Music and Opera

Two poets named Shelley have graced the English language. One was Percy, and the other is Pete. Just as an intellectual is someone who can hear the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger, so a true lover of a three-minute pop song is someone who, hearing the words ‘Shelley’ and ‘Manchester’, thinks not of ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ and the Peterloo Massacre, but of ‘What Do I Get?’. ‘Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have)?’, ‘I Don’t Mind’, and the dozens of other songs that Pete Shelley wrote and sang with Buzzcocks. I took lessons in rhythm guitar from Buzzcocks by playing along to Singles

Grade: D+ I promise you this isn’t simply class loathing. Yer toffs have contributed to British rock and pop and it hasn’t all been unspeakably vile. There were moments when Kevin Ayers held our interest, for example, and even Radiohead. And then there’s that man of the people, Joe Strummer. So let’s excuse Mumford & Sons their weighty class baggage and just concentrate on the music, which is irredeemably awful and makes Coldplay sound like the MC5. Someone has given them beats, cute little digital beats, to set beneath the faux folk which once irritated and now just bores one into a stupor. There is also that thing beloved by

Grade: A+ Ooh, you can have some fun with this when the unwanted guests swing by this Christmastide. These are the ‘greatest hits’ of a serially indulged caterwauling loon with the political disposition of a spoiled seven-year-old, redone to make them even worse than they were before. So, put on ‘Why’ as you hand around the cocktails and the seasonal canapés. Trumpeting elephants, angry crows, an ominous synth and Yoko howling ‘Why? Whhhhhhhhhhhhy? Wok Wah Wheeeeeeeee! Ag ag agag ag! Whhhhhhy?’ Like a particularly angry and talentless Diamanda Galas. But don’t let a smile give the game away as this unendurable, pretentious garbage resounds around the room. Instead, flip to

Let’s get the ‘was-it-good?’ stuff out of the way first. Yes, it was good. It was better than good. It was incredible, fabulous, dazzling. It was whatever adjective you want to throw at it. I can’t recall seeing a more engrossing pop production, ever. You don’t just get great songs — come on, you’re not going to quibble about ‘Once in a Lifetime’, or ‘Burning Down the House’, or ‘Slippery People’, or ‘Road to Nowhere’, are you? — played by brilliant musicians. You get them presented in a way no one has thought to present a rock show before. That way was to remove all fixed points from the stage.

Grade: A+ Easily album title of the year, maybe album of the year. A true bravura offering from these supposedly tired old men. Cypress Hill are now in comfortable middle age, almost as old as me, ffs. But they were ever ludicrously inventive and idiosyncratic, right back to that first album in 1991, which wrote the template for many lesser and even more profane hip hop gods. This one is mired in psychedelia, as even Charles Moore might have guessed from the title. There are very knowing nods to, especially, early Jefferson Airplane — although the guitar sounds more like Barry Melton than Jorma Kaukonen — and Sly and the

Grade: B– Ooh goody — a parade to rain on! You wouldn’t believe the hyperbole expended by the rock critics on this middle-class French lass, real name Héloïse Letissier. Or maybe, being used to such mass gullibility, you would. ‘Bogglingly intelligent’ and ‘a thrillingly uncompromising artist, playing with ideas of gender, identity and individuality to pop-bright melodies’, for example. Her first album in English, Chaleur humaine, was similarly bestrewn with pop-hack ejaculate, to the extent that it resembled a plasterer’s radio. Why? Oh, check out the back story. Very gender fluid. Leftie. French. Channelling early 1980s electro pop and dance. And here she is with her hair cropped and calling

When Soft Cell first appeared on Top of the Pops in summer 1981, miming along to their version of Gloria Jones’s ‘Tainted Love’, it felt like a moment of palpable newness. Well, it certainly did if you were prepubescent and really had no idea what sex actually was. Romantic love — in either its glory or disappointment — was the everyday subject of the pop song, but here was this funny little fella in black, with studded accessories, singing of a love that was ‘tainted’. I had no idea what he got up to when the lights went out. I knew that homosexuality existed — in the same way that

No one any longer denies the immense significance of Wagner’s musical-dramatic achievement, even if they find it repellent. But his reputation as a writer — of operatic texts, autobiographical and biographical memoirs, practical essays on how to conduct particular pieces, vast and less vast theoretical works, ranging from speculations on opera and climate to theologico-political musings — is not high. Nor should it be, except for the more ‘occasional’ pieces. He was in fact a major contributor to mauvaises lettres, and no kind of systematic thinker, however much he might have liked to be. His only prose that is consistently readable comes in his letters, some of them enormous, all

It’s the Spectator’s 190th birthday this year and we celebrated with an end-of-summer drinks party in the garden for the writers and cartoonists who make the magazine what it is. In keeping with Fleet Street tradition, there was no food and plenty of booze – and everyone was kept entertained by great music from Charlie Wolfin and his jazz trio.             Photos by Louise Long 

Did Ashraf Marwan jump, or was he pushed? Not his fall off the balcony of his luxury apartment in London in July 2007, which is how Marwan, an Egyptian diplomat turned billionaire, met his unexplained and highly suspicious death, but his tumble into the arms of the Mossad, into whose tender embraces he slipped in 1970. At the time, Marwan was also in the even more tender embraces of Mona Nasser, daughter of Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser. After Nasser’s death in 1970, Marwan became a close aide to Anwar Sadat, and brokered military and diplomatic deals with the Saudis and Gaddafi’s Libya. All the while, Marwan was supplying top-grade

‘I feel I have learned lots about what not to write for the theatre…’ There’s a prevailing idea that the ever-precocious Benjamin Britten was an operatic natural — a composer whose gift sprang fully formed with the première of Peter Grimes in 1945. But that’s not strictly true. Go back just a few years to 1941 and you’ll find Paul Bunyan — the oversized skeleton in Britten’s musical closet. Rewind those few years and Britten, darling of post-war England, was all but a national pariah. A pacifist who had escaped conscription by travelling to America, he was forced to take work wherever he could find it. ‘Simple, marketable works’ was

Jazz may be an egalitarian, collaborative music, but jazz musicians honor their best with the laurels of hierarchy. Everyone knows the royal monikers of ‘Duke’ Ellington and ‘Count’ Basie, and most people know that Billie Holiday was ‘Lady Day’. But there’s also a whole aristocracy of hip name-drops: ‘The Baron’ (Charles Mingus), ‘Pres’ (Lester Young), ‘The Court Jester’ (Ornette Coleman), ‘The High Priest’ (Thelonious Monk). The list goes on, and on. The mid-century saxophonist Hank Mobley (1930–86) was never ennobled in such fashion — unless you count Dexter Gordon’s hilarious handle for his friend, ‘The Hankenstein’. Nor has historical consensus enshrined Mobley as a leading musician of his era. Fellow tenor

‘I could still be a pop star,’ says Lawrence, sitting on a footstool in his council flat, high up in a tower block above London EC1. ‘I know I’m not going to be a person who has a million hits on the internet. Do they call them hits? Views, or streams, whatever they are. I’m not going to be that person, but I still think I could have a hit record. For me a song like “Relative Poverty” is a song for this generation, and I don’t know why it shouldn’t be an anthem for today.’ Lawrence is now 57, and he has been trying (and failing) to become a

Grade: C+ Mumrock. A lucrative genre, dating from the beginning of the 1970s, when Mums suddenly wanted something a little bit hip. My own mother briefly succumbed to the inane imagery and kindergarten melody of ‘Song Sung Blue’, sometime in 1972, before she moved on to more sophisticated stuff (Gilbert O’Sullivan, as I recall). This is Diamond’s 40th anniversary collection of hits, live or otherwise, and his third Hot August Night containing the same songs. Hasn’t everybody got all this hideous dross by now? Is the only selling point this time that he’s singing them at 71, the voice still throatily pompous, the medallion still on display? Was he ever