Music

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Does Google know me better than I know myself?

My research assistant, John Steele, is also a songwriter. A friend emailed him with the lyrics of a Fleetwood Mac number. These days Google often appends emails with a shortcut to save you typing your own answer by suggesting one or two likely responses. In the Fleetwood Mac lyric a former lover wonders whether her ex can see her reflection in the snow-covered hills. Google’s suggestion was ‘No’. Musicians have pondered some of life’s most profound questions, so John and I tried posing a few in emails, to see Google’s suggested response. Some were hilarious. If only David Bowie were here to know that ‘Yes!’, there is life on Mars.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Beautiful voice, pretentious album: Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters reviewed

Grade: C+ Where did they all come from, the quirky yet meaningful rock chicks who don’t have a decent song between them yet put out albums by the bucketload? Back in the day it was just Joni Mitchell, who had four good songs, Laura Nyro who had two and Dory Previn who had one. Now there are thousands of these creatures, flaunting their intemperance without showing much brilliance. And all slavered over by the (still male) music press. Years of oppression, of being disregarded, they would argue. But disregarded for very good reasons, in almost all cases. Yeah, Carole King is ten times the songwriter James Taylor ever was. I

Thursday

Richard Bratby

From Middlemarch to Mickey Mouse: a short history of The Spectator’s books and arts pages

The old masters: how well they understood. John Betjeman’s architecture column ran for just over three years in the mid-1950s. Yet during that short run he experienced the moment that comes, sooner or later, to every regular writer in The Spectator’s arts pages. ‘It is maddening the way people corner one and make one discuss politics at the moment,’ he wrote on 23 November 1956, clearly as bored of the Suez crisis as the rest of us were, until recently, by Brexit: Because I write in this paper, people assume that I share its Editor’s views about Suez… But I don’t know what the views of this paper about Suez

Thursday

Graeme Thomson

The musical benefits of not playing live

Glenn Gould considered audiences ‘a force of evil’. ‘Not in their individual segments but en masse, I detest audiences.’ He retired from public performance on 10 April 1964, at the age of 31, having given fewer than 200 public recitals. The Canadian classical pianist had longstanding philosophical objections to the ritual of performing live. He found applause automatic and insincere, and often asked spectators not to bother. He even wrote a (partly) tongue-in-cheek manifesto, the Gould Plan for the Abolition of Applause and Demonstrations of All Kinds, in which he called for clapping to be banned. Gould believed that the most useful and honest response to music came following a

Thursday

William Cook

Welder, banjo player, comedian, actor, and now artist – Billy Connolly interviewed

We are in a basement gallery in London’s West End, and Britain’s greatest comedian is doing what he does best — sharing his delight at the daft absurdities of daily life. He remembers seeing a little boy wading into the freezing waters at Aberdeen. ‘You make a certain noise when the wave comes up. It’s a noise that you can only repeat by shoving a hot potato up a donkey’s arse.’ He is making this empty gallery feel as though it’s full of people — and a bunch of strangers laugh like old friends. ‘A lot of my stuff doesn’t have punchlines’. He doesn’t need them. ‘It’s lovely just making

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Haunting and beautiful: Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus’s Songs of Yearning reviewed

Grade: A It has taken 33 years — during which time this decidedly strange Liverpool collective have put out only three albums and done virtually no interviews — for the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus to become sort of au courant. Which is perhaps why they have suddenly, in a wholly unforeseen bout of activity, put out two in the same week. The other is the limited edition Nocturnes. Given our current predicament, the simple iron church bell that tolls here and there on this album should be resonant enough. But musical fashion has swung around a little to this band, too. Whereas once they would have been filed

Saturday

Richard Bratby

Bleak humour, resourcefulness and wit: Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Quarantine Soirées reviewed

There’s a certain merit in bluntness. ‘Quarantine Soirées’ was what the Budapest Festival Orchestra called its response to the crisis, and if the name conveyed a certain bleak Magyar humour, the resourcefulness couldn’t be faulted. Elsewhere, orchestras were still talking optimistically about broadcasting concerts from empty halls, and (even more optimistically) about persuading online viewers to pay for them. Realising that any activity that brings 90 musicians into close proximity was probably running out of road, the BFO’s music director Ivan Fischer announced that ‘this is not the time for orchestral music’ and launched a programme of chamber recitals by the orchestra’s players, livestreamed from their rehearsal hall. Logging on

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Beethoven wasn’t just history’s greatest composer but also one of its greatest human beings

Ludwig van Beethoven isn’t just my favourite composer: he’s my household god. There’s a bust of him on my mantelpiece. It took ages to find something that did him justice. This one was made in Italy about 100 years ago; it’s painted to look like black marble, his features are modelled on his life mask and it gets his hair right. (This mattered to Beethoven: when August von Kloeber painted him in 1818, the composer ‘expressed delight at the treatment of his hair’.) Above my stereo system there’s a Victorian copy of another portrait of Beethoven; it’s striking but undistinguished. As for the statuette in my bathroom, I should really

Thursday

Michael Hann

A son-et-lumière spectacular: The Chemical Brothers at the O2 Arena reviewed

How does one account for the phenomenon that is the Chemical Brothers, a quarter of a century on from their first records, just getting bigger and bigger? Only now are they touring the arenas of the UK for the first time. They’re nominated for a Grammy. Their current album, No Geography, is a top-five hit. Wasn’t the 1990s dance-music explosion meant to have ended with, well, the 1990s? They’re not alone either: Underworld, too, are now playing arenas, and not just to people who want to shout the refrain to ‘Born Slippy’: ‘Lager! Lager! Lager! Lager!’ Perhaps there’s something in the fact that neither group was completely contained by dance

Thursday

Michael Hann

Rap that feels like a sociology lecture: Loyle Carner at Alexandra Palace reviewed

A few years ago, I asked the young American soul singer Leon Bridges — a latter-day Sam Cooke, with the old-fashioned song arrangements to match — if he ever pondered the incongruity of being a black man, backed by a white band, playing music in the African-American tradition to audiences that (in the UK at least) were almost entirely white. ‘I have a song called “Brown Skin Girl”,’ he replied, ‘and I ask “Where my brown-skinned girls at?” And there’s maybe one or two in the crowd. It’s a little awkward sometimes.’ His words came to mind watching Adia Victoria. Despite her being an African-American woman signed to a major

Alexandra Coghlan

Handsome and revivable but I wasn’t moved: Royal Opera’s Death in Venice reviewed

Premièred within two years of each other, Luchino Visconti’s film and Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice both take Thomas Mann’s novella as their starting point. But from shared beginnings the two works diverge dramatically. The cloying visual beauty of the film, its pink-and-grey vision of Venice swaddled in Mahler strings, couldn’t be further from the stern, self-loathing austerity of Britten’s last opera, whose beauty is much harder won. The sea that pounds and dashes the Suffolk coast in Peter Grimes is lulled in Death in Venice into the queasy, syncopated swell of the lagoon, a miasma of heat and sickness rising from its waters. The vistas from the Lido

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Meet the unrivalled Sun King of early music, William Christie

It’s morning in the garden of William Christie, and he’s talking about home improvements. ‘I planted three pines up there actually,’ he says, pointing. ‘One blew over in a storm in ’99. But I was able to plant on both sides and create a vista. It’s getting there.’ He gestures across topiary and lawns and away towards the opposite hillside, where an avenue of trees and classical pillars sweeps up towards the skyline. Hang on: he created that too? It’s not unknown for famous conductors to act like Bourbon princes. Here in la France profonde, though — on the terrace of his 16th-century farmhouse, and celebrating 40 years as director

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The Polish electronic music revolution of the 1950s

It was created in November 1957, a year before the BBC’s fabled Radiophonic Workshop, and was far more influential in shaping the development of electronic music, yet the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES) is now virtually unknown even in Poland. Radio 3’s feature on Sunday night, Poles Apart (produced by Andrew Carter), made the case for its significance, taking us back to those early days of analogue bleeps, bongs, blurps and squelches. Robert Worby and the eerily electronic undercurrent to the programme gave us a completely new perspective on what else was going on in Poland in the 1960s besides the trouble at the Gdansk shipyards and the suppression of

Richard Bratby

Why are Haydn’s operas so lousy? La fedelta premiata reviewed

There’s a book about musicals that every opera lover should read. Not Since Carrie by Ken Mandelbaum is a history of musical theatre’s greatest flops: a comprehensive study of the thousand ways in which a collaborative artform can crash and burn. It’s unbelievable stuff. The Broadway cast of 1961’s Kwamina participated in a voodoo ritual to neutralise the show’s critics (English National Opera is rumoured to be planning something similar). Adverts for Jule Styne’s Subways Are for Sleeping were banned from New York public transport after vagrants took them as an invitation to spend the night on board. And the prize exhibit: the RSC’s Carrie, whose star Barbara Cook was

Michael Hann

Fascinating and compelling: Bruce Hornsby at Shepherd’s Bush Empire reviewed

In the unlikely event that Bruce Hornsby and Morten Harket, A-ha’s singer, ended up featuring in the Daily Mail for, I don’t know, getting into a fight in a supermarket over the last luxury Scotch egg, they would be described as ‘“The Way It Is” hitmaker’ and ‘the “Take on Me” star’. In neither case, I suspect, would that be how they would choose to be remembered. In Hornsby’s case, I know it’s not, because he told me so earlier this year. And when he played that song — a piece of high-class MOR so persuasive that it’s been sampled by hip-hop stars and used incessantly in TV montages since

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Woke slogans welded to incompetent grunge: Neil Young’s Colorado reviewed

Grade: B- Horribly woke boilerplate slogans welded inexpertly to the usual incompetent Crazy Horse grunge. Young and his pick-up band of now 50-years standing usually work well together — as on Zuma, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and even Ragged Glory. But that’s when there were a few decent songs in the mix, stuffed with compelling ideas and interesting imagery. That sort of thing is in terribly short supply here. ‘She Showed Me Love’ staggers along for an unendurable 13 minutes: ‘I saw old white guys trying to kill mother nature.’ Just old white guys? How about you check out the Indonesian and Brazilian loggers for a second? Then the

Michael Hann

The open-hearted loveliness of Hot Chip

Squeeze and Hot Chip are both great British pop groups. But they never defined a scene. Their ambitions extended further than being hailed by a few hundred people in bleeding-edge clubs. Squeeze piggybacked on punk, but they were quite evidently never a punk group, even if they dressed up as one. They were of the street rather than the art school, but they had no interest in gobbing, and Chris Difford was able to turn vignettes of everyday London life into three-minute comic dramas. (Perhaps he had more in common with John Sullivan — another south Londoner whose characters combined humour and pathos in his scripts for Only Fools and

Thursday

Stuart Jeffries

‘The only place I can’t get my plays on is Britain’: Peter Brook interviewed

‘Everyone of us knows we deserve to be punished,’ says the frail old man before me in a hotel café. ‘You and I for instance. What have we done this morning that is good? What have we done to resist the ruination of our planet? Nothing. It is terrifying!’ Peter Brook fixes me with blue eyes which, while diminished by macular degeneration that means he can make me out only dimly, shine fiercely. But for the genteel surroundings and quilted gilet, he could be Gloucester or Lear on the heath, wildly ardent with insight. ‘Think of Prospero. He’s a bad character, hell-bent on revenge for his brother’s wrong, a colonialist

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

In his new piano concerto Thomas Ades’s inspiration has completely dried up

There’s nothing like a good piano concerto and, sad to relate, Thomas Adès’s long-awaited first proper attempt at the genre is nothing like a good piano concerto. Not in the version we heard at its UK première in the Royal Festival Hall, anyway. What a disappointment! Perhaps Adès can rescue it, but he’d have to hack away at the score as ruthlessly as Bruckner dismantling his Third Symphony. That work wasn’t necessarily improved by its revisions but, honestly, almost anything would be an improvement on the first two movements of the 21-minute concerto performed by Kirill Gerstein and the LPO conducted by the composer. You knew there was something wrong

Thursday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

A triumph: ENO’s Mask of Orpheus reviewed

ENO’s Mask of Orpheus is a triumph. It’s also unintelligible. Even David Pountney, who produced the original ENO staging in 1986, admitted to me in the interval that he didn’t have a clue what Harrison Birtwistle’s opera was about. But who cares when, visually and musically, you’re being socked between the eyes? Mask makes sense in the same way an earthquake makes sense. Fittingly we begin with total nonsense: Orpheus, in the bath, attempting to reform language. This is Orpheus the Man, in red velour and gelled-up hair, looking like Rod Stewart. An unlikely charmer of fishes and trees, it has to be said. But soon enough another Orpheus pops