lehman’s books, insufficient liquid assets, and a capital ratio that was too low, although he says all these things were addressed through actions prior to bankruptcy.

“But even with those actions, you still weren’t able to secure adequate credit facilitiess to operate your business,” challenges Georgiou.

Fuld replies: “You are correct, 100%. We could not stem the tide of the uncontrollable market forces and the false rumours that swirled around the firm.”

He continues: “Once a bank is under siege and loses the confidence of the market place, I don’t believe that any bank can exist.”

“Did we do everything right? We clearly did not,” says Fuld. “I myself did not see the depth and violence of the crisis. I did not see the contagion. I believe we made poor judgements in timing for the assets we bought and for the businesses we supported. Would I love today to be able to reach back and take those? Yes. Did I say in the very beginning ‘I take full and total responsibility for the decisions I made’? I only made those decisions, though, with the information I had at the time.”

Fuld adds that he could have done a few other things – such as shutting down all Lehman’s mortgage origination platforms in 2006 or 2005. But he would have needed a “crystal ball” to do so.

7.44pm: More probing into Lehman’s mistakes. Bob Graham, a former Democratic governor of Florida, wants to know if one mistake was “moral hazard” – an assumption that there would be government support in the most extreme of situations.

“I had no expectation that the government would help us. I think that precedent was set after Beae Stearns where there was so much lashback on ‘bail out’ and ‘crisis’ that it was clear the government couldn’t do that again.”

Fuld says he walked into Lehman’s fateful weekend of bankruptcy knowing the bank had to create “its own solution”, which is a bit of a contradiction from his earlier remarks bemoaning that the Federal Reserve refused to help his bank.

7.53pm: Brooksley Born, a Democrat, is asking boring questions to the Fed’s man, Thomas Baxter, about the degree to which financial experts had predicted the turmoil that followed Lehman’s failure. She’s particularly interested in derivatives.

7.56pm: A little nugget revealing just how deeply Lehman was involved in derivatives – even two years after bankruptcy, there are still almost 250 people employed by Lehman Brothers’ insolvent estate who work purely on unwinding the bank’s derivatives, according to Harvey Miller, a lawyer who worked on Lehman’s chapter 11 filing.

“These transactions are extremely complex – they’re multiple, they’re all types of transactions,” he says.

8.11pm: Much of the FCIC’s questioning has shifted away from Fuld to other witnesses now, and there’s a great deal of probing in detail on the minutiae of the actions of US regulators, so I’m going to wind up this blog. But to summarise, here are the main points we’ve heard from Dick Fuld, aka “the gorilla”, who was in the driving seat of Lehman Brothers when the bank suffered its fatal crash:

• Fuld admits he “clearly made mistakes” at Lehman and he’d love to turn back the clock: “I myself did not see the depth and violence of the crisis. I did not see the contagion. I believe we made poor judgements in timing for the assets we bought and for the businesses we supported. Would I love today to be able to reach back and take those? Yes.”

• Having said that, he reckons that uncontrollable market forces, untruthful rumours and incorrect perceptions about Lehman’s finances caused the bank’s collapse, together with a refusal by the Bush administration to step in with a rescue.

• The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Lehman sharply differ over when, and how much, aid was on offer from the central bank’s “discount window”. The Fed says it offered cheap liquidity to Lehman, but Fuld says it didn’t do so until after bankruptcy.

• Everyone was knackered when Lehman was failing and there “could have been a lack of clarity in terms of communications” according to the Fed’s man, Thomas Baxter.

• Still, Fuld insists that Lehman could have been salvaged – he says it simply had a temporary liquidity crisis. Denying critics’ allegations of a “capital hole” of $30bn to $60bn, Fuld says the bank had $26.7bn of equity capital in the final days before its demise.

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