Music

Yesterday, I popped into Rough Trade West record store to purchase the new Pink Floyd album. That isn’t something I expected to say in my lifetime, but 20 years after their 14th album The Division Bell, one final album has been added to the band’s canon: The Endless River. Although this laddie does not think of himself as a professional music critic, I like to think I know my Floyd so here is a quick take on their new release. The Endless River is not on a par, and nor should it be, with the following albums: Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, The Wall, The Division Bell or anything else Pink Floyd have released.

A spoof in the Israeli Daily recently had Eminem planning to convert to Judaism and move to Tel Aviv. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing that any time soon - he’s not really waiting for the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy. Still, stranger things have happened. I was very amused by the Reverend Richard Coles recently; when asked if he is the only vicar who has ever topped the British pop charts, he said 'Yes, but I met the vicar of Hitchen the other day and I said 'We've met, haven't we? Was it through the church?"' Apparently the vicar of Hitchen replied 'No, I was in Pigbag in the 1980s!

We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how good they are at business, perhaps finding the prospect of them rushing into our world rather daunting. However, a part of this process has been the sudden curiosity there for western art-forms. Not long ago the idea of a tour of China by a European early music group would have seemed completely fantastical. What space was there in a country which for many years had allowed only eight ‘model plays’ to be publicly staged — all of them about the achievements of the army — for the votive antiphons of Tallis, or the Passions of Bach? Not everyone in that vast country is ready for such delicacies yet, but a light has begun to shine.

The death of Christopher Hogwood has deprived the world of the most successful exponent of early music there has ever been, or is ever likely to be. It has also reduced by one the quartet of conductors who have been called ‘the Class of ’73’, a term coined by Nick Wilson in a recent study of the early-music revolution of the 1970s and 80s. It refers to four groups that were founded in that year that are held to have changed the face of modern concert-giving: Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music; Trevor Pinnock and his English Concert; Andrew Parrott’s Taverner Choir; and my own Tallis Scholars. Of these it was Hogwood who had the most immediate impact and commercial success. It is also fair to say that his recordings are the most numerous, but least played, of all the Class.

The Spectator, 22 August 1914: Inter arma silent Musae; but Bayreuth on the eve of the war showed very few signs of the coming cataclysm. It is true that on the presentation of the Austrian ultimatum to Servia a good many Austrian visitors departed, and the Fürsten-galerie was not so crowded towards the end of the first cycle as it was at the performance of Parsifal. The military were more and more in evidence in the streets: knots of officers were seen in animated conversation; groups of people circled round the newspaper offices and other places where bulletins were posted up, and, to judge from the nocturnal voces populi, a good many of the residents of Bayreuth seemed never to go to bed at all.

This week has seen the Prime Minister playing Mary Whitehouse again. On Monday he announced that, as of October, music videos on sites like YouTube and Vevo are to carry age classifications similar to those already in place for feature films. You can read the subtext on his ‘deeply concerned’ brow: 'if this is what it takes to get a majority…' In principle, it’s hard to object too much. CDs (if anyone still buys them) carry parental guidance stickers, and a lot of comic books have a ratings system. Video games and DVDs follow the same British film classification board traffic-light system as cinema releases. Unless you take particular issue with any of this, you can’t really do much but shrug. But then you clock how ineffectual the whole thing is.

I prefer the music and lyrics of Pharrell Williams’s Happy to Morrisey’s Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now (because I loathe the smug insincerity of Morrisey more than anything else) but - in case you haven't noticed - I'm still a miserabilist. Being a glass-half-full-and-cracked-and-laced-with-poison type of gal, I can't abide the influx of positivists that appear to have popped up in recent years. A positive attitude is supposed to cure cancer, bring about world peace and end starvation. Being negative, as I am (by way of avoiding chronic, daily disappointment), is treated with distain, disgust and derision. I'm blamed anytime I get ill by fake gurus for bringing it about myself as a result of not actively healing through positive thinking.

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 a rival to the BRIT Awards, with a focus on younger musicians and better music, which in principle sounds good until you realise it’ll be the BBC deciding the music and the musicians. He also hopes to ‘surprise audiences’ with ‘unexpected performances’. To do that he’s gone and bagged the BBC Concert Orchestra! I know! Exciting, eh, to know that Britain’s least respected orchestra will be involved in this celebration of great music.

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 1996 – his posthumous output is actually pretty sluggish. Record labels have always had a talent for cashing in on their dead charges. The zombie discs that result are generally made up of songs the 'artist' was too embarrassed to release when he recorded them. Michael Jackson's new one, Xscape goes one further. It’s a cut 'n' paste job of unused demos and vocal off-cuts remixed by some producers who were quite cool circa 2002.

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 Netherlands was the best song I have ever heard at a Eurovision Song Contest, and by some margin. But that may be because Europop makes me feel ill, and their song definitely wasn’t Europop. It’s the first time I’ve heard a pedal steel in this competition. That being said, the Dutch have form as purveyors of catchy, country-lite, soft rock – anyone remember “Mississippi” by Pussycat?