‘All critics are failed writers,’ someone with a New Zealand accent said on Desert Island Discs the other day.
‘All critics are failed writers,’ someone with a New Zealand accent said on Desert Island Discs the other day. Obviously I have completely blanked out who it was, but I do know she was talking out of her fundament. Most of us become critics not just because we need the money (please send all cheques payable to me c/o The Spectator) but because we love the subject of which we write, and obviously because other critics drive us potty. The Pet Shop Boys have a new album out, which I haven’t yet heard, but I have read some of the reviews, one of which floated the iconoclastic notion that the Pet Shop Boys are electropop’s Ramones. In other words, all their albums sound the same. Which they don’t, of course, but the sniffy, lippy, doubtless teenage critic who wrote this is unlikely to have gone to the effort of listening to their many albums before making this judgment. Saying they are electropop’s Ramones isn’t criticism, it’s the pleasure of hearing your own voice after six pints of lager.
And yet, and yet. If criticism has any role in these busy and excessively analytical times, it’s surely to get things wrong. A while ago I put forward the notion that there were certain bands or singers of whom you would only ever need one album, and there was no need to waste time listening to anything else they ever did. I cited the Lyle Lovett problem, in that all the albums I had heard by this plug-ugly Texan troubadour sounded pretty much identical. His second, 1988’s Pontiac, is a cracker and all the others make you wish you were playing Pontiac.
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