Culture

Culture

The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.

All I want next Christmas is new Christmas songs 

Music

Three months until spring. Four months until the start of the cricket season. And only nine months until the radio starts playing ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ again. Or have you heard enough of Christmas songs by now? Many of us had heard enough of them by Christmas 1988. Every October they return. The first strains of

Could this be the year of C.P.E. Bach?

Music

Looking through the list of composers who celebrate some sort of anniversary in 2014 is a depressing business. I don’t think I have ever seen such an anonymous collection of small-time nobodies, and yet for them to appear on a list at all suggests that they did something of note, and that someone has heard

The best albums of 2013

As the new year beckons, James Mumford counts down the best albums of 2013. Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend, and David Cameron’s favourite – Haim, all make the list. But Coffee House readers – what would be on your top ten? 10: Phoenix, Bankrupt! The revival of the 1980s is the clear theme of my top-ten. The

The splendour of the English carol

Music

The most celebrated Christmas carol, ‘Silent Night’, belongs to Austria. Father Joseph Mohr, the priest at Oberndorf, a small village near Salzburg, wrote it in 1818. Set to music by Franz Xaver Gruber, it was sung on Christmas Eve at the church of St Nicholas: Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht. It is the most celebrated carol

Ed West

Bob Dylan falls foul of Europe’s neo-blasphemy laws

The French authorities are investigating Bob Dylan after some Croats were offended by something he said in an interview with Rolling Stone last year. The singer had said: ‘If you got a slave master or [Ku Klux] Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can

Steerpike

We’ve got to hold on…

Hats off to the Duke of Cambridge for joining Jon Bon Jovi and Taylor Swift on stage at Kensington Palace last night for a sing-along of ‘Livin’ On A Prayer’. The Winter Whites Gala was raising money for Centrepoint homeless charity. It’s the taking part that counts.

Peter Phillips: I saw the other side of John Taverner

Music

When I first met John Tavener in 1977, he was still largely known for his dramatic cantata The Whale, which had been performed at the Proms in 1969. By then both John and his Whale had acquired considerable glitter, partly by having the veteran newscaster Alvar Lidell associated with it, and partly through its eventual

Morrissey can’t even moan properly — here’s a frontman who can

Music

There is much to be said for Schadenfreude. (If it was edible, it would be a meal in a very expensive restaurant, for which someone else was paying.) So it’s probably inadvertently that Morrissey has added to the gaiety of nations this past fortnight with the publication of his autobiography, winningly titled Autobiography. So catastrophically

Steerpike

Political philosophy, Harry-style

Boy-band super-hero Harry Styles proclaimed on Twitter earlier today: ‘All social change comes from the passion of individuals.’ His shrieking fans were enthused by this insight. Some even asked if they could quote him in their exams. How sweet. Mr S is pleased to see little Harry channelling American anthropologist Margaret Mead. She is alleged to have said (although I can’t discover

How to conduct a Tallis motet in a cardboard cathedral

Music

To undertake a concert tour of New Zealand’s cathedrals at the moment is to be constantly reminded of the destructive power of nature and how dogged people can be when the chips are down. The list of buildings that the earthquake of February 2011 destroyed in the centre of Christ-church includes the Anglican cathedral, which,

‘I was an arrogant 18-year-old’: Daniel Harding on growing up

Music

‘Have a look at this,’ says Daniel Harding, goggle-eyed, between mouthfuls of salmon. The pictures on his smartphone show Claudio Abbado, one of his mentors, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Schumann’s Scenes from Faust, a work that gets closer to Harding’s musical personality than any other, which he has just recorded with the Bavarian Radio

Damian Thompson

Damian Thompson: I may be in danger of becoming an opera queen

Music

It’s taken 40 years, but I’ve finally developed a taste for the one type of classical music that I couldn’t stand. And last week I broke the news to the man responsible: Roger Hewland, owner of Gramex, the world’s finest second-hand classical CD and record shop, just behind Waterloo Station. ‘Roger, I’ve suddenly got into

The Morrissey myth

Features

Drinking in Corbières, a dingy basement bar just off St Ann’s Square, 30 years ago, you could bump into any number of groovy young Mancunians clustered round the jukebox, talking about the bands they were going to form. One night, as the jukey played ‘The Cutter’ by Echo & the Bunnymen, all evening long it

Rod Liddle

Welcome to the Randy Newman Hate Club

There was a line in Randy Newman’s very funny song ‘Short People’  that I couldn’t quite work out, so I looked up the lyrics online. There were some observations about the song posted below the lyrics – I thought I’d share a selection with you.  ‘This song is just really f****d up… freedom of speech

Talk Talk bears repetition

Music

First impressions always count, and they are almost always wrong. This is particularly pertinent if you review albums for a living, as I used to years ago. You would listen once, maybe twice, possibly three times if you were really being good, and then form an opinion, which was as much based on your preconceptions

Does London really need another concert hall?

Music

Does London need another concert hall? Or, to put it more precisely, does London need another chamber music hall? The recent opening of Milton Court in the Barbican begs this question: a pertinent one since we already hold the world record for full-time concert spaces of fewer than a thousand seats, and must come equal

Damian Thompson

Music at Mass is theological warfare by other means

Music

How many battles have been fought over sacred music throughout history? The noise you make when you worship is a big deal: those who control it can shape everything from clerical hierarchy to intimate spirituality. And there are patterns. Deep suspicion of music is the mark of the puritan. Fundamentalist Sunni Muslims teach that all

Musicians are roasting at the Proms; freezing at the Bachathon

Music

Gossip that an orchestral player fainted while performing in the Albert Hall during the recent heatwave points to a strange lacuna in the policing of concert conditions. The unions who like to stipulate how professional musicians are treated — Equity and the MU — have long made a big song and dance about minimum temperatures

Happy 80th birthday, Dame Janet Baker

Music

Raise your glass on 21 August to wish a happy 80th birthday to one of the greatest singers and singing actresses this or any other country has produced — Dame Janet Baker, the mezzo-soprano from Yorkshire, who never went to a music college and won the hearts of her audiences in a career spanning 35