Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards.

First of all, thank you very much those of you who bought tickets for the live virtual show Rock and Roll Politics last week

via King's Place. Hundreds and hundreds did, even though it clashed with the first televised

Premier League match. We finished just in time for everybody who wanted to to watch

the Man City Arsenal game. It's beautifully timed. But even if that rock and roll politics show

was crap, I still think they had the better half, that first half of the evening than those who

then tuned into the football.

I tuned in, quite excited to see what it was going to be like with no crowd, no atmosphere.

And it was weird, first compellingly weird and then dull.

And I switched off actually and turned to YouTube to watch Simon Rettle conducting The Rites of Spring, which was far more dramatic and vivid and unpredictable and exciting than this game.

I don't know what it tells us about live events, the nature of football, the nature of sport, that the absence of spectators

who aren't direct participants in the sport kind of diminishes to such an extent that these

22 overpaid players are reduced to kind of rather dull figures passing a ball around,

no doubt with great skill. I watched another one on Friday. I'm a spur season ticket holder and

watched, sorry for those of you not remotely interested about football, but it's to do with everything.

It's do with politics to this Because what is it about public events?

I remember Ed Miliband asking me once,

did I find that when I did public events,

he was good Miliband in having a curiosity about others.

This was when he was leader of the opposition,

a job I would have died to have done at some point.

But he was asking, when I do sort of public speaking events, a live show or speaking at an

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