Culture

You don’t have to be a follower of Liverpool Football Club, or football at all, to spot the difference. Two months ago the Reds were running about headless as a newly wrung chook; today they are putting the fear of perdition into the best teams in the land. Or take Leicester City. Last season they were locked in an epic, desperate small-town struggle for Premiership survival. Today, they are top of the League. What changed? Both teams have the same players as before, same strip, roughly the same formation. The only new face is the manager’s. Change the boss and — presto — the mood picks up, tempi get faster, goals are scored, confidence rises and everyone charges around with a smile on their chops.

Róisín Murphy, the Irish singer-songwriter, is currently touring Europe with her Mercury Prize-shortlisted new album, Hairless Toys. The album, with its odd disco-grooves, dub rhythms and dark, loopy synth sounds, combines pop futurism with a retrospective 1970s edge. The album is tinged with an autumnal sense of loss and the self-examination of an older woman looking back on her life. 'The things I’ve seen', the 42-year-old Murphy sings, in a mournful whisper. Why 'the Irish Grace Jones' (as Vanity Fair called Murphy) is not better known outside her native Ireland is a mystery. On stage Murphy is supremely powerful because she knows how to keep still. She thinks about the slightest raising of her arms or silent snapping of her fingers.

In this exciting new era of Spectator cruises I have been put in mind of a dream event long in the planning: to hear Allegri’s Miserere on ice, specifically on the ice of Antarctica. A number of things came together to put this on my bucket list, from the thought of dressing up like penguins (as usual) while we sing to penguins, to reading in the press that the Tallis Scholars ‘have performed on every continent on the planet except Antarctica’. I want to fill a boat with like-minded enthusiasts and adventurers, and set off from South America via the Falklands to the Antarctic Peninsula, hoping to make a landing and a concert at Paradise Bay.

We were like four hapless contestants on University Challenge. None of us knew the answer. But just like they do on the telly, I leaned learnedly across towards my 28-year-old son, who in turn looked despairingly towards one of my stepsons, before my other stepson made his contribution with a shrug of the shoulders. So, it was up to me as captain of the team to take a guess as the first few bars wafted through the Royal Albert Hall. ‘“Tangled Up in Blue”?’ I proffered with as much enthusiasm as Jeremy Corbyn at a white-tie dinner. But, fingers on the buzzer, there were far bigger questions to be answered.

At the entrance to Marylebone railway station is an old piano that anyone can play. Unfortunately, whoever had this sweet idea can’t be bothered to fix the broken notes. Even so, about once a fortnight, on my way back from visiting my mother in Gerrards Cross, I put down my shopping bag and bash out Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp minor. As I do, I invariably think about Mrs Irene Oates, the first proper eccentric I met. She was my only piano teacher and I’m grateful to her. On the other hand I’m not very good, even by amateur standards, and she’s partly to blame. When I was 11, my mother told me that she’d spoken on the telephone to a lady who was going to teach my sister and me the piano.

Last night BBC staff and musicians alike assembled at Portcullis House to back UK Music's Let it Beeb campaign. As guests including Lord Hall, Sandie Shaw and Anneka Rice raised a glass to the campaign which aims to protect BBC music services from the threat of charter renewal, MPs including Ed Vaizey and Jess Phillips made sure they didn't miss the chance for a celebrity selfie. It then fell on organisers to urge everyone in the room to sign their petition calling on the government to 'protect vital BBC music services from any budgetary cuts during the charter renewal process'. With that in mind, they made sure that John Whittingdale, the Culture Secretary, was in the audience to hear their pleas.

I suppose you can look at it two ways. Glastonbury, and rock festivals generally, were once patronised by music obsessives; largely male and probably some distance along the autistic spectrum, in many cases. People like me, in other words, when I was younger. Oh yes – and that’s another thing. Age. They used to be for the young. But the defining difference with today was that people once went for the music. I note that next year’s Glastonbury has sold out – without anybody knowing who is actually playing. I blame women. In general they have a different approach to music. They like the experience of being somewhere people are making a lot of noise, without worrying about the name of the bass guitarist. It’s probably a healthier way to enjoy music, I suppose.

Last week a 17-year-old girl forced the Edexcel exam board to change its A-level music syllabus to include the work of women composers. Jessy McCabe, a sixth former at Twyford Church of England High School in London, started a petition after studying gender inequality. Good for her, you might think. But is it good for A-level students? A delicate question lies at the heart of the subject of female composers, and it’s not ‘Why are they so criminally underrepresented in the classical canon?’ It’s ‘How good is their music compared with that of male composers?’ Ms McCabe told the press that ‘I’d quite like to learn about the music of Clara Schumann.’ OK, let’s start there.

This column does like a bargain. Indeed, it not only esteems and relishes a bargain, it has also worked long and hard to prove Milton Friedman wrong. Sometimes there really is such a thing as a free lunch. And for those of us still wedded to the notion of owning music on some kind of solid, tangible medium (vinyl, CD, dusty box of cassettes at back of cupboard), these are great, cheapskate-friendly years in which to be alive. Almost every song ever recorded can be bought for a song. And still we mothwallets can claim the moral high ground, because we’re not actually stealing it, unlike everyone under 40. As Fagin once sang, ‘In this life, one thing counts. In the bank, large amounts.

To be honest, my friendship with Michael Tilson Thomas hasn’t gone quite as I had hoped. It started in February 1990, when he chose a Tallis Scholars track for one of his desert island discs. This was a movement from a mass by Josquin des Prez, that he said (apparently impromptu) was music which ‘completely comforts me and brings me into a state of tranquillity’. I thought I might have found a new messiah. For many years now I have had the hope of meeting an orchestral conductor who is prepared to take on the challenges of performing a major work from the unaccompanied choral repertoire. Of course there have always been those who have included choral society-type singing in their symphony programmes.

The popular singer Chrissie Hynde has been reprimanded by feminist campaigners for speaking common sense. Hynde, who is somewhat more astute than most landfill rock slebs, has advanced the proposition that women should take a degree of precaution to ensure that they are not sexually attacked by men. Such as not wandering the streets, pissed out of their skulls, in their underwear. She told the Sunday Times: 'You can't paint yourself into a corner and then say whose brush is this? You have to take responsibility. If you play with fire you get burnt. It's not any secret, is it? 'If I'm walking around in my underwear and I'm drunk? Who else's fault can it be?

In a 2012 interview on Newsnight, foul-mouthed LA rapper Tyler, The Creator told a churlish Stephen Smith that the point of his music was to ‘piss old white people off like you’. Now, the old white people at the Home Office seem to have proved him right, by banning the rapper – real name Tyler Okonma – from entering the UK for the next three to five years. Okonma’s manager, Christian Clancy, wrote in a blog post that he received a letter stating that the rapper would not receive a visa because his work ‘encourages violence and intolerance of homosexuality’ and ‘fosters hatred with views that seek to provoke others to terrorist acts’.

William Kapell was an American concert pianist with the looks of a male model and the fingers of a wizard. He played the concertos of Rachmaninov at dashing speed but with delicate precision. He was snapped up by RCA in 1944 at the age of 22 and the world’s leading conductors queued up to accompany him. In October 1953 he toured Australia. On his last night there he visited Jascha Spivakovsky, a pianist who had escaped the Russian pogroms as a child, settled in Berlin and then fled to Melbourne after Richard Strauss warned him that he was on a Nazi hit-list. He spent the war helping fellow émigrés escape. That was one reason he never signed a recording contract. Also, Australia didn’t have a classical label.

By chance, my first night in Havana in 1987 was the night the clubs went dark to mark the death of Enrique Jorrin, the inventor of the cha-cha-cha, whose rhythmic brainstorm had gone global. My grandparents used to dance cha-cha-cha at Latin nights at the Grand Hotel in Leicester in the 1950s. Rubén Gonzalez, Jorrin’s pianist, thought that his death spelled ‘the end of the old music’ and went into retirement, his piano destroyed by termites in the tropical humidity. Another contemporary who didn’t quite make his mark was Ibrahim Ferrer — he’d been in a moderately successful band Los Bucucos. Ibrahim retired at about the same time, for similar reasons to Rubén — the work had dried up.

Walking around central London, I’ve been struck by how many shows Frank Sinatra has been performing in town recently. He played a string of concerts in July at the Royal Albert Hall (which as any schoolboy knows was actually named after Sinatra’s middle name), and he is currently performing an extended summer season at the London Palladium. Quite how Frank is going to cope this Friday evening, when this eternal Sinatra séance requires his spirit to put in an appearance as his life and music is celebrated at the Proms, at the same time as he gigs at the Palladium, I’m not sure.

Watching the Berlin Philharmonic going into conclave to choose a successor to Simon Rattle — after countless hours of secret discussion they have chosen Kirill Petrenko — reminds one of little less than the election of a pope. In both cases the expectation is the same: the organisations are so iconic that they must continue into the future without a hitch and without question. Whatever sort of job they are doing, or have done, they have become too much a part of normal life to be abolished. Why is it that symphony orchestras of any standing are expected to survive indefinitely, where smaller musical organisations, though they may be just as established, are not? What are the long-term prospects for the Monteverdi Choir after John Eliot Gardiner retires?

Saul Hudson, more commonly known by his childhood nickname 'Slash', turns 50 today. It is safe to say that the next 50 years of his life are unlikely to be quite as hectic as the first. The heroin-addicted lead guitarist of Guns 'n’ Roses has settled into a routine of philanthropy and Angry Birds. He is always mentioned in magazines as one of the greatest guitarists of all time. The opening to 'Sweet Child o’ Mine' is routinely voted the best guitar riff ever. But the true extent of his genius — which stretches far beyond his ability to produce a nice tune — is still not fully recognised. Many in fact think he's overrated.

Lucas Debargue, a 24-year-old French pianist, came fourth in the finale of the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow on 30 June, yet he’s the only competitor anyone is talking about. Why? The main reason is that they’re riveted by his backstory. Have you noticed how we all say ‘backstory’ these days, instead of boring old ‘background’? It’s defined as ‘the things that have happened to someone before you first see or read about that person in a film or story’. Neal Gabler wrote a book called Life: The Movie, about our entertainment-obsessed society’s urge to stretch and squash everything from terrorist attacks to an argument at the checkout into an imaginary plot.

Popular culture is all about the shock factor, especially when it involves female popstars. The late Eighties set a precedent for women making statements in their music videos. In 1989 Madonna broke taboos with an interracial love story, complete with burning crosses and a crying saint. A year later Sinead O’Connor was the first woman to cry in a music video. Since then pop-feminism has produced a steady stream of provocation, from the Spice Girls kicking girl-power in our faces, angry man-hating from Alanis Morissette to the independent women of Destiny’s Child. The noughties were pretty much a romp through string bikinis in preparation for Lady Gaga borrowing an outfit from the butchers in 2010.

The main thing that strikes you as you watch AC/DC whip 70,000 people into a frenzy at Wembley stadium is, of course, how very similar they are to David Hockney. And Peter O’Toole, come to think of it. Not to mention Beryl Bainbridge, Eric Morecambe and Sheridan Smith. What all these people share in common is perhaps the most important quality any artist or performer needs: the ability to take your work seriously without taking yourself seriously. It is very, very difficult to play guitar as well as Angus Young, or to hold an audience as well as Brian Johnson. Watch a pub band cover ‘Highway to Hell’ and you’ll realise just how good the originals are.

I had meant to write a dispassionate account of this year’s Glastonbury, really I had. But I’m afraid my plans were ruined by a chance encounter on the final day with my old friend Michael Eavis — the distinctively bearded dairy farmer who founded it 45 years ago. Rather sweetly he has got it into his head — long story — that I once helped him save the festival. Gosh, I hope this is true because it would annoy so many people: suck on that, all you Guardian readers, you lefty stand-ups, you Greenpeace activists. Every time you go to Glasto from now on you must offer a silent prayer of thanks to the Prince of Darkness himself. ‘You coming to see The Who tonight?’ said Eavis. Usually, I like to leave early to avoid the traffic.

When Margaret Thatcher imagined perfect power, she thought of the orchestral conductor. ‘She envied me,’ said Herbert von Karajan, ‘that people always did what I requested.’ Power, however, is a mirage that fades as you get close. What Mrs Thatcher saw were the trappings, never the essence. Great conductors might get the glory, but someone else pulled the strings. Behind every power there is a greater force. Behind every conductor, there was Ronald Wilford. It is hard to think of Wilford, who died last week, aged 87, without a sneaking admiration. A self-schooled Machiavellian, a Mandelson of music, he invented a chimera of ‘the great conductor’ and, as president of Columbia Artists (CAMI), sold it at unimaginable profit.