Music

There’s yet to be a Glastonbury line-up that hasn’t provoked a chorus of naysaying. Refrains like ‘looks rubbish. I wouldn’t go’ and ‘not like it used to be’ are de rigueur. Dismissing the headliners as ‘crap this year’ rivals football as the nation’s favourite sport. Yet there’s something to be said for trusting the Glastonbury bookers: check out, say, the lower-tier bands on the 1994 poster and see how many greats they discovered before they were famous – Radiohead, Pulp, Oasis... Nowhere else in the world could hand written signs for toilets induce a Proustian yearning to return Glastonbury’s prestige and legendary ‘vibe’ are now such that the festival is bigger than any of the artists playing there.

Are the Rolling Stones the new Rat Pack? Or put it another way: how did the Stones achieve this curious headlock on our affections? If anything, it seems to get stronger over time. In the band’s current US stadium tour, aptly sponsored by the old-age interest group AARP, a million customers are each paying $100 for a seat that allows you to aim a pair of binoculars at a distant video screen. Want an actual view of the stage? It’ll cost you up to ten times as much. Still, it’s all gravy. The last major Stones tour grossed $550 million at the box office.

A decade ago, a group of people who owned small music venues came to the conclusion that the kinds of places they ran were teetering on the brink of a catastrophic extinction event. And so they formed the Music Venue Trust, which has spent ten years kicking cans and shouting the odds about the need to preserve these places, about how they are the production lines from which the festival headliners of tomorrow come. A brilliant guitarist, a fascinating songwriter, St Vincent cycles sleekly through styles with utter assurance Quite right. Good, small venues are the best place to enjoy both live, loud, raucous music and intimate performances where the crowd’s hush is as deafening as any amp.

In April, the Pet Shop Boys, pop music’s most influential and beloved synth-pop duo, returned with a new album, Nonetheless. The British pair could hardly be described as wildly prolific, having released a comparatively meager fifteen albums since their debut Please in 1986. (Their one-word titles usually contain some oblique joke or other; the act’s singer Neil Tennant once remarked that the idea for the first LP was that it amused him that a record buyer would ask for the “Pet Shop Boys, please.”) Yet one reason for this relatively sparse output is that they take a painstaking amount of time to ensure not only that each of their albums is polished to perfection, but that it is existentially different from their previous release.

If I could be like anybody, I would wish to be like Peter Duchin. The pianist and bandleader — who, each year during his prime, oversaw from his perch at the piano dozens of debutante balls and scores of society events — has always seemed to me to embody style, dignity and grace.  Arguably Duchin came by some of these qualities as a consequence of his heritage — his father was the equally famous bandleader Eddy Duchin — but it has always been obvious that he must have worked hard at them, too. He had certainly had his share of reversals: his mother, the former Marjorie Oelrichs, succumbed to complications experienced during childbirth; about thirteen years later, his father was felled by leukemia. He was raised in large part by diplomat W.

There is a strange rule in contemporary Hollywood that filmmakers ignore at their peril: biopics might be a popular dramatic form for directors, but they tend to be of little interest to audiences. In the past year alone, the likes of Napoleon, Ferrari, Maestro and Golda have all under-performed commercially, demonstrating that however accomplished the filmmaker (including the Oscar-nominated likes of Michael Mann, Ridley Scott and Bradley Cooper), it is nearly always a non-starter to attempt to persuade viewers to spend their $15 on watching someone’s life story for two hours at the cinema. Oppenheimer proved to be a rare exception — though that’s far from the only way in which Christopher Nolan is exceptional.

One of the saddest things about popular music is the talents it can’t accommodate. Robbie Robertson, of the Band and much else besides, died in August at the age of eighty, and never found a proper home for his gifts after that great initial burst of late-1960s creativity. But at least Robertson was widely recognized by his peers as one of the outstanding electric guitar players of his time, although the contemporary guitarist he most admired himself was Jerry Miller, of the group Moby Grape. Unlike Robertson, Miller, who’s happily still with us today, hasn’t as yet won a Grammy, or been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But he did play a starring part in what’s surely one of the great show business morality tales of its time.

A chart-topping album. A drummer that can’t stand up straight without the aid of his giant bag of coke. Bickering bandmates and lovers. A rock band on the verge of break-up. These are some of the things on offer in just the first few minutes of Stereophonic. While I’m far from The Spectator’s resident theater critic, I do see my fair share of plays each year. Sometimes I’m compelled to write about them, but only when I’ve found something truly delightful. So let me start by saying this: Stereophonic is the best play I’ve seen in years.  On its surface the play is the story of a mid-Seventies rock band coming to terms with success while navigating tumultuous internal relationships with each other.

He stands five-foot-seven in his stocking feet — five-nine in boots — but with Clarence White’s Telecaster slung around his neck and a thick head of gray hair roostered up, he looks ten feet tall. John Marty Stuart has plucked the strings of every major figure in country music. Growing up in Philadelphia, Mississippi, his heroes were bluegrass legend Lester Flatt and American prophet Johnny Cash. Before going out on his own, Stuart only had two jobs: he joined Flatt’s band in 1972 as a fourteen-year-old mandolin virtuoso, and after Flatt retired in 1978, he joined Cash’s band as a guitarist.