THERE’S nothing better than a bad idea. A really chumpish one, preferably. I collect them, as well as doing my level best to add to the population.

I can only stand back and admire, for instance, the film mogul who first suggested Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid — The Prequel. And I wish I’d been there at the moment when Mike Yarwood proposed that, at the end of his television show, he should say “And this is me” and then burst into song.

My all-time favourite, however, was the brainchild of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. In 1968 they set up Apple Records, and at a press conference in New York announced that they were interested in hearing from anybody who felt they had ability that had been overlooked because “they had the wrong colour shoes”.

“Send us your huddled talent”, they suggested. Later they put advertisements in newspapers, actually paid for adverts, that asked people to send in tapes of their performances and promised to listen to them rather than throw them in the bin.

As anyone who has ever had the slightest experience as a commissioning editor could have told them, this was, ahem, unwise.

“I went into the office,” said George Harrison, sounding surprised, “and there were rooms full of lunatics.” John Lennon had a similar experience: “I tried to see everyone. I saw everyone day in, day out; and there wasn’t anyone with anything to offer society or me. There was just, ‘I want, I want’.”

Well, you don’t say.

The Beatles set up Apple Records because they distrusted “the suits” and thought they knew better. It turned out that they didn’t. Among the many candidates that have been blamed for breaking up the band — LSD, creative differences, heroin, Yoko, growing-up, Linda and so on — it was the most prosaic one of all that was really responsible. Money. The more they renounced worldly possessions, the more they put their trust in the brotherhood of Man rather than the stock market, the more they rowed about cash. And in the end, it did for them.

I thought that this little historical digression might prove useful to Chris Martin. For last week the lead singer of Coldplay announced: “I think shareholders are the great evil of this modern world.” Martin was commenting after EMI had given warning that its profits would be lower because the band took longer than expected to record their latest album. “I don’t really care about EMI,” he said, graciously.

Now, there are lots of people who find almost everything about Chris Martin irritating, from his wife Gwyneth Paltrow to the decision to name their daughter (ironically in the circumstances) Apple. But I’m not one of them. I like Coldplay, think Paltrow is talented, and as for Apple, well, each to his own.

Yet even I have to concede that his comments about shareholders were, how else can one put it, irritating.

I mean, who does he think he’s kidding? Rock’n’roll is not the music of the anti-capitalist counter-culture, it is among the finest expressions of free enterprise. Coldplay is not an Arts Council-funded basket case, it is a global brand.

In fact, the tensions between rock acts and their record companies, which so often appear as rebellious anti-Establishment statements, have their roots in crude economics.

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