Cordelia Williams at Portsmouth Menuhin Room

 Cordelia Williams, Portsmouth Menuhin Room, April 29

This new series of Saturday lunchtime recitals in Portsmouth's Menuhin Room took no time at all to establish itself with a high standard of performance and an engaging programme of events. Somehow, Cordelia Williams took on the enormous challenge of following last week's Shostakovich and was in no way found wanting.

Prokofiev's Visions Fugitives features on her forthcoming disc, Cascades, and so we were treated to a preview although the live performance experience is invariably preferable to the obvious advantages of a record in any case. Twenty short pieces were 'fleeting' indeed, even within their brevity. Music, or Western music, is traditionally mostly repetitive but you don't get any second chances as these snatches of drama, dazzling flashes, fragments of rhapsody and startling interjections pour forth. Codelia tested out the Steinway's top notes and found them crystalline and shiny. A jaunty dance before the crashing exploitation of both extremes of the keyboard was packed with energy before the lento irrealmente was, like gold, to airy thinness beat.

Schumann's Waldszenen, op. 82, was 'high Romanticism' not only for how, as Cordelia explained, it identifies intensely with the natural world and makes such detail of human significance but also, for me, for its light and dark. Gorgeous but shady, its Haunted Place evoked something walking about so unsettlingly that, as Diana Swann's very useful programme notes told us, Clara Schumann wouldn't play it. It's a good thing she never heard Pierrot Lunaire. The Bird as Prophet further disturbed the surface of an otherwise happy-sounding world before an exuberant Hunting Song and another set of short pieces ended pacifically but also radiantly, with Farewell.

Perhaps the history of music could be told as the story of how it increasingly addressed horror, or had no other option. The second half was Schubert's Sonata D. 958, taking another step back in time. I hope I'm not the only one who thinks of Schubert as younger than Beethoven without always realizing that he died only a year later which makes their respective 'late' periods exactly contemporary notwithstanding that they both, again in Cordelia's words, had 'dark nights of the soul' however tuneful they managed to make them sound.

The Allegro dresses its torment in disarming jollity, the Minuet is tentative. We are never quite allowed to be carefree. What will stay most in the memory of this most memorable performance will be Cordelia's f, ff and ffz, startlingly foregrounded against her p. The allegro finale was an entirely captivating grandstand skip and dash, not necessarily towards the end but pursued by something more grisly than a bear.

It should never be allowed to go without saying what a fine job Andrew McVittie has done in putting this series together and we should acknowledge his well-organized 'front of house' team and thank them, too. He is a most gracious and generous host and his series is proving to be an outstanding artistic success. There's plenty more to come this year before we dare hope he can do it all again next.

Whether you were lucky enough to be there today or not, there's a supply of Cordelia here, CDs, for those times when the wireless is playing an opera by Wagner. Or contemporary jazz.

Hampshire Police Male Voice Choir at Lunchtime Live!

 Hampshire Police Male Voice Choir, Portsmouth Cathedral, April 27

'Allo, 'allo, 'allo, What have we here? It's not often we get a male voice choir for a lunchtime concert round these parts and I'm not sure if I've ever seen one in the flesh before although I'm familiar with Sosban Fach and Hyfrydol from records that were in the family. It's not so often these days one has a new experience.

It's not mandatory to be Welsh to do this any more than one needs to be from Yorkshire to be a brass band. It can be done beyond the limits of its natural habitat but HPMVC include half a dozen Welshmen in their number for authenticity's sake. Like brass bands, it seems to me, male voice choirs have a limited palette compared to a full orchestra but that didn't prevent Whistler painting, Status Quo from having hit records or any number of poets writing very much the same poem time and again. It's what you do with it that matters. They can go from a caress to a roar, they can arrange a piece into the four parts we heard today but, mainly, HPMVC know how to work an audience.

Some swelling sound was to be heard in Gwahoddiad before Nigel Smith moved from organ to piano for the warmth of Schubert's Sanctus and the lilting of Robat Arwyn's Benedictus which was when it dawned on me that all 36 of them knew all the words and were singing not always the same language from memory.

I once thought Bridge Over Troubled Water was a hymn anyway so the transition to 'popular' music was seamless. The tingle one sometimes gets from music is the surest indicator that it is working. It is something that one can't help and it crept up on me there and then. 

I'm not finding fault with easy-listening Matt Munro's Softly As I Leave You but wonder if I might modestly suggest a composer called McCartney and his song, Let It Be, be considered for the repertoire. And, then, respecting local football sensitivities, Nigel incorporated the Pompey Chimes into a staccato When the Saints Go Marching In that became a jazzy part-song in a rousing arrangement of disciplined playfulness while doing its best not to further provoke either side's supporters who have both suffered enough this season. That 'staccato' effect was one manifestation of the choir's exemplary diction in evidence throughout.

High on a Hill, Let the Lower Lights be Shining and What a Wonderful World made up a melodious section before what one suspected might happen did. 

You don't get far by just being pleasant these days. I wasn't convinced we'd had enough woofers, enough of the turbo charge kicking in, but know by now that nobody puts all their best work in at the start. On a Clear Day prepared the way for the obvious highlight - and they know it is, An American Trilogy, best known as an overblown late career performance by an overblown Elvis Presley. However, in the hands of Geoffrey Porter directing the Hampshire Police Male Voice Choir with Nigel Smith on piano, featuring Sachin Gunga on organ and a spiritual solo by Garry Jackson, it was magnificent and achieved grandeur. That might have been the big finish but there were credits and thanks to be distributed before Morte Criste, 'When I Survey the Wond'rous Cross', by Emrys Jones which was one last big build from calm to the actual big finish almost by way of an encore.

Except these boys enjoy their singing. After I've written a poem, which can take me as long as half an hour, I like to have a rest for about six months before attempting another. They're not like that at all. The Dolphin is one of Portsmouth's best pubs, of those that remain, and they adjourned across the road there for well-deserved refreshment and, under the direction of Dave Paul, treated themselves to versions of two more songs at the after party, Roses and I Believe. Apparently it's not an offence. The police weren't called. Oh, yes, they were the police.

Impressive. I think Portsmouth Cathedral would be glad to have them back. I doubt if the retiring collection adds up to as much as today's did very often.  

 

Lawrence Power and Sergio Bucheli at Wigmore Hall

 Lawrence Power and Sergio Bucheli, Wigmore Hall, Apr 24

It was my first visit to London since lockdown and it showed when I went the wrong way twice before finding the right road from Victoria to Wigmore Hall. So devoted am I to the work of Dietrich Buxtehude that I'll happily undertake a 14 hour day to hear a five minute Chaconne but there was more to it than that.

The theme of imitation explained in the programme notes was more evident in some pieces than others. The Buxtehude up first wasn't necessarily intended to imitate freshness and the open air, not only in the violin but something reminiscent of the theme from Tales from the Riverbank in Sergio's lute part, but if words can often mean what we want to understand by them then music is much more so.

Two parts from the Suite in G from Ayres for Violin Book 2 by Matteis were lachrymose before Lawrence switched mood for the jigging and reeling of Ground after the Scottish Humour.

Fazil Say's Viola Sonata was a world premiere so we were among the first to hear how it stretched minimal musical ideas to nervy limits through some wizardly technique of pizzicato and glissando in its first movement before the raw dance energy of its second. It's hard to say if such excursions in contemporary music will still be being performed at Wigmore Hall in three hundred years time when fashions will have shifted many more times.

Two pieces by Westhoff explicitly told us what they were imitating. I was happy enough to hear the violin's impersonation of a lute when listening for 'liuto' but, not having read the notes, was equally convinced of the countryside in 'campane', but it was bells, as in 'campanile' so, as with my insensitivity to synesthesia, it matters less what you make of it. You can enjoy it without getting it right. 

In between those, as ancient and modern traded places throughout, was Errollyn Wallen's carol, Peace on Earth, its outlandish idealism expressed in restrained long lines over a lute accompaniment that may or may not be related to the Cavatina hit single by John Williams but it was good to have Errollyn in her most mainstream mood from all the many and various things she does. While one can safely invest on identifying Vivaldi when you hear him, nobody could accuse Errollyn of having a distinctive sound.

Cassandra Miller's Daylonging, Slacktide, commissioned by Lawrence, was the most extraordinary piece on a wildly various programme. The last time - the only other time- I heard her work it also prompted an above average response but I can't put that response on any scale between positive and negative, only visceral. I don't really want to drag anybody in as a comparison but I might have guessed at Laurie Anderson. It was far beyond what Yoko Ono might be capable of. Again, while it made me think of oppressive summer heat it was, in fact, 'about longing to reconnect with others'. Spell-binding, not least for wondering when it was going to end (for better or worse) as Lawrence dutifully unearthed unworldly effects from his viola. If I still wanted to identify with anything vaguely comprehensible in the avant-garde, as I liked to after The Faust Tapes in 1973, I'd be thinking of making Cassandra Miller my favourite composer but I'm not young any more and I'm better off with the doo-wop of Hi, We're the Miracles. 

Sergio took up his other instrument, guitar-like but maybe a vihuela, for some Paganini which sounded less like a contract with the devil and more baroque than we expect from Paganini but, coming out on the other side of Cassandra Miller, one can be excused for having lost one's bearings. 

Luciano Berio would have been a huge price to have proved to be my preferred option on the menu and with its muezzin, actually Sicilian, tape voice, sonorous viola and disembodied folk tune it did okay but, no, not really. I wonder if the viola, being so unkindly overlooked in between the violin and cello, doesn't attract the wrong sort of composer who think they can somehow do something with it. But we were taken back to the courtly formality of Marin Marais before his Le Tourbillion seemed to have to make a headlong dash to get all the notes in before Radio 3 had to go to its Afternoon Concert. Sitting close to the brilliant Hannah French, delivering R3 from just a laptop and a set of headphones, I thought she looked concerned.

I think they went off air sharpish which meant only those there heard a particularly fitting encore, for two friends who first met in Gloucester - Sleep by Ivor Gurney which was, of course, wistful but because it's Ivor Gurney, you know it's not imitation, it's real and it's about Gloucestershire and I've been there so I know. Except it didn't sound especially like Gloucestershire to me.

I was on safer ground in the afternoon at the Aladdin Sane 50 Years exhibition because I completely 'get' David Bowie, and T. Rex, and know all about them. Like Five Years is the first track on Hunky Dory.

- No, on Ziggy Stardust.

We had an entirely theoretical fiver on it but my recent form on the turf translated into even being able to get established facts from 1972 wrong. 

We could at least agree that our History teachers at school were terrible but I had to give one of them the credit for telling me that 'lack of knowledge can't be disguised by fine writing'.

It won't get you top marks in 'A' level History, no, but - I don't know- I've been getting away with it for the most part for quite some time now, such as it is. I'm not even convinced that getting things right is the answer as long as you thought you had a good time. And I did.

Portsmouth Menuhin Room concert series: Shostakovich Piano Trio

 Portsmouth Menuhin Room concert series: Shostakovich Piano Trio, April 22

There were more reasons than usual to look forward to today's Menuhin Room concert. Shostakovich is always an occasion and, after Catherine Lawlor's Szymanowski in the cathedral was such a memorable highlight of the year so far, one was keen to hear what she did next. Also, a lecture recital meant that all would be explained and we knew in advance what it was all about.

The Piano Trio in question was no.2, op. 67, but it's not all about the piano. Angela's introduction was a textbook account of the composer, his place in history and the composition. In it she provided so many telling words and phrases she all but did me out of a job. He is a synthesis of classical structures, ambiguous, 'angular', frivolous, parodic, necessarily not 'too modern' or pessimistic and needed to adopt camouflage to maintain his integrity under the Soviet regime. Not always in that order but most of them at the same time. If there's a greater C20th composer then I haven't heard of them.

Mikhail Lezdkan's cello began the first movement evoking the chill wind of the Russian taiga and tundra at the very top end of its range before Catherine's violin joined beneath it mournfully and Angela's piano began in its lowest register, thus already inverting any traditional expectations of who played what. From 1944, at the darkest time of WW2, it is full of intense foreboding, as Angela had said, as well as 'sinister, enigmatic, but playful, assertive, with mock gaiety, angry, dissonant and dynamic'. * 

The second movement portrait of Shostakovich's close friend, Ivan Sollertinsky, who died aged 41 while this piece was being written, is an energetic, 'frenzied, relentless' tribute to an overwhelming talent and character. There is no place to hide in this music. It's not for the faint-hearted. Mikhail, Catherine and Angela are strong musical personalities and needed to be, almost needing to stand up to each other. A weak link would have let the whole thing down but they were as committed and forthright, as well as sensitive and 'together', as each other. It is an advantage, and a thrill, that ensemble playing has over solo performances that the whole is so much more than its constituent parts.

The third movement was a profound lament and the fourth an exhilarating 'danse macabre' taking much from folk and Jewish klezmer music, the piano again percussive while the strings despaired together but ambiguity is a deep and powerful thing in great art and the stormy, impassioned passage towards the finish grew and crashed about until, unlike the other movements that end abruptly with no afterthoughts, it does end quietly, and on a major chord, so that after all that Shostakovich still provides a glimpse of something maybe positive. Not being sure if we are allowed such hope is more affecting than being offered solid reassurance.

The downside of a lecture recital is that there is less actual concert and the Piano Trio lasts 25 minutes. Is what I was going to say but it was hard to believe so much had happened in so short a time. Enough is more than enough. There was a stunned, prolonged silence before the extended applause which, if there was any justice, should have been a standing ovation. My fault. I should have started it- somebody has to - because I'm sure others would have followed.

We will be more than adequately compensated next week, though, when Cordelia Williams presents a longer programme that doesn't include Shostakovich. You can't have him every week and Schubert, Schumann and the like will be gentler on us.

In today's Times there is an interview with Simon Rattle sorrowful and concerned that this is a 'desperate moment' in British classical music. He would know more about that than me but I saw no evidence of it in the Menuhin Room, which is largely thanks to Andrew McVittie's wonderful work in making this series happen, and I don't see anything but good things happening across our local area. But while almost routinely enthusing about all the events I attend, there has to be a space left above genuine praise and enthusiasm for the extra special. I hope I left enough for Angela Zanders (Piano), Mikhail Lezdkan (Cello), Catherine Lawlor (Violin) and their Shostakovich Piano Trio, op. 67, because that was truly, madly, deeply moving and, as is the point of music at its very best, no words are enough.

 

* With thanks to Angela for so many such words throughout. One can hardly pass up the opportunity to use her words because she got in first and took the best ones ahead of me.

How Cliff Richard was Made

I was grateful to have The Dreamer by, allegedly, Cliff Richard passed on to me and I'll give it a good home. Although it is written in Cliff's cheery tone of voice, it's likely that somebody else did the actual writing. Whether it's going to New York, doing their first gig, having a hit record or sitting in the same place Elvis usually sat in a restaurant, most things are fantastic. But, to be fair, he was very successful from the beginning and much of it must have been fantastic in those early years of the pop music industry.

Even so, he doesn't come across as The Dreamer. He seems to know what he's doing from the start and more than sixty years of success in such a fickle world as pop doesn't happen by accident.

As fits his user-friendly, inoffensive public demeanour, this account is all about the positive - of which there's always been plenty - and it doesn't dwell on the negative any longer than it really has to. The Drifters become The Shadows as better musicians are found to replace the old mates he started out with but, for the most part, the casualties of such professionalism remain on good terms. No connection is made between the 'inappropriate relationship' Cliff has with Carol Costa and how,

Since Jet Harris and Carol Costa had split...Jet's drinking had been getting worse and he was starting to be a liability in the band

which is why he didn't last much longer as a Shad.

Going on before the Kalin Twins, who were top of the bill, in a show, The Drifters were 'blowing the headliners off the stage' but the young Cliff was 'tough' and not sufficiently all sweetness and light to agree to go on in the first half to give the Klain Twins a chance. That's not how it works.

If at first sight The Dreamer might look like an anodyne story of how a poor but tremendously good-looking boy got lucky and became Britain's longest-lasting, and vastly successful, pop singer, the real story of how Cliff Richard was made out of Harry Webb is here. It's just done with the same velvet gloss that was applied to his whole career, accentuating the best-looking bits. It's hardly any different from Black Sabbath, the Sex Pistols or the Prodigy maximizing their appeal as bad boys, Pink Floyd or Emerson, Lake & Palmer designing something for teenage boys who thought they were intelligent or The Spice Girls being marketed as powerful role models for impressionable young girls. Cliff certainly did fancy himself as the British answer to Elvis and was very taken with the 'wilder' personalities of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard but he was able to reach a compromise with Norrie Paramour, who wanted to make albums with an orchestra, and negotiated half the tracks for the rock'n'roll band. There really is nothing wrong with being 'mainstream', especially if the big idea is to sell records and you can include both the 'safe' and more adventurous parts of the demographic in your target audience. Most such successful careers have been at least as much due to good business sense as good 'art', whether it was Shakespeare, Handel or Damien Hirst. 

I'm not halfway in the book yet, not quite as far as the making of his best records in the early 60's and certainly nowhere near halfway through the life-long, as it has turned out, commitment to his career, which has survived such setbacks as Christianity, being left off radio playlists for being 'uncool' and the scurrilous accusations made against him in 2014. By that time I was very much one of his admirers and was glad to be one of those that supported his cause. I hadn't always been so dedicated to his cause. 13 year old boys are far too much taken up with their own neuroses and in 1972 I took music very seriously indeed. But, if you're lucky, you can grow out of that.

 

In 1959, Cliff had a bit of a European holiday with Tony Meehan and a couple of friends, decided to find where Elvis lived, in Germany, on the way back, and knocked on his door but Elvis wasn't in. 

 

I've never been overly devoted to Elvis Presley. Cliff only had to wait another 52 years before he met Freda Payne. That was much more worthwhile, I'd have thought,

 

 

Los Ladrones in Havant

 Los Ladrones, The Spectre Knight, St. Faith's, Havant, Apr 12

It's said a change is as good as a rest and so while the local cathedrals were taking a rest from lunchtime recitals, St. Faith's provided some light operetta for a change.

The Spectre Knight by James Albery and Alfred Cellier centres on Viola, daughter of the Grand Duke whose court has been banished to live in a haunted glen. Her cousin, Otho, shows up, disguises himself as a ghost and they all live happily ever after. Held together by Marion Porter's narration and Nigel Smith's spritely piano, Jane Marett was a lively soprano Viola and John Butt a comic Otho and ghost. Michael Powell as the Duke, Simon Cooksey as his Lord Chamberlain and Irene Cooksey as the mezzo Lady in Waiting were support roles in comparison but contributed with distinction to several ensemble pieces.

I am free, I am free, for my labour is done was an early outing for Jane's soprano excursions before John's I only mix with ghosts well known involved some rudimentary, low-budget sound and visual effects that augmented the corinthian spirit of local amateur dramatics and period piece entertainment. I'll take forty-five minutes of such Victorian parlour amusement over hours of Wagner's Ring cycle every time.

Ensemble pieces like Fill up, and let us drink to one another followed by Too-whit, too-whoo, too-whoo, too-whit were convivial frolics before none of the audience would have been too taken aback by the highly satisfactory five-part denouement that returned to the booze by way of celebration.

Perhaps lunchtime operetta has a future. This was well-supported although, like any such thing, friends and family could have been a significant part of the numbers but it's a fine thing that this repertoire and tradition is being kept vibrantly alive. It seems quaint to me and I'm not as young as I was, my acquaintance with G&S being largely a credit to my parents.

It is to be hoped that such gentle wit and theatrical unlikeliness can be preserved a while longer yet. I had to look up a translation of 'los ladrones'. It means 'thieves'. Surely not. Custodians, more like.  

Ronnie

Some last words, from me at least for the time being, on Mick Brown's Phil Spector book. As if the records made with the Ronettes, the Righteous Brothers, John Lennon et al weren't enough - and we know there is more story to come - the book reaches new heights. Firstly, there is the interview with Brown in which Spector is coherent, thoughtful and capable of something like wisdom. For a short time one is tempted to find some sympathy for him. Then, in the next chapter he shoots Lana Clarkson and then there's the court case.

It's not a pleasant book, of course, but it's a brilliant one that transcends the genre of pop history and becomes something much bigger and better although to care about it it is an advantage to care about pop records. It's such a good book that it prompted a poem that I hope is worthy of the name.

--

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ronnie

Her glass was always more than half empty,

The wedding ring a prison like the mansion
For the sake of it. She’s had her fill.
This wasn’t what she had expected.
She’s made him so proud of her 

She’s an exhibit too priceless to show,

Locked away among his anxieties 

And guns.
                  The walls are the walls 

Of an unsound mind, the world 

Outlandishly much smaller 

Than she thought it would be. 

She wasn’t crazy about him 

Orchestrating everything. 

And, if he has the chance,

He’ll never let her go.

- 

It's at an early stage that one usually needs to decide if a poem is going to be in metre or not. I like them to be if they can but wouldn't want to be the sort of poet that is exclusively either metrical or not so. With the second line having 11 syllables and resistant to being reduced, I typed in a few lines that I could look at later.

Having reached an impasse, I added a few more the next day, not convinced it amounted to much more than a loose accumulation of lines but I liked them. One can't say it's too 'loose' with every line echoing with allusion or wider reference, like the line endings 'fill' and 'expected' and so I moved a line or two about, amended the punctuation and eventually printed it out to look at.

I think it's a poem and the longer it goes without being further amended the more likely it is to solidify as it is. In the same way that paint dries or molten metals harden, that which had looked temporary or 'in progress' begins to look finished. The great thing about it in recent years has been that it is only me that has to be happy with it. I wasn't always sure about the opinions of other readers anyway, whether they were overly flattering or unduly had their doubts.

It remains to be seen if it stays on the A list of 'publishable' items to be included in the Collected Poems or if it drops onto the B list of out-takes. Agnetha Afterwards is borderline, not necessarily because it's not a good enough poem but because I wonder if I have any authority to write such a thing but the triptych of poems on women artists in isolation doesn't need any more than Escape Artist, for Rosemary, due soon in the anthology of the Medway Libraries 'Circle of Six' project. 

So, a poem indeed. And probably time for another six months of rest.

Elizabeth Bishop Exam Questions

It's been 'pop' music here recently, I can't help but notice. We can't have that all the time. It's a relatively quiet period for lunchtime concerts.

A few years ago I was doing what I could to help a friend with her Open University essays. Shostakovich, Ovid, Heaney and Hughes, that sort of thing. I was looking forward to the C20th Literature course and Elizabeth Bishop because I hoped the essay question might direct some attention to what it is about her poems that makes her quite the paragon example. But it wasn't to be. My friend chose to do Children's Literature and so I got some time off.

But it recently occurred to me that there would be exam questions on Elizabeth Bishop on the internet and there are,

Elizabeth Bishop Exam Questions

They don't help much, mostly only giving candidates the opportunity to write what they know, or think.

But maybe it was a bad idea and I was expecting too much. Maybe the reason why she is one of the poets whose work I haven't yet found any fault with is because one can't quite say. Maybe 'poetry' at its best is something that can remain elusive.

School and exams did their best to put us all off poetry by reducing it to the 'I-Spy' project of identifying alliteration, assonance, rhyme and even irony, ambiguity, synecdoche and zeugma. I'd much rather poetry didn't do such things, or at least make any effort to. It's much more impressive to 'be any good' without having shown how hard you've tried.

And that's why Elizabeth Bishop is 'any good' - because it's not easy to say why. Detachment, I reckon, has a lot to do with it. Putting some distance between what is being said and what it might, possibly, mean. But even that is straying a bit close to irony.

Now that we live in an age that allows biographical references back in and accepts that the text does not exist in isolation from the time and circumstances in which it was written, my main reasons for admiring her, as well as the poems, are that she was hospitalized for five days after a drinking session and that, at the age of about 59 or 60, she found her glasses in the fridge which meant the milk must be on her desk.

They don't make them like that anymore.

I've generally always thought that 'novelist' was a proper job and 'poet' almost something one did for pleasure, like some do gardening, and it didn't matter what sort of job one made of it. It's best not to worry because most poetry is terrible. Good poetry is almost impossible.

In trying to fend off the seven months since I've written a poem I liked much becoming eight, I have committed some lines to a Word doc on the subject of Ronnie Spector, see below, but it's not quite happening and so is likely to show tell-tale signs of having been 'worked on' and so it's likely to go with the failed companion piece on Agnetha Fältskog and await an idea for a third female pop icon to make a triptych of bad tributes.

But, you never know. In retrospect, I'm not sure what all the fuss was about with Blondie once we'd been treated to Denis but she eventually came back with Maria which was the best thing she ever did so one never quite gives up hope. And we are back on pop music again. Sorry about that.

They Lost That Lovin' Feeling

If the reason for reading Mick Brown's Tearing Down the Wall of Sound had been to investigate the relationship between madness and genius in this particular case, which it was, I'm not disappointed. I think it's always particular to each case, though. In this case, the insecurities of a small, geeky man who at least had the talent to develop his obsession with the pop music on the radio into a deep understanding of how it was made.

'Genius' is a big word but, like Thomas Edison might have meant, it's not necessarily all innate and requires some nurturing. Spector knew how to make a pop record, though.

Having read Ronnie's account in Be My Baby, though, there are differences to be found in perspectives to be had. Ronnie presents herself as a picture of innocence whereas Brown thinks she knew plenty, not least in marrying Spector for the benefit of her career. It effectively lasted four months although the wedding night was ominous enough.

Spector was most concerned that his girlfriend wasn't left with the Rolling Stones, especially, when touring the UK and would engage in long late night phone calls when she was away in a hotel to assure himself she was with nobody else. That contrasts with Yoko Ono's attitude to her marriage to John when she suggested he should have an affair with May Pang, much to both of their surprise, but they did as they were told. 

Maybe Lennon didn't have easy relationships with anybody, not unlike Spector, and so it is almost inevitable that they soon find difficulties of their own. I might take issue with Mick Brown that Lennon's Rock'n'Roll album, some of which was retrieved from sessions produced by Spector, was soon forgotten because Stand By Me is the best solo Lennon thing there ever but, yes, George was the most immediately successful Beatle with All Things Must Pass because he had all the songs The Beatles wouldn't do saved up for a triple album.

Books on pop music history aren't all as good as they could be, being written sometimes by devoted admirers or from a partisan point of view but it is usually of interest to find out what was going on behind those beguiling confections on the wireless. It would appear that the initial failure of You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling in America was a decisive fracture in Spector's run of success and resulted in a loss of self-belief, which is a big loss for someone who needed as much of it as he did. However, Mick Brown's job on Phil Spector is as compelling, and deeply researched, as any I can think of. It doesn't leave us thinking any better of Spector. We are surely all on Ronnie's side but even she in a way invited some of her troubles in. It is a book without an obvious hero. The story of pop music remains the story of what horrors went on beneath its surface while the disc jockeys played us so many wonderful records.

Steeleye Span – Rave On

 

I'm guessing it's Peter Knight doing most of the vocal gymastics, oh-wha-ah-a'who'a' whoopa, on this on the grounds that, some 40 and more years ago, I remember him saying, while introducing a song, that he was a great admirer of Prof. Stanley Unwin, whose quirkilarity in the usilarouousness of the Englistic lingusistocity was in those days by some thought to be the most hightilomonious achievementimum of erodicious although it might by now look as subversive as it did then.

Buddy Holly, we also understood in those days, was the Mozart of pop song writers. I'm not quite so sure about that as I once was but the point is that Steeleye Span were prepared to try to be 'quirky', for better or worse, of which this is an example, and it only represents them in The Rock Show because I'm very short on 'rock' records that I genuinely like to fill such a show and have shifted 'folk rock' into it and programmed this after one of Buddy's less sentimental efforts.

Rave On by Steeleye Span puts on a great show of folky vocals, as if some local yokels in a Thomas Hardy novel had done it ahead of their time.

There is plenty of more representative, more genuinely folky, Steeleye Span than this and not many bands came up with more evocative album titles than Hark! the Village Wait, Ten Man Mop, Please to See the King and Parcel of Rogues.

It almost seems as if the success of having an extraordinary hit with a Latin hymn in Gaudete and then completely 'selling out' by having an album produced by such an inauthentic purveyor of pop music as David Bowie should have done for them. Success ruined a lot of artists, possibly most of those that achieved any measure of it, but you might find that Steeleye, made up of whoever they can find, recovered from such glamour and stuck to what they did best.

As long as Maddy Prior is doing the front stage, top line part, they still can but, just looking at their website, she is the only one left from the 70's so it's really 'Maddy & Friends'.      

The Dark-Eyed Sailor

 

Steeleye Span are on the list for the Perfect Day of Pop Radio feature one day but they get in ahead of that for having been my unsuccessful suggestion for this morning's Radio 3 Playlist Challenge to follow up a somewhat less entrancing setting of The Dark-Eyed Sailor by Vaughan-Williams.

Steeleye were among my early 70's, early teenage favourites and, although it's maybe twenty years since I played the disc that has this on, originally from Hark ! the Village Wait, 1970, it has lasted the course. There is something about one's first enthusiasms that stays with you.

So, thank you to Georgia Mann and her producers for prompting the memory of this even if they didn't see fit to include it in their selections.

The Mamas & the Papas, Do You Wanna Dance

 

It's not necessarily the song, it's the way it's done. The Shadows put in one of their finest performances as Cliff's support band in 1962 but that was an entirely different thing to the Mamas & the Papas relaxed harmonies on their first album in 1966 and different again was a version by the T. Rex Disco Party on the B side of Dreamy Lady. The Beach Boys also had a go but they were all paying tribute, and royalties, to Bobby Freeman who wrote and recorded it in 1958.

Anybody who does better than a Cliff classic and, admittedly, not one of T. rex, most memorable outings, is doing well but the Mamas & the Papas must always be in with a chance, re-imagining what I had thought was a Cliff record. Gentle and sensitive before rising to something quite impassioned, it was a revelation when I first found it and it is some measure of their achievement that it was only filling out the album and never a single for them.

They had plenty of options but this hidden-away treasure was once quite a find, hasn't lost anything in the decades since and is possibly really their masterpiece.

Call My Bluff

 

The seasons call our bluff regularly these days often being out of kilter with traditional expectations. Eventually all the poems that described such things as Aprille's shoures sote, No This, No That, November or how October is marigold will need to be footnoted to explain way what have become incomprehensible  stereotypes of those times of year. But it's been Spring-like today and the plan is to attend the cricket on Friday for an absurdly early visit to the Bowl but that's when Nottinghamshire are due there. I hope Basharat Hassan, Derek Randall and Gamani Gooneseena are in good form. 

However, it's not all fun. One does have to do 'something useful' once in a while if only to assuage one's conscience. Practical jobs and I have never gone well together and any attempt at one runs a high risk of leaving the job looking worse than it did before I started. But painting is surely non-technical enough not to need somebody to do it for me. In nearly 25 years in this house I've maybe painted no more than 25% of its walls and very little of its ceilings and it begins to show. It's not until one takes a room apart that one finds how far short of an exhibition home it has fallen. So, today was the bedroom ceiling done in the homely company of Matt Chorley, Mariella Frostrup and finally Fi Glover and Jane Garvey on Times Radio. That might have been the hard part. I selected a shave of Duck Egg Blue for the walls which I'll apply tomorrow, whether with Times Radio or Radio 3 remains to be seen. But I already feel virtuous and I hope the ceiling is worth 7/10.

I deserve at least a 1997 Call My Bluff,something of a pop music special with Adam Faith, George Martin, Cliff and Bob Holness who so very famously didn't play the saxophone on Baker Street. But there's Vicky's dad, Alan, Suzanne Dando, who I'm glad to find wasn't murdered, or married to Sam Torrance, so I was thinking of someone else, and an early cersion of Sandi Toskvig that's not very different from the current one. One might say 'they don't make them like that anymore' but they do, they just do it with people you've never heard of.

Portsmouth Choral Union - St. Matthew Passion

 Music in Portsmouth

Some words regarding Saturday night's Matthew Passion by the Portsmouth Choral Union.