Music

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Yoga is slow-motion pole-dancing for grannies

It’s hard work being rich. I gave up trying years ago. You must waste money on everything, even the basics, to advertise your status as a big spender. Food and drink are easy. You buy organic veg from a dim-witted aristocrat at a farmers’ market. And you choose sparkling water filtered through the porous flanks of a Malaysian volcano. A tougher challenge is oxygen. The rich need top quality air as well. But how do you let people know that your breaths are costlier and more refined than the inhalations of the mob? Well, yoga. Yoga turns breathing into a five-star indulgence. You hire a servant (known as a ‘guru’

Monday

Rebecca Reid

Has Taylor Swift broken music’s last taboo?

As a woman in my early thirties, it is my God-given right – arguably my duty – to have an opinion when Taylor Swift releases an album. And it’s a role that I’ve always performed without compunction. But on this occasion – the release of album 12, The Life of a Showgirl, my ability to get into the weeds (does ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ represent close text analysis of Shakespeare?) was hampered by my shock at one particularly audacious lyric.  Previous albums have had the the odd raunchy moment. So when, on this new album, she sang ‘His love was the key that opened my thighs’ in a song titled ‘Wood’,

Thursday

Peter Hoskin

The vanished glamour of New York nightlife

Mark Ronson has one of the finest heads of hair in all showbusiness. The music producer’s coiffure is a dark, whipped and quiffed thing that makes it look as though he naturally belongs on a Vespa in Capri, being ogled by the belle ragazze as he scoots on by. As a cultural object, it certainly surpasses the Oscar he won for the songs in that Lady Gaga remake of A Star is Born; it probably equals his Barbie soundtrack; and maybe even approaches the hits he made with and for Amy Winehouse. But it wasn’t always like that. Back in the 1990s, Ronson’s hair was a standard-issue crop, while he

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Nutrition is a bogus creed

Time to think about my diet. A test kit arrives from the NHS screening team who want to inspect a stool sample to see if a hostile cluster of cells is growing in my guts. What I eat horrifies everyone – except me. I live on Bran Flakes and Frosties straight from the box, and I enjoy chocolate bars or digestive biscuits coated with redcurrant jam (Lidl, 51p). Each year I spend about £600 on food – mostly processed pap full of fructose and additives. ‘Chemical rubbish,’ my mother called it. I avoid restaurants because I can do better at home. I like boiled rice or noodles smothered with sauces

Stephen Hough

What’s wrong with elitism?

There was a time when the serious business of concert-giving closed down for the summer. Artists were expected to take time off – to rest, to fish, to learn repertoire. But now many of the most important musical events happen during the resting, fishing months, not least the BBC Proms. This year I was determined that vacation should mean just that, as I swapped the stage for the stalls, from Janacek’s Katya Kabanova at Glyndebourne to Top Hat at Chichester to Good Night, Oscar at the Barbican. It was an idyllic break, but it’s back to work. My new season began in New York, a second home since 1981 when

Thursday

Angus Colwell

Kate Moss’s new Bowie podcast is far too safe 

In January, it will be ten years since David Bowie died. I remember Bowie songs playing out of every London orifice that day. People who only knew ‘Life on Mars’ went down to the Brixton mural and cried. And then, for a whole year afterwards, the BBC’s arts coverage consisted entirely of salt-and-pepper fatties sitting in studios, in the mandatory uniform of T-shirt and blazer, all of them finding different ways to wheeze: ‘Day-vid Bow-ie chay-nged everyfing.’ As we approach the anniversary, the BBC is having another go – except this time with Kate Moss. ‘This is David Bowie Changeling’, Moss purrs, inaugurating a nine-parter on BBC Sounds and Radio

Thursday

Catriona Olding

A tale of two Martins

Provence The canicule broke yesterday, heralding the end of high summer. Wild figs and mulberries litter the path, filling the air with their scent which, combined with lavender, rosemary and thyme, is the smell of Provence. Even though we’ve had more rain than previous years and fewer weeks of extreme heat, we’re relieved – especially those of us with no pool in which to cool off. When the temperature rises above 35°C, actions become clumsy and the mind dulls. Even here in the relative chill of the cave, with the shutters and windows closed, it can be insufferable. Small chores become mammoth tasks, work piles up and the fridge sits

Thursday

Ivo Delingpole

In defence of Notting Hill Carnival

This isn’t going to be a piece celebrating the rich cultural tapestry of London’s Afro-Caribbean community, sombrely expressing the importance of preserving its heritage and history. I just like going to Carnival. I see it as an opportunity to make the most of the last dregs of the summer. I’ll meet my friends, dance to a grizzled Rasta’s tunes with a Magnum or two (a syrupy, 16.5 per cent alcohol, Jamaican tonic wine), watch the steel drums and befeathered dancers, before decamping with a box of jerk chicken and fried plantain. There’s no £499 VIP Platinum wristband you can buy to have the premium Carnie experience I spent the first

Thursday

Richard Bratby

How the railways shaped modern culture

Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol’ Blue Eyes pretending to be a train. It’s not that he’s a railway enthusiast (though Sinatra, like many musicians, was an enthusiastic collector of model trains). No, it’s written into the words and music of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s song ‘Blues in the Night’: ‘Now the rain’s a-fallin’, hear the train a-callin’ “whoo-ee”.’ And so Sinatra sings it, just as Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Louis Armstrong sang it. It’s an American classic, defined by the sounds that permeate the soul of American popular music: the sounds of the railway. Two hundred years

Catriona Olding

Medics make the worst patients

Provence Apart from three Covid years, the German rock cover band Five and the Red One (named, so they say, because one of them has a ‘fire mark’) have played a free concert on the Cours here in the village every summer since 2008. I first saw them in 2009 when my three daughters were teenagers. The four of us, along with our friends Monica and André, who were then in their mid-sixties, stood together near the front jumping up and down and singing along. Some of the wee ones who sat on their fathers’ shoulders behind us might have children of their own by now. Last year a rowdy

Friday

Alec Marsh

Forget Oasis – we should celebrate Pulp’s legacy

It begins with an electric swish sound that makes you feel like you are falling backwards, followed by an arresting synthesiser da-da-dum drumbeat. Then we get the voice, in double-time: ‘She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge. She studied sculpture at St Martin’s College…’ With those words, singer Jarvis Cocker and his fellow members of Pulp caught the attention of a nation. And chances are, three decades on from the release of ‘Common People’, this musical intro will still send a tingle down your spine, particularly if you’re aged anywhere between 40 and 70. Forget the record-marketing buzz of ‘Blur vs Oasis’ (always less entertaining than the

Tuesday

Michael Henderson

The BBC’s mistreatment of the Proms

The Proms – the BBC Proms, to stick a handle on its jug – remains a good deed in a naughty world. Eight weeks of orchestral music, mainly, performed nightly at the Royal Albert Hall by artists from every continent, for as little as £8 if you are prepared to stand. One of those artists, the Georgian fiddler Lisa Batiashvili, supplied the highlight of this year’s ‘first night’ with a mighty performance of the Sibelius concerto. The concert ended with Sancta Civitas, a rarely heard choral work by Ralph Vaughan Williams, performed with love by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its principal conductor, Sakari Oramo. Musically, it was a good

Saturday

John Sturgis

Now it’s getting late: on Neil Young, ageing and fatherhood

Neil Young once saved my life. Or at least, that’s how I remember it.  This was at an outdoor show in Finsbury Park in July 1993. I had pushed and squeezed my way almost to the front of a large crowd shortly after being passed something of dubious provenance to smoke. One moment everything was perfect: he was playing that romantic late career hit, ‘Harvest Moon’, the sun was setting, the moon, conveniently, rising, and I was swaying along, rapturous. But then, suddenly – bang… I fainted.  This is the only time in my 45-year gig-going career that this has happened. But I was gone. I was briefly unconscious, then

Thursday

Bijan Omrani

Pope Idol: Leo’s singing should be celebrated

‘But will anyone be interested?’ the vicar asked cautiously. It was a fair response to my latest madcap scheme. One of the vicar’s 12 churches, St Candida and Holy Cross at Whitchurch Canonicorum in Dorset, hosts one of the country’s only three remaining pre-Reformation saints’ shrines with the relics of the saint still present. In this case, the shrine is to St Wite, a ninth-century virgin princess martyred by the Vikings. Her saint’s day was coming up. Could we, I asked, recreate a pre-Reformation church service in honour of it? The vicar, the Revd Virginia Luckett, who is sometimes heard on Radio 4, agreed to my proposal – but with

Wednesday

Flora Watkins

What was so great about the 1990s?

‘They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man… the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over,’ laments Danny the Dealer of the 1960s at the end of Withnail and I. These days, given the apparently insatiable appetite for all things 1990s, you could be forgiven for assuming that they’ve pinched that title. Nineties fashion and music are back: Pulp have just released their first album in 24 years, while Oasis are reforming for a series of mega gigs. There’s even been a Labour landslide. The Face magazine, which launched the career of the ultimate 1990s supermodel, Kate Moss, is currently pulling in the crowds with its Culture Shift exhibition

Monday

Patrick West

Why we need Virgin Megastores

They were a stalwart of Britain’s towns and cities from the 1970s until their disappearance in 2007 – and now Virgin is set to bring its Megastores back to the high street. According to the Times, the Virgin Group has in mind at least one central London site as a possible location for a new Megastore. Its chief executive, Josh Bayliss, said he wants to return the ‘human connection’ to the Virgin brand. Quite right. We should applaud this news, not just on nostalgic grounds – but for financial, aesthetic and communitarian ones too. Like so many once-familiar high street names, Virgin Megastores may have succumbed to supermarket competition and the online shopping revolution, but that

Sunday

Christa D’Souza

How I made Tyler, the Creator uncool

I tried getting my husband to go with me, but wild horses wouldn’t have dragged him so I forced a friend’s son to come instead. I’m talking about going to see Tyler, The Creator at the O2. That’s Tyler, The Creator, the magnificent hip hop artist who was banned from the UK in 2015 by then Home Secretary Theresa May on the grounds of supporting homophobia and acts of terrorism.  What, you’ve never heard of him? Well, that’s clearly because you are not as down with the kids as me. I may be a middle-class boomer from Chiswick but I’m also a raging hip hop fan and I know my

Thursday

James MacMillan

How silence makes music

‘What!? But they won’t let you in!’ and ‘What!? But they’ll detain you at the border!’ and ‘What!? But they’re all nuts over there!’ were just some of the responses from friends and colleagues at my announcement that I was heading to the US for three and a half weeks’ work. But my visa was valid and accepted at passport control, I wasn’t thrown in jail, and the people whom I met and worked with were perfectly sane, perfect hosts and a perfect delight. First up was the Minnesota Orchestra, where I conducted two concerts of my own music and more well-known works by Rachmaninov and Rimsky-Korsakov. Also on the

Thursday

Ian Thomson

The mystical masterpiece from Stalag VIII-A

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer steeped in the solitude and ecstasy of Catholic mysticism: everything he wrote was dedicated to the greater glory of God. He was in thrall to the liturgical works of Stravinsky, but also to the percussive cling-clang of Javanese gamelan music and other eastern sonorities. His thirst for ‘un-French’ music sometimes put him at loggerheads with the Paris old guard who found him as fandangled and foreign as a pagoda. His ability to create new possibilities in sound was of course what made him modern. Messiaen was scarcely 20 when he wrote his hauntingly strange Préludes for piano in 1929 and the no less mysterious

John Rutter

The world reveres British music

I have just returned from the lovely Italian city of Rimini, where 300 local singers had gathered for a weekend of choral music under my direction, culminating in a concert in the grand Teatro. As they sang amid the chandeliers, gilded cherubs and plush velvet, I reflected that in all the recent discussion about tariffs, no one has yet highlighted the importance of music as a British export. As a representative of our choral tradition, I was treated with something like the reverence that would be accorded to a Brazilian footballer or a Russian chess player. My host, the regional choral supremo, knew all about our British choirs. His CD