Culture

My faith in rock music has been temporarily restored. According to the manager of The 1975, the execrable essay/song that his band recorded with diminutive doom-monger Greta Thunberg had previously been rejected by other bands. By ‘bigger artists than The 1975’, he says. He means this as a criticism. Like, ‘How dare these artists turn down the opportunity to work with Greta??’. But I think it’s brilliant. Saying No to Greta and her establishment-backed moaning about the man-made cataclysm that will shortly devour humanity yada yada is the most rock’n’roll thing you can do right now. The 1975/Greta hook-up really is the most dreadful dirge. Over ambient piano music Greta intones about the end of the world. Natch.

Grade: B- So a queen dies as her giant baby is being born. The baby grows very big indeed and soon everything in the universe is inside his necessarily large head. One day he sacrifices himself to save his subjects from a deluge of snow. The townspeople cut off his head and preserve it in steel so that it will last for ever. Some of them climb inside his mouth to have a look around. They see thunderstorms and stars, apparently. Exactly what you’d expect from another Flaming Lips concept album, I suppose, this time narrated by a bemused Mick Jones of the Clash.

In 1871, the polymath and computer pioneer Charles Babbage died at his home in Marylebone. The encyclopaedias have it that a urinary tract infection got him. In truth, his final hours were spent in an agony brought on by the performances of itinerant hurdy-gurdy players parked underneath his window. I know how he felt. My flat, too, is drowning in something not quite like music. While my teenage daughter mixes beats using programs like GarageBand and Logic Pro, her younger brother is bopping through Helix Crush and My Singing Monsters — apps that treat composition itself as a kind of e-sport. It was ever thus: or was once 18th-century Swiss watchmakers twigged that musical snuff-boxes might make them a few bob.

Of all the daft notions about the classical music business, the daftest is that it’s a business at all. Seriously: an industry that’s structured to make a loss, unable to survive without subsidy? If you enjoy conspiracy theories, classical music’s façade of white-tied affluence, combined with fading memories of Herbert von Karajan’s private jet, might imply the existence of some vast global musical-industrial complex. Perhaps it even existed, once. But the modern reality is a fragile network of (to quote Sir James MacMillan) cottage industries: ensembles, promoters, boutique record labels, all heads down in their silos, sweating away at whatever it takes for their own corner of this unsustainable ecosystem to break even.

In Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI hands become fists, arms and elbows clubs, shoving, pounding and ker-pow-ing the keyboard to near oblivion. No wonder Pierre-Laurent Aimard had slipped on a pair of gloves before starting to stop his fingers from bruising or bleeding. The sound created is monstrous, alarming, thrilling. Aimard threw the full weight of his body behind each blow to such an extent that I could see his backside hovering above his stool. It’s not easy to beat up a Yamaha grand. We always dismiss Stockhausen when he claimed that he came from the star Sirius. But his work backs him up. His Klavierstücke are exactly what you might expect from a dazed alien.

In my first week as an MEP, I was delighted to find that my Twitter feed included lots of interest in classical music and literature: Beethoven and Schiller. It soon became apparent that it wasn’t a cultured debate, but vicious condemnation of us turning our backs during “Ode to Joy”. The EU officials had demanded that we stand for the “national” anthem, and we objected to that great work being hijacked as a federalist "Anthem of Europe". We were accused of being philistines and disrespecting European civilisation. Novelist Philip Pullman scolded me for my “gross insult to Beethoven”.  As it happens, I love the universal brilliance of Beethoven; all the more reason to object to the EU claiming him for itself.

Grade: B– The first Springsteen song I ever heard was ‘Born To Run’, back when I was 14. I clocked the impassioned, overwrought self-mythologising, the grandiosity of the opening riff, the strange lack of a chorus given the promise of the verse. Well, OK, interesting, I reckoned — maybe even good. But great? Never. I shifted my judgment only once over the following 45 years. Born in the USA had the tunes and stories and the sheer heft that for once matched the chutzpah and the looks. The rest has been either just good or, more often than not, quite a bit less than good. I always reckoned that perpetual sideman Nils Lofgren was by far the superior songwriter, but Nils isn’t quite as alpha male as Bruce.

Glastonbury was almost ruined for me by Kylie Minogue. Very selfishly, she started her sunbaked set – in the Sunday afternoon slot reserved for pop legends - while Boy and I were packing up the tent ready to make a quick getaway later that evening. By the time we got to the Pyramid Stage, the crowds were so thick you could barely push your way through to a view of the video screens at the side, let alone the stage itself. 'Please don't let her have done my favourite song yet,' I said to a chap in a shiny red jacket. (I decided to stand near him because he'd said 'You're James Delingpole!' as I stumbled past, in a friendly way, not in a nasty way which is always my fear amid so many greenies). 'What's your favourite song?' 'The one that goes "La la la. La lalalaa la. La la la.

‘Invest in your hair,’ advises David Coverdale, a man with a shag of the stuff glossier than a supermodel’s and as big as a guardsman’s bearskin, even at the age of 67. (He won’t say that number. He insists his age is ‘three score and seven’.) ‘People say to me: “Do you colour your hair?” And I say: “Absolutely not.” ’ He pauses for half a beat. ‘ “I have a super hairdresser who does it for me.” Some guy came on Instagram, telling me: “Come on, David, it’s time to get rid of the wig.” It’s not something I bought from Frederick’s of Hollywood, you silly bastard! It’s a crowning glory!’ David Coverdale’s hair matters because of who and what he is.

The last time Bikini Kill played in London was in a room that now serves as the restaurant of a pub in Kentish Town. What a change 26 years can bring: on their return to the city last week, they filled the 5,000-capacity O2 Academy, Brixton, for two nights. That changed status, in truth, is not the result of the timelessness of their music — scrappy punk rock that at its most tuneful was pleasingly familiar and at its least tuneful approximated the sound of fingernails scraping down a blackboard at extreme volume. So why had 10,000 people bought tickets to see them in London?

If you’ve paid even passing attention to early reports of the Spice Girls comeback tour, you will be aware of problems with the sound, the car parking, the lax and/or overbearing security checks, the bad weather, bad tempers, bad karma, bad you name it… Some of it may even be true. But having observed the Spice Girls sashay through a maelstrom of fake news since long before the phrase was invented, I was not altogether surprised to discover that the show was far better performed and produced, and certainly a lot more fun, than the media mavens would have us believe. No one would describe the Ricoh Arena in Coventry as a place of visual or acoustic beauty.

Grade: B Rock stars who utter something a little gamey, something a tad right-wingish, are usually coerced by the lefties into a cringing apology before you can say a-wop-bop-a-lu-bop. This is not a new thing — it happened to Eric Clapton after his ‘Enoch’s right’ outburst in 1976 (which very quickly spawned the Socialist Workers Party-led Rock Against Racism movement). The message has always been: get with the programme, right-wing scum, or we’ll hate you and your career will be over. Credit, then, to Morrissey for refusing to resile from his belief that England is ceasing to be the England he knew and loved and that there are too many foreigners in the country. I kind of agree with him, up to a point. But the liberal bullies will have their way.