Music

Bernard Herrmann died 50 years ago this month. He only just lived long enough to complete the suite of instrumental jazz that’s now regarded as not only his finest work across many decades as a movie composer, but one of the greatest celluloid soundtracks of all time. There are very few movies which you can honestly state simply wouldn’t have got out of the traps were it not for the soundtrack. Taxi Driver is one of them. There’s more than enough available film critic geekery about Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro’s finest hour to plough through already. But the curious afterlife of the Taxi Driver soundtrack was something I had no idea about until a recent Spotify sleuthing session. You’ve heard the main siren call theme of the movie.

I’m backstage with classical crossover singer Karl Loxley and his pianist Tim Abel at Stratford-Upon-Avon’s Rother Street Arts House. The sound and lighting team are setting up in the empty theatre for what will be one of the final shows in Loxley’s ‘Songs of Christmas’ tour. Since 2015, when Loxley sung Puccini’s ‘Nessun Dorma’ on the TV talent show The Voice, he’s been on a mission to make classical music cool. I’m here to see exactly what that involves – and if he’s succeeding.  Loxley is charming, expansive and – at least when I interview him, a couple of hours before showtime – relaxed. Appearing on The Voice, he tells me, was ‘a very nerve-wracking experience. I don’t think I would have the nerve to do it now.

Here is a great festive pub quiz question for you. Which film was the song ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ written for? It’s likely, particularly if you’re below a certain age, that your first reaction will be surprise that it was written for a film in the first place. That’s a reflection not so much of the failure of the film in question – Meet Me in St Louis, which was the second highest-grossing film of 1944 – but of the enduring popularity of the song itself. In 2023, it was the 11th most played holiday song, according to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. But just as the song has transcended the film, it has become unmoored from its original meaning.

Like Ebenezer Scrooge, we are all visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past. At this time of year, people and events that have gone before feel closer at hand – both the personal and the historical. One of the main ways we experience this is through our tradition of Christmas carols. A recent YouGov survey showed that 14 per cent of Britons usually attend a carol service. Not as high as one would hope, but attendance rates are rising: in 2023, Church of England Christmas services alone saw a 20 per cent leap in attendance. I sense 2025 is already continuing the trend. Yet many churches will be pointlessly squandering the opportunity by continuing a fad which both turns off newcomers and lets down regulars: modernised Christmas carols.

Like most freelance writers, I have a notepad full of jottings which come under the loose category of ‘Ideas I Probably Won’t Get Round To Doing As I Doubt Anyone Will Be Interested, They’re A Bit Rubbish Anyway And It Probably Wouldn’t Pay Much’. Around halfway down this list is a book provisionally entitled A Hard Day’s Fight, in which I espouse my opinions on a plethora of Beatles-related debates, and add a few new ones of my own.

Queen’s ascendency began at around the same time as the first residents were moving their Axminster carpets and Party Sevens into Tower Hamlets’ Robin Hood Gardens, the Smithson-designed Brutalist estate that would go on to become a typical example of how post-war ‘streets in the sky’ concepts were almost always doomed to fail. Five decades on, just one small section of Robin Hood Gardens has survived for posterity. It’s been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum to, presumably, warn future generations of what can happen to a neighbourhood when you combine too much cheap concrete with not enough public consultation. Thanks to Freddie Mercury and co., one solitary example of the very worst excesses of overblown 1970s musical bad ideas persists, too.