Two programmes about singing this week, and they could scarcely have been more different. I’m in a Rock’n’Roll Band! (BBC2, Saturday) was the first in a series about groups, and it kicked off with lead singers. Thank heavens, they skipped most of the ponderous, portentous, pretentious nonsense that is often spouted about rock bands. You can’t get rid of that altogether when Sting is around (he identified the main qualities of the lead singer as ‘arrogance and immense courage’, which is 24-carat luvvie-talk — ‘For God’s sake, the sheer guts it takes to go out in front of an audience gasping for you to be Lady Teazle!’) but for the most part people were pleasingly direct.
Someone asked what frontmen and women were really like, and the answer came back, ‘knobheads’. They were, we learnt, ‘a mixture of arrogance and insecurity’. Someone else said that they were ‘narcissistic bastards’ and described how they would make intolerable demands not because they wanted things but because they could get them.
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