Charles Spencer

Last month, when unveiling my all-time top ten favourite albums, I predicted that the list would probably have changed by the autumn. In fact, it changed within days of filing my copy. For along came Larkin’s Jazz, which I think is the finest, most scholarly and above all wonderfully entertaining and affecting CD collection that has come my way since starting this column nine years ago.

Regular readers may have noticed an embarrassing lacuna in this column. Having urged you to come up with your top ten albums of all time, to which you responded in such numbers, and with such entertaining and illuminating results, the sadist who set you the task has so far failed to deliver a selection of his own. This isn’t a matter of cowardice or mere idleness on my part, I promise. For months now I have been cogitating on it, agonising about it, tearing up the list and starting all over again. But it’s been fun, too, listening to much-loved albums that had somehow been allowed to gather dust on my shelves, trying to separate the excellent from the absolutely essential, and to find room for as wide a variety of music as possible.

As was so often the case with Bertie Wooster when he faced an interview with his fearsome Aunt Agatha, I feel a sense of impending doom as I write this on a beautiful morning in late June. The roses smell sweet, the sun is shining, and a light breeze is blowing through my study window. I ought to be at peace with the world but, in a few days’ time, the chickens will come home to roost, and the prospect is making my stomach knot with an all-too-familiar mixture of guilt and fear. My wife and her sister came into some money following the death last summer of their mother.

By and large, I try to keep the night job out of this column. I love musicals, and even derive a gruesome gallows pleasure from the really bad ones but, since I review them for the Telegraph, it feels wrong to write about them here. And I don’t often listen to cast recordings of great shows at home either. If I want to hear numbers from the great American songbook — and I often do — I prefer the interpretations of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Fred Astaire, the last a man who sang as well as he danced, and always served the song rather than his own ego. An exception, however, must be made for the current production of Hair, now playing in the West End with the same American cast who first opened this glorious revival on Broadway.

That splendid old bruiser Michael Henderson, no stranger to Spectator readers, and as passionate about music and poetry as he is about cricket, has, as so often, a bee buzzing in his bonnet. Responding to last month’s winning entry in the ‘Olden but golden’ all-time top-ten competition, he notes that Roy Beagley included Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte on his list. But which recording? huffs the mighty Hendo. ‘There are dozens, probably hundreds of Flutes. Surely the challenge you set was to select ten favourite recordings, not ten favourite pieces of music.’ Hendo is right, of course, when it comes to anoraks like me and him.

My word, you Spectator readers are an education, and a delightfully idiosyncratic bunch to boot. To celebrate this 100th ‘Olden but golden’ column I invited you to send in your all-time top tens, and three dozen entries have arrived so far, some from as far afield as the US and Australia. In 2002, we confined ourselves to rock and pop. This time classical music and jazz and indeed any other musical genres were actively encouraged, and favourite singles as well as albums were permitted as well. I particularly like the bloody-minded independence of Spectator readers.

God and the editor willing, next month’s column will be the 100th ‘Olden but golden’. God and the editor willing, next month’s column will be the 100th ‘Olden but golden’. For those who write in The Spectator every week, this would doubtless seem small beer. For a monthly column it feels like a landmark and one I sometimes doubted I would reach. And of course I may not.... As any journalist will tell you, every piece you write has the potential to be your last. ‘Olden but golden’ began in October 2001, and I was pleased as Punch to be allowed to do it. Pop music has been a big part of my life since 1963, when I was eight and first discovered the Beatles.

Minicab drivers have a bad reputation for being dishonest incompetents and worse — a current poster campaign suggests that if a woman gets into an unlicensed cab she has only herself to blame if she gets raped — but down here in suburban Surrey they couldn’t be more helpful or reliable as I have had recent cause to find out. Just before Christmas, I skidded on ice in Dorset and my beloved VW Passat slid slowly and graciously into the iron railings of the picturesque bridge that runs over the River Brit in Netherbury. Having just driven off from a standing start, I was only travelling at a few miles an hour and time seemed suspended during my helpless slide across the ice.

God, I hate this time of year. Getting up in the dark in the morning, setting off to work in the dark in the late afternoon, then spending the evening sitting in the dark in the theatre are bad enough. But then there’s the cold, angular rain, stinging my face as I sit cowering in the porch nursing a roll-up, the office on the phone wanting yet another piece to fill the vast open spaces they so much dread between Christmas and the new year, and even dear Liz, this magazine’s saintly arts editor, wanting early copy because she’s already up to her ears with the yuletide bumper issue. It’s enough to make a cat spit and a theatre critic snarl. But my role in this column is not to moan.

If someone had asked me last month when it was that the revered Radio One DJ John Peel had died, I’d have said a couple of years ago. If someone had asked me last month when it was that the revered Radio One DJ John Peel had died, I’d have said a couple of years ago. In fact he died in Peru on 25 October 2004, while on a trip for the Telegraph’s travel pages. This is one of God’s many cruel tricks on His creation. As one grows older, time passes more quickly. Just when you want each day to last longer, it becomes shorter, until you feel that life is hurtling you towards your terrifying appointment with mortality with positively unseemly haste.

A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth. A few weeks ago I was in Chichester, reviewing a fine revival of Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables and suddenly experienced a great ache of nostalgia for the period immediately before my birth. Rattigan’s play, first staged in 1954, portrays a post-second-world-war England in which emotions are essentially private, polite small talk largely prevails, and upper lips are worn stiff — in public at least. Of course, the dramatist was in many ways critical of this.

I have so far avoided swine flu but have caught the festival bug badly this year. Back from Glastonbury, I realised I could squeeze in a day at GuilFest, the much smaller and less intimidating festival held each year in Guildford’s Stoke Park. I have so far avoided swine flu but have caught the festival bug badly this year. Back from Glastonbury, I realised I could squeeze in a day at GuilFest, the much smaller and less intimidating festival held each year in Guildford’s Stoke Park. Brian Wilson, the song-writing and production genius behind the Beach Boys, was topping the bill and I awaited his performance with considerable apprehension.

The Telegraph sent me to do a piece on Glastonbury the other week. The crush of the crowd, the stink of the burgers, the even worse stench from the lavatories, the fact that most people seemed to be half-drunk or stoned, and the loneliness of wandering around the site, utterly miserable, when everyone else appeared to be having a high old time with friends or loved ones, reminded me of Mephistopheles’s great line in Dr Faustus: ‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.’ When the thunder and lightning started, followed by rain so heavy it drenched you in seconds, I felt more miserable than I have in years. As I fled the site I made a firm vow never to return to Glasto. Once was more than enough.

Like most addicts I have become accustomed to smuggling stuff into my own house. In the old days it was bottles of Scotch or wine. More recently it has been a couple of hundred quid’s worth of CDs after a binge in HMV.  The trouble with CDs is that they take up so much space. Wandering round Cargo in Wimbledon the other Saturday I noticed a splendid chest of drawers for a mere £40 that would offer safe and stylish storage for some 400 discs. It was the work of a moment to snap it up and put it in the car. It was only when I arrived home that I realised the flaw in my plan.

My son turned to me in the car the other day, and observed, ‘This is the band you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it, Dad? My son turned to me in the car the other day, and observed, ‘This is the band you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it, Dad?’ Playing on the car’s CD player, at a volume that would have led my wife to accuse me of deliberately trying to deafen our own child had she been present, was Focus Level by a New York group called Endless Boogie. My God, they hit the spot.