Going to see the new smash hit show Matilda the other night, I was once again reminded that, as a creative musical force, the contemporary West End musical is dead. It contains the sort of music you only find in musicals; it has no relevance to contemporary music; it exists in a creative ghetto. The
Wrocław in Poland was Breslau in Germany until 1945. We’ve travelled here to record the orchestral parts of the music we’ve written for a ballet, The Most Incredible Thing, which opens at Sadler’s Wells in March. It takes me several days to work out how to pronounce the Polish name of the city. Some foreigners
On tour one develops air-conditioning paranoia. (I’ve just returned from a two-month Pet Shop Boys’ tour of North and South America, from Montreal to Lima.) You approach your latest hotel room with dread. How noisy is the air-conditioning? Can you turn it off? Is your room on the top floor directly under the main air-conditioning