Music
Anthem for end times
It was so dark, my friend noted, you could have had sex or done a Hitler salute. No stage lights,…
Child’s play
‘Germany’s greatest artistic asset, its music, is in danger,’ warned The Spectator in June 1937. Reporting from the leading new-music…
A gigantic field of feeling
I was never into the blues that much. I listened to a bit of Roy Buchanan and Rory Gallagher but…
Oh dear, Abba’s new album is a bit of a dog: Voyage reviewed
Time has been very kind to Abba. No one back in the 1970s thought of them as geniuses. But they've even lost the talent for writing memorable tunes
‘My voice is a curse’
Steve Morris talks to Gary Numan about luck, plane-spotting and Asperger’s
It’s cool to spool
May the gods of Hiss and Compression bless Lou Ottens. As head of new product development at Phillips, the Dutch…
Sentimentality served junkie-style
The thing to remember about Chet Baker, an old acquaintance says of the errant jazz musician in Deep In A…
‘I like upsetting people’
Michael Hann talks to the cult rock star Steven Wilson about why it’s harder to write a pop song than prog
‘We knew there was greatness in these songs’
Graeme Thomson talks to Steve Diggle, front man of Buzzcocks, about orgasms, boredom and Pete Shelley
Yes man
Rod Liddle talks to Rick Wakeman about lockdown, the Sex Pistols, and how you can’t have opinions any more
Whistling past the graveyard
Dr John called James Booker ‘the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced’. Booker died…
All together now
It’s the breath I miss most. The moment when a shuffling group of men and women in scruffy concert blacks…
Class acts
The Last Night of the Proms came and went, and it was pretty much as anyone might have predicted, if…
Going solo
Our college choirmaster had a trick that he liked to deploy when he sensed that we were phoning it in.…
Barely touching the void
The Royal Albert Hall, as Douglas Adams never wrote, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely,…
Parallel universe
There wasn’t going to be a Lucerne Festival this year. The annual month-long squillion-dollar international beano got cancelled, along with…
Method in the madness
First there were the home recitals: musicians playing solo Bach in front of their bookshelves, wonkily captured on iPhones. Next…
The keys to Beethoven
If you want to understand Beethoven, listen to his piano sonatas. Without them, you’ll never grasp how the same man…
Scouse style
Richard Bratby on Britain’s oldest and ballsiest orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, which has taken on everyone from gang leaders to Derek Hatton
The day the music died
Britain’s choirs are facing oblivion. Yet they’re also terrified of returning. One story explains why. Picture this innocent choral-society scene…
It’ll end in tears
It was the fourth time, or maybe the fifth, that I found myself reaching for the tissues that I began…
Live and let die
Remember when 2020 was going to be Beethoven year? There were going to be cycles and festivals, recordings and reappraisals;…
From joy to dissolution
At the start of Elgar’s Second Symphony the full orchestra hovers, poised. It pulls back; and then, like a dam…
Surfer’s paradise
The full addictive potential of classical YouTube needs to be experienced to be understood. And let’s be honest, there are…
The best recordings of Bruckner’s Eighth
I am daunted. Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony is a work that I regard with love, awe and even anxiety. I always…
