Culture

Tony Hall made some terrible music announcements yesterday. They come hot on the heels of some terrible arts announcements he made a few months ago. Among the most lousy is the proposal to set up a music awards ceremony – because we don’t have enough of those. The suggestion is that the ceremony would become

It’s a long time, a very, very long time, since I bought a Coldplay album. Has any band of the past 20 years been so consistently irritating? Oasis were aggressively annoying, which isn’t the same thing. I quite liked the first Coldplay album, particularly ‘Trouble’, and A Rush of Blood to the Head was a

To be honest I’m not certain that Michael Nyman, The Spectator‘s music critic in the late 60s, was one of the performers on this infamous (and in my opinion greatest) recording of Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. But what is certain is that Nyman (alongside Brian Eno and Gavin Bryars) did become an enthusiastic member

When I was first learning about classical music, 50 years ago, the scene was more streamlined than it is now. Beethoven was king, with Brahms and Mozart next in line, and Haydn slowly establishing himself. Mahler was the new kid on the block; Bruckner was largely unknown and mistrusted. If one wanted the full symphony

If I live as long as my father, I’ll be checking out on 9 December 2017. Since every man in my family drops dead of a heart attack at a ridiculously young age, it’s not inconceivable. I mean, obviously the chances of me dying on precisely that day are tiny, but it’s my ballpark figure.

‘Strip him of his knighthood!’ Or life peerage, or CBE, OBE — or whatever. The cry goes up with a kind of automaticity these days, and with increasing shrillness. As I write, elements in Fleet Street are hyperventilating about Gary Barlow’s OBE. Barlow and two other members of the band Take That are reported to have

Pop humpty-dumpty Michael Jackson has a new album out today. If that statement seems odd, you don’t know the half of it; five years after his death, Jackson is only on album number two. Compared to a trooper like Tupac – who still manages a couple of albums per year, despite having copped it in

I enjoyed Fraser’s preview of the Eurovision Song Contest; I had not known that he was such a fan. You work with someone for years, oblivious to their dark secrets, their strange peccadilloes. It was typically brave of him to come out, in public. I watched the thing, again. I thought the entry from The

Seven million of us will be tuning in at 8pm tomorrow night for the Eurovision final, rising to nine million when the UK number is played. But what do we expect to see, and do we think it’s rigged? The Spectator’s Culture House Daily blog, in conjunction with YouGov, is able to give you an

The film critic Anne Billson wrote a typically pugnacious piece recently about the phrase ‘guilty pleasures’, which has spread like Japanese knotweed beyond its origins in pop music and taken root throughout popular culture. In film a guilty pleasure would be something like Four Weddings and a Funeral, which we’re not ‘supposed’ to like because

There are those to whom the word ‘volare’ means nothing. But for  us Eurovision enthusiasts, it’s all starting with the opening ceremony tonight. Two semi-finals this week, then the big one on Saturday. It’s transmitting live in China, New Zealand and Canada this year – making Eurovision the most-watched non-sporting television event on the planet.

To curate a festival these days is to put oneself in the firing line. There is every chance that all one will earn is the charge of stirring up apathy. It is a risk; and there will be no knowing how it has gone until it is much too late to withdraw gracefully. In the

It’s twenty years since the height of Britpop, but does anyone still care about it? YouGov has carried out some polling on the subject today. Although 35 per cent stated that they like or really like Britpop (compared to 20 per cent who dislike/really dislike), 44 per cent replied ‘don’t know’. There’s also a lot of

It is coming to something when relatively young pop stars die not of drugs or misadventure but, essentially, of old age and decay. Frankie Knuckles, the house DJ and producer, breathed his last recently at the age of just 59, and several ageing ex-clubbers of my acquaintance told me that it was the end of

When Chicago DJ Frankie Knuckles died last week, a novelty number by a Brylcreemed Aussie pop punk group had just reached number one. It displaced Duke Dumont & Jax Jones’s I Got U and ended a three week-run of house singles at the top of the charts. I suspect the following statement may piss off

Has anything ever been more luvvie than this?

W.H.Auden once wrote: ‘Real artists are not nice people. All their best feelings go into their work and life has the residue’ — which puts those who aspire to be artists in a bit of a quandary. Is it a measure of one’s success as a ‘real artist’ that one is not a nice person?

So Lebedev’s London Live has launched. And I don’t know about you but I’m hooked. I’d totally forgotten what really bad TV looked like. It’s as if the chief execs at Channel 5 got together with Alan Partridge for a 21st-century rebrand. London’s new TV channel did get one nice review from the, oh, Lebedev-owned

‘The truth is,’ says Gordon Back, lowering his voice, ‘that if the violin finalists from the BBC Young Musician of the Year were to enter the Menuhin Competition, they wouldn’t make it to the first round.’ Not through the first round, note, but to the first round: they wouldn’t be good enough to compete. Back

George Michael and Kylie Minogue have albums out this week. And while they might both be distinctly second-division these days, they’re both still rather remarkable. George Michael got famous for not being Andrew Ridgeley, and has since redefined the status of adult-oriented pop. He has also written the only Christmas song in history worth playing

Earworm: what a wonderful word. It describes, as nothing else quite can, the effect a really invasive melody can have on your consciousness. Hear the song once and you will hear it again and again, on a loop in your brain. At the pub quiz the other night, the answer to a question was Brotherhood

listen to ‘Fraser Nelson on Britain’s 2014 Eurovision entry’ on Audioboo

One of the unlooked-for side effects of the financial crisis has been what might be called the desocialising of music funding. Whereas once many arts organisations could expect to survive solely on public money, just recently there has been an almost unseemly rush to tap private sources of cash. The time lag between the original