Leaders of the pack

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. In short, they reminded me of some politicians.

Bob Geldof took time off from fretting about the wretched of the earth to say that when he led the Boomtown Rats, ‘I got shagged a lot [by the most beautiful groupies] but it was sloppy seconds for the other guys.’ Ah, that elfin Irish charm!

I mention this to contrast it with Gareth Malone’s Shanties and Sea Songs (BBC4, Friday). Gareth is the choirmaster from several BBC shows, so he’s a celebrity but, thank heavens, doesn’t act like one. He travelled round Britain, with his earnest charm, meeting the people who keep sea songs alive. They wouldn’t know a groupie from a grouper. There was a hitch: for some reason British folkies tend to sing as if they all have a serious sinus problem. And some shanties, being rhythmic work songs, are extremely dull.