Music

Tuesday

Cressida Bonas

What I learnt from Ludovico Einaudi

Last week I went to The Hammersmith Apollo to see Ludovico Einaudi perform his new album Underwater. I hadn’t been to a concert since before the pandemic and had forgotten the thrill of live music. Recordings can never match the sensual and social experience of live performance. When listened to collectively,  music unmasks the soul – solitary emotions are suddenly shared – and it connects us to something greater than ourselves. Music is the medium I go to for comfort when life is not quite making sense Underwater is Einaudi’s first solo piano album in two decades, becoming the fastest streamed classical music album in history. High minded critics turn their noses up, calling his

Monday

Sam Leith

Bono’s ‘poem’ was an insult to the craft of verse

Poet’, said Robert Frost, ‘is a praise-word’. So it is. That explains in part the unabashed delight with which Colm Tóibín, speaking in our current Book Club podcast, talks about publishing his fine first poetry collection Vinegar Hill – decades of international acclaim as a novelist notwithstanding. Poetry is a high-status artform, perhaps the highest. Yet unlike most other artforms, very many people seem to think of it as something that anyone can do. You wouldn’t expect to be able to write a symphony, or build a suspension bridge, or win Wimbledon, without many years of apprenticeship and intimate attention to the work of those who have excelled in those

Thursday

James Delingpole

Enthralling and unusual – even if you don’t care about Kanye: Netflix’s Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy reviewed

The most disappointing pop performance I’ve ever seen – and in the course of my 15-odd years as a music critic I saw an awful lot – was Kanye West at Glastonbury in 2015. Perhaps he was making some kind of ironic statement on the nature of celebrity and fan expectation: blinding lights all focused on himself; no attempts to engage with the crowd; relentless, mechanical rapping but with most of the amusing samples and catchy hooks removed, the better to punish us all by ordeal with loud, righteous verbiage. But I still admire this irritating genius hugely because besides making often very addictive albums he refuses to play the

Thursday

Toby Young

When does ‘middle age’ end and ‘old age’ begin?

I was a bit irritated by all the millennials saying the Superbowl half-time show made them feel old. The 15-minute musical extravaganza at Sunday’s game was a tribute to the golden age of hip hop and featured Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige, Eminem and Dr Dre. The reason it made so many people in their thirties and early forties feel a bit long in the tooth is that all artists are now candidates for the Hall of Fame. Dr Dre is 56 and Snoop Dogg turned 50 last year. Seeing their idols thickening around the waist and sprouting grey hairs was a mementomori for people who came of

Michael Tanner

Playing until her fingers bled: the dedication of the pianist Maria Yudina

The 20th century was an amazing time for Russian pianists, and the worse things got, politically and militarily, the more great pianists thrived, despite the extreme danger and discomfort in which they lived and in which some of them died. If we think immediately of Richter, the greatest of them all, and Gilels, there are at least 20 more that we could add without exaggeration. One of the most important was without question Maria Yudina, born in 1899, who astonishingly survived until 1970. She was not just a sovereign artist but an eccentric of the kind and degree that only Russia seems able and willing to supply. Reading a biography

Thursday

Bill Wyman

The moment I fell in love with music

I’ve lived in Chelsea for the past 35 years. Since 2002, I’ve photographed everything I find interesting here — churches, streets, door knockers and pub signs, plus two old Chelsea pensioners chatting on a bench with their medal ribbons and rank pinned to their scarlet coats. I’ve recently finished my project and added these 1,800 photographs to the historical research I’ve done about Chelsea, which is now sitting safely on my bookshelf. My love of photography comes from my Uncle Jack. When he returned home at the war’s end, he had a Leica camera, which he got by trading his cigarette rations with an Italian civilian. He gave me his

Jools Holland

What musicians like me learned from the pandemic

My mother died earlier this year aged 85. She left me her old pianola. These were popular in the 1920s and 1930s before people had records and hi-fis. You would put the rolls on the pianolas and they were cut by the great pianists of the day, from the popular players like Charlie Kunz, as well as the star jazz and rhythm pianists like Fats Waller or Jelly Roll Morton, and also the great concert pianists like Rubinstein. You would simply put the piano roll on and then pedal away. The old war-damaged pianola had been left to her by her mother — and I learnt in my grandmother’s front

Tuesday

John Rutter

Our Christmas music is the envy of Americans

For a working musician like me – I compose and conduct – the run-up to Christmas is one of the busiest times of the year. I generally find myself writing some last-minute carols, then come the garage-sandwich weeks: endless travel to far-flung rehearsals in freezing churches and halls in preparation for the annual round of concerts and carol services where I’ve been invited to guest-conduct and perhaps to deliver a Christmas reading. It’s exhausting but inspiring. Two years ago I was due to join the Bath Camerata choir for a recital. Looking around at the jolly gathering of grannies, vicars, bushy-bearded real ale drinkers and earnest-looking students I started to

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Did the music industry enable R. Kelly?

As Harvey Weinstein was to film, so Robert ‘R.’ Kelly has been to the music industry. An energetic and profligate figure who enjoyed enormous commercial and artistic success in his heyday, Kelly’s downfall, with his convictions on nine charges of sex trafficking and racketeering, is now total. It looks likely he will be given a life sentence for his crimes, and few, other than his most devoted admirers, will be mourning his entry into the penal system.  Yet Kelly’s fate, while richly deserved, is not the end of the story. Instead, questions have to be asked of those who were around him while he behaved egregiously behind the scenes. It transpired,

Thursday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

A lockdown masterpiece and the Jessica Rabbit of concertos: contemporary classical roundup

So it finally happened: I experienced my first vocal setting of the word ‘Covid’. An encounter that was, inevitably, more harrowing than when I caught the virus itself. ‘Coviiiiiiid!’ yowled the singer, while the orchestra emitted a boom, crack, snap, rumble rumble, shriek, bang, dissonance dissonance. Rice Crispies fans, eat your heart out. It was part of Exiles, a 30-minute new commission by Julian Anderson for the opening concert of the LSO season. And though this work for soprano, chorus and orchestra did have its touching moments, and attractively translucent and lustrous moments, all terrifically anal and French (music that held out its pinkie), it had the great misfortune to

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The path to re-enchantment

Most social occasions now seem to kick off with a wasted hour or two. The time is spent discussing Covid: who’s had it and who hasn’t, who’s had the most nightmarish encounter with a mask fanatic and who the worst lockdown. After that there can be a second course, discussing things like international travel. Remember when we used to be able to book a ticket, put up with the indignities of the budget airlines but still arrive in any place we wanted? Now everybody has stories of friends and relatives they haven’t seen, places they can’t go, and experiences they’ve had to miss. The world has become a little smaller.

Andy Miller

A true bohemian: the story of Nico’s rise and fall

It is well established that artists are not always the nicest people. On the surface, the life of the model, actress and singer Christa Päffgen, aka Nico, would appear to bear this out. Being Nico didn’t mean being nice. The story of Nico’s rise and fall usually goes like this. She grew up in the rubble of post-war Berlin, emerging from adolescence as both stunningly beautiful and remorselessly ambitious. By the time she was 28 she had appeared on the cover of Vogue, starred in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and sung with the Velvet Underground; she counted Alain Delon, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison among her numerous conquests. She went

Friday

Julie Burchill

The X Factor made all the right people cross

On hearing that the X Factor is no more after our 17 years together, I reflected on what a journey it had been, how I’d given it 110 per cent and that I would never hear those four huge ‘yeses’ again. Bravely holding back the tears, I couldn’t help but agree with its founder Simon Cowell that the show had ‘become slightly stale’ – slightly! I’ve seen twice-used tea-bags with more sheer molten stage presence than some of the finalists who made it through in the latter seasons before it was taken off for a ‘rest’ in 2018. How different it was at the beginning! After a slow start attempting

Thursday

Jenny Colgan

What is the secret of Duran Duran’s durability?

In my second year at secondary school we were all deeply envious of a girl named Judi Taylor because, obviously, her name was only three letters away from John Taylor, the world’s most beautiful man, which meant she probably had the best chance of marrying him. I was thinking about this the other day just after I’d checked to find out if there were any VIP tickets left to see Duran Duran next year in Hyde Park (there aren’t), when one of my daughter’s friends jumped in the car.‘Hi, ‘she said. ‘I’m Charlotte Derulo. Well, I will be one day.’ Never underestimate the eternal passion of a tween girl. As

Thursday

Michael Hann

Wispy, gauzy beauty: This Is The Kit, Barbican, reviewed

On the way home from This Is The Kit’s show at a socially distanced Barbican, I listened to Avalon by Roxy Music, which had been brought to mind by the previous 90 minutes or so of music. It’s perhaps worth saying that This Is The Kit — the nom de chanson of Kate Stables, backed by a three-piece band and three horn players — have absolutely nothing in common with Avalon by Roxy Music, visually or musically. Stables, hair piled on top of her head, and dressed for comfort, not speed, did not look as though she intended to boost the Colombian export trade after the show; perhaps, instead, she

Daisy Dunn

The joy of Radio 4 Extra

The best thing on the radio last week was, without question, Kind Hearts and Coronets. You may have missed it because it was on Radio 4 Extra, the poor, forgotten relation of the BBC’s main channels, which many regard as merely a Radio 4+1 for yesterday’s replays, when it is in fact home to the drama and comedy archive. Like the BBC4 TV channel, which is sadly ceasing commissioning, it hosts the sort of intelligent programmes people really enjoy, to the consternation of those who dismiss them as ‘old’. Fittingly, for Radio 4 Extra, Kind Hearts is all about a poor, forgotten relation who strives to reclaim his place within

Thursday

Graeme Thomson

The foghorn’s haunting hoot is a sad loss

Halfway through what must count as one of the more esoteric quests, Jennifer Lucy Allan finds herself on a hill near Birkenhead, in a cottage which houses the archive of the Association of Lighthouse Keepers. In a small bedroom long since surrendered to the past, she is handed a homemade CD of 90 foghorn recordings of ‘uncertain provenance’. Let’s call them Bootleg Blasts. She sits on the end of the single bed, craning her neck, ‘listening for more than what is there, listening for answers, listening for meaning’. Allan is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster with a passion for experimental music: I have had a long affair with ‘weird’

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: The beauty of brick

The Union in peril Sir: Fraser Nelson (‘The great pretender’, 15 May) writes that it has never been easier to make a bold positive case for the Union. He suggests the UK government starts to fight. Perhaps the starting point could be the benefits which flowed from 1707 — joint citizenship, a currency union, a customs union and wealth transfer — both individual and national (the Barnett dividend speaks for itself). Without the Union these would not have happened. Without the Union there is no guarantee any of these will continue. It is not Project Fear to point that out. The sooner Scots begin to understand that retaining UK citizenship,

Wednesday

Michael Hann

‘I’m not interested in moral purity’: St Vincent interviewed

St Vincent — Annie Clark, a 38-year-old singer-guitarist of prodigious gifts — spends a lot of time confounding people. She confounds them with stage shows that are less gig than theatre, ostentatiously choreographed and fabulously provocative (though not in any crude sense). She confounds them with an image that morphs from album to album (for her sixth, Daddy’s Home, she has adopted the dissolute Cassavetes-heroine look). She confounds them by, in a puritan age, placing sex squarely within her work, though usually in a plausibly deniable way (the title Daddy’s Home refers to her father’s release in 2019 from prison after serving nine years for his part in a stock-manipulation

Thursday

Daisy Dunn

Seldom less than gripping: Banged Up podcast reviewed

Prison-based podcast Banged Up, now in its second series, is far more uplifting — and less soapy — than its name suggests. It begins with the tacit assumption that, if you haven’t personally been incarcerated, you probably have at least a dozen questions you’d want to ask someone who had. Is the food really awful? How likely are you to be beaten up? Is there a lending library? (I’d start with the last.) Banged Up has the answers to plenty more besides. The podcast is hosted by a prison lawyer named Claire Salama and two ex-inmates, a former footballer, Mike Boateng, known as ‘Boats’, and university-educated Rob Morrison, who describes