Music

Monday

Hajar J. Woodland

How I crossed the line from devout Muslim to stand-up comedian

In a small, dark room in the depths of Banshee Labyrinth, a gothic-looking venue just off Cowgate in Edinburgh, 11 people cheer and clap as I thank them profusely for spending the past hour with me. My backdrop is a red and white no-smoking sign and two coffin-shaped blackboards with drinks offers scrawled on them in chalk, and the portcullis-style door offers little soundproofing from inquisitive festivalgoers peering in and wondering aloud whether to take one of the 40 seats – but the setting is perfect for my first ever Edinburgh Fringe show. As soon as I finish the last song and receive warm applause, I switch almost immediately from

Friday

Nigel Jones

So long, Marianne Faithfull

Anyone of a certain age is aware of the urban legend that links Marianne Faithfull, a Mars bar and Mick Jagger. But Marianne’s death yesterday at the grand age of 78 (given her lifestyle, how did she get that old?) really does remove one of the last living links with the golden age of rock and roll in its wildest youth. For Marianne embodied every cliche associated with rock excess: the lover of three of the original five members of the Rolling Stones (Mick, Keith Richards and Brian Jones), she also took on David Bowie, but had the good sense or taste to reject the amorous advances of Bob Dylan

Monday

Tanith Carey

The life-affirming misery of the Cure

Watching the Cure’s live-streamed performance of their first album in 16 years, it was hard not to notice the toll time has taken on Robert Smith. At 65, his black spiky hair has long turned into a bedhead of fag-ash grey – a reminder to those of us who have grown up with him that none of us are as young as we used to be. As the slow waltz of the first track of Songs of a Lost World kicked in, and Smith wailed ‘Where did it go?’, it was starting to look like a very gloomy evening indeed – even by the standards of a band hardly known

Thursday

Craig Raine

What makes a good title?

Liszt’s compositions tend to have descriptive titles – ‘Wild Chase’; ‘Dreams of Love’ – whereas Chopin avoided titles. Thomas Wentworth Higginson wished titles on Emily Dickinson’s poems, opposed by his fellow editor Mabel Loomis Todd. They didn’t stick. Maybe this is why Dickinson is acclaimed but unread. ‘I heard a Fly buzz’ is easier to remember than 465. We can express this truth by quoting Dickens on the Bible in Little Dorrit: ‘such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. C. iii, v. 6 & 7.’ Or by remembering how often we forget our several PINs. For poets, titles can be a resource, a useful press release before the actual poem

Monday

James MacMillan

I’m not the only football-obsessed composer

I was in Sweden a few weeks ago, where my music was presented in Stockholm in the most recent International Composer Festival. One of the orchestral works performed was my football-themed ‘Eleven’ (11 players, melodies of 11 notes, chords of 11 pitches and various football chants woven into the fabric of the score). I’m not the first composer obsessed with the beautiful game. Bohuslav Martinu’s ‘Half-time’, written in 1924, was inspired by the supporters of his team, Sparta Prague. And more recently there have been bold examples by English composers Mark-Anthony Turnage (who worked chants for his beloved Arsenal into his orchestral piece ‘Momentum’) and Benedict Mason, in whose opera

Thursday

John Sturgis

Were Boney M the weirdest pop act of all time?

For a spell in the late 1970s there were two pop groups which dominated the UK singles charts – both, coincidentally, vocal quartets from continental northern Europe. But while one, Abba, have since become a billion-pound industry with an apparently permanent hologram-shaped presence on the London concert scene, their then rivals for pop supremacy, Boney M, have almost completely disappeared from public consciousness. And this is a shame because Boney M remain uniquely noteworthy in one field in particular: weirdness.  There are other contenders: Little Richard, the Sweet, Village People, the KLF.  But judged by the twin metrics of just how odd they were in tandem with quite how successful they

Thursday

Rory Sutherland and Rick Rubin

‘Judgment is the price of being creative’

Rick Rubin is a legendary American record producer who co-founded Def Jam records, which helped popularise hip hop. He has worked with everyone from Johnny Cash (whose career he is credited with reviving) to Paul McCartney and Kanye West. He sat down with The Spectator’s Rory Sutherland to discuss creativity, Bach, Sherlock Holmes, JFK assassination theories and more. RORY SUTHERLAND: It’s a huge pleasure to see you again. Just for the benefit of older Spectator readers, it’s probably worth defining what a music producer does because it’s ambiguous. People might imagine someone sitting there, adjusting the levels on one of those enormous mixing decks. In fact you never touch any

Andrew Lambirth

The otherworldly artist who made his name at The Spectator

There is something otherworldly about Rory McEwen’s paintings of plants, leaves and fruit. They are indisputably beautiful, often breathtakingly so, but they are almost eerie in their self-possession. They are like planets vibrating to the music of the spheres – quivering with arrested energy. These images are super-real (rather than surreal) but they sometimes have a surreal edge that can be disturbing. ‘I paint flowers as a way of getting as close as possible to what I perceive as the truth’ Although best known for painting these botanical watercolours on vellum, Mc-Ewen (1932–82) was a man of many parts: an extraordinarily talented figure, a poet and broadcaster, a folk and

Monday

Rob Crossan

A middle-aged man’s guide to ageing gracefully

Middle-aged men might be feeling persecuted at the moment. But we bring so much of the opprobrium upon ourselves. The MasterChef host Gregg Wallace has, it should be remembered, not been charged with any crime. But the allegations of his inappropriate, predatory and downright cringe-worthy behaviour towards women have inspired the kind of reaction among my male colleagues and friends that I haven’t heard the likes of since the arrival of David Brent and The Office some 20-plus years ago. Nobody finds your Tommy Cooper impression funny because the only other person old enough to remember Tommy Cooper is outside hectoring a stranger about the smoking ban ‘You don’t understand,

Thursday

Andrew Pierce

The Westminster Wag to watch

Surely charity is about helping others, not massaging your own ego? Ed Sheeran’s boycott of Band Aid is yet another example of putting virtue-signalling above doing actual good. I thought of delicate petal Ed when I was asked to join some media friends to record a cover version of ‘All You Need Is Love’ to raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital, which is building a children’s cancer centre. Our group – shamelessly called The Celebs – included Christopher Biggins, Frank Bruno, Anne Hegerty, the terrifying star of the quiz show The Chase, and a clutch of actors. It was my first time singing in public since I leapt to my feet,

Wednesday

Matthew Parris

Do you like the century you’re in?

Years ago Lord Patten of Barnes – Chris – was our guest for my Great Lives programme on BBC Radio 4. He championed the life of Pope John XXIII, a mid-20th-century pope from humble origins who (his admirers would say) did much to bring the Roman Catholic Church into the 20th century. He had his detractors too, Evelyn Waugh for instance: ‘Easter used to mean so much to me before Pope John and his council… I have not yet soaked myself in petrol and gone up in flames, but I now cling to the faith doggedly without joy.’ The muscle memory of today’s pop-musical taste is half a century long

Tuesday

James Innes-Smith

Punk may be dead, but the Sex Pistols aren’t

Pull those ripped tartan trews on lads, the Sex Pistols are back! Well, kind of. Lead singer John Joseph Lydon, aka ‘Rotten’, is livid that the other three surviving members have decided to perform a couple of charity gigs without his consent. Really? Punks doing charity gigs? Sid Vicious must be turning in his Pennsylvanian grave. A throng of balding 67-year-olds were pogoing to ‘God Save the King’ while hurling £8 pints of lager at each other The feud goes back to the mid-1970s when Lydon, in typical muso style, vowed to stay true to the music while the other layabouts were more inclined to milk the legacy for all

Thursday

Michael Hann

My night with the worst kind of nostalgia 

American Football are a band whose legend was formed by the internet: some Illinois college kids who made an album for a little label in 1999, went their separate ways, and in their absence found that a huge number of people had responded to their music. They duly reunited in 2014. They are often identified as emo, the most confounding of all genre names, given it means everything and nothing, but American Football are not of the eyeliner and dyed-hair variety exemplified by My Chemical Romance, nor the angsty pop-punk variant of Weezer or Jimmy Eat World, nor the shouty hardcore punk evolution of the genre’s founders in the 1980s.

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Manacorda’s thrills and spills at Prom 72

At a Hollywood party in the 1940s, the garrulous socialite Elsa Maxwell spotted Arnold Schoenberg, then teaching music at UCLA, looking miserable. So she pushed him towards the piano with the words: ‘Come on, Professor, give us a tune!’ I couldn’t help thinking of those words on Friday night, when we heard the first Proms performance of a symphony written in 1847 by a professor at the Paris Conservatoire. The Third Symphony of Louise Farrenc is full of well-crafted melodic lines, neatly configured to fit maddeningly predictable textbook chord progressions. It’s delicately orchestrated, but even the feathery flutes of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment couldn’t disguise the professor’s

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Ten times better than Taylor Swift: Romance, by Fontaines D.C., reviewed

Grade: B+ Almost all modern popular music is afflicted by a desperate yearning for importance, and thus – as it translates these days – electronic bombast, which is of course available now at the flick of a switch in the studio. The song is not enough, nowhere near enough. What you need, to elevate your infantile and asinine observations of the world and your sad lack of a good choon, is confected importance. This has been increasingly true since about 1965, but never more so than now. The song is not enough? That’s because it’s not a very good song, kiddo. Write a good song and, you’ll find, marvellously, it

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Don’t look back in anger… it’s just how ticket sales work

We expect Ryanair tickets to cost more on holiday Saturdays than term-time Tuesdays and Uber fares to surge in the rush hour. When bidders drive an Old Master painting into the millions, we praise the skill of the auctioneer. And of course dynamic prices can go down as well as up. These are market mechanisms to match supply and demand, recognising that some buyers will pay more than others for desirable scarce goods. So why the hoo-hah about ticket prices for Oasis’s reunion tour, which doubled as supply dwindled for those towards the end of the online queue? Labour ministers, Brussels bureaucrats and US justice officials have all declared that

Tuesday

Alexandra Coghlan

Saved from certain death at Auschwitz – by playing the cello

Bees and mammoth bones, a shipwreck, horse urine (preferably female), a 17th-century craftsman and a 20th-century genocide. Playing an extended narrative game of Only Connect in her latest book, the musicologist Kate Kennedy takes a bird’s-eye view of four lives and five centuries as she turns her own instrument, the cello, into a prism. Part history, biography and auto-biography, with digressions into anthropology, acoustics and aesthetics and an intriguing cast of characters, Cello sings richly. But you have to be willing to go on the journey. Has publishing reached peak personality-stakes? Whether the subject is swimming or stamp-collecting, non-fiction seems wearyingly determined to rebrand itself as memoir, our author, also

Thursday

James MacMillan

The mystery of teaching composition

Summer study courses for young composers have been popular for a few generations. After the second world war, up-and-coming experimental composers started flocking to places like Darmstadt in Germany for the Internationale Ferienkursen für Neue Musik. Olivier Messiaen taught there in the late 1940s and 1950s, when among his students were Stockhausen and Boulez. Attending the 1980 course as an undergraduate, I benefitted from a lesson with Brian Ferneyhough and conversations with Wolfgang Rihm, who died last week and was described in one obituary as ‘the last great German composer’. In the US, the summer activities at places such as Tanglewood and Aspen have become part of the learning process

Thursday

Ivo Delingpole

Complain all you like but Glastonbury has delivered the goods again

There’s yet to be a Glastonbury line-up that hasn’t provoked a chorus of naysaying. Refrains like ‘looks rubbish. I wouldn’t go’ and ‘not like it used to be’ are de rigueur. Dismissing the headliners as ‘crap this year’ rivals football as the nation’s favourite sport. Yet there’s something to be said for trusting the Glastonbury bookers: check out, say, the lower-tier bands on the 1994 poster and see how many greats they discovered before they were famous – Radiohead, Pulp, Oasis… Nowhere else in the world could hand written signs for toilets induce a Proustian yearning to return Glastonbury’s prestige and legendary ‘vibe’ are now such that the festival is

Thursday

Michael Hann

‘Psychedelic folk that twists and leaps’: Beth Gibbons, at the Barbican, reviewed

A decade ago, a group of people who owned small music venues came to the conclusion that the kinds of places they ran were teetering on the brink of a catastrophic extinction event. And so they formed the Music Venue Trust, which has spent ten years kicking cans and shouting the odds about the need to preserve these places, about how they are the production lines from which the festival headliners of tomorrow come. A brilliant guitarist, a fascinating songwriter, St Vincent cycles sleekly through styles with utter assurance Quite right. Good, small venues are the best place to enjoy both live, loud, raucous music and intimate performances where the