The Magnetic Fields - You Must be Out of Your Mind

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCAVTapPOm0

Some people's idea of the greatest pop concerts might be of a vast stadium with thousand upon thousand of fans waving flags and singing along, or of ageing long-haired guitar heroes (who might be necessarily a bit shorter-haired by now) making some immense racket through piled-up speakers and amps and the suspicion that class A drugs were involved.

O, no, not me. Stephin has a cup of tea in the first half, at least. And it's much more like a chamber concert. You Must be Out of Your Mind is almost a composite Merritt song, as if he isn't exactly stretching his talent any more. But it will do just fine. As long as our seats at The Barbican don't have other people's heads getting in the way as much as this.

My Cultural Life

I'm in The Observer today, the review section having begun a feature called My Cultural Life. One doesn't mind them editing it but it would be better if they didn't make it mean the opposite of what I'd said. The misunderstanding occurs when they think Danny Baker's show is a football phone-in, but never mind. You can't believe anything you read in the papers. What I sent in was this,

My Cultural Life

I keep Radio 5 on most of the time at home but have developed the quick reactions needed to switch over to Radio 3 when a football phone-in starts. Danny Baker is back to his glorious best on Saturday mornings while Radio 3 often succeeds if you don’t check what’s on and let it surprise you.
I’ve been reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson after hearing so much about it. After a slow start it has picked up very well and is starting to live up to its reputation. But I don’t read very much fiction these days. I’ve been looking at The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara to decide once and for all if his casual vernacular deserves to be treated as important poetry. I’m still not sure but it is a likeable book. On order is Identity Parade, a forthcoming anthology of British and Irish poets that have emerged since the mid-1990’s edited by Roddy Lumsden. Poets are looking younger these days, like policemen have been doing for a long time, and it will be interesting to see what they are up to.
Also on order is Thomas Ades’ CD, Violin Concerto & Tevot. Some reviews virtually demand you buy certain items although one needs to read between the lines a bit to decide if the reviewer is on your wavelength. CD’s suddenly seem so old-fashioned and I can’t remember when I last went into a shop for one but one-click buying is alarmingly easy to do. The Magnetic Fields’ Realism was another potent mixture of dark humour and gorgeous romanticism. It is unlikely that the achievement of 69 Love Songs will be repeated but they are my favourite pop act by a distance and we are looking forward to seeing them again, at the Barbican next month.

Flat Earth

Flat Earth

Aristotle knew the earth wasn’t flat.
Ships don’t drop off the edge but slide from view
as gradually as new stars appear
as one travels south. And, not only that,
the summer solstice sun cast no shadow
at Syene, though Alexandria

had shade at the same time. The earth is curved,
as Eratosthenes could demonstrate
and did. Who also knew Egypt was hot
before the invention of temperature,
Farenheit, Celsius or centigrade.
And here is further proof that it is not:

It had to be like that – for space and time
demand that they turn back on themselves,
thus neither earth or universe are flat
when you set off in search of wealth or fame,
so young, promiscuous and vain, or else
you wouldn’t meet yourself on the way back.

Thomas Ades

Ades, Tevot, Violin Concerto, Berlin Philharmonic/Rattle et al (EMI)

British music has been in good form in the last decade or two. John Tavener is now the old guard, his Protecting Veil a masterpiece and popular success; James Macmillan now middle-aged, whose Veni, Veni Emmanuel is a regular concert item and Seven Last Words from the Cross a sublime personal favourite of mine and so, how time flies, Thomas Ades (b.1971) is the big noise although it might seem that he's been around for some years, because he has.

Tevot is a big noise, too. The notes usefully explain that,

'Tevot' is a Hebrew word that connotes both musical bars and Biblical 'arks', Noah's miraculous vessel and the Ark of the Covenant. And Ades is quoted as saying that the earth is an ark carrying us through the chaos of space in safety.

I think I remember Lieutenant Pigeon using a similar metaphor to enlighten us on the conceptual complexity of Mouldy Old Dough. But, even so, one does wonder if Ades' meaning isn't alarmingly optimistic. After the obligatory soft and loud, one hears lush passages of strings and restful horns, trumpets more remote suggesting endless space but what I mainly hear is a film soundtrack to a story about a spaceship but nothing particularly profound.

The Violin Concerto 'Concentric Paths', soloist Anthony Marwood with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, is more successful, the notes referring us to Ariel, shimmering and then darker. But jumpy outbursts of sound do not automatically make a piece dramatic. When one hears such interjections in every other contemporary concert on Radio 3, they become a default compositional device and not very shocking at all. There is no doubting Marwood's virtuoso playing, though, and it has periods of fine music and concentrated playing. The notes tell us that 'the exhausted soloist (is) reduced to noise making at the bottom of the violin's register' but, here, for once, if that is so, I'd prefer it to be more so and, if he's that exhausted, how come he has enough energy to give us the final movement of over 5 minutes.

Three Studies from Couperin give us some hope or expectation of some more satisfying baroque orderliness and the pastiche captures the necessary mood accurately but these pieces aren't the reason for the CD, and the little fillers at the end aren't supposed to be a disc's highlights. Nicely done but not essential when we could listen to Couperin himself whenever we choose.

Overture, Waltz and Finale from the opera Powder Her Face are sassy, showy and theatrical but by this time I'm wondering whether I care, I'm afraid.

So, with apologies. If sometimes, some items didn't disappoint just a little bit then it would be less of a thrill when other things give us that rare feeling that goes down your back and makes you feel more alive than what you thought you were.

This isn't it, for me, and if Thomas Ades is the leading light of his generation then I am grateful for the music that the composers of my own age and the generation before them provided. It might be asked why anybody would take the time to review something that they don't particularly like but also refuse to demolish. I think it's to show that there is an in-between area and that one just can't enthuse about everything. What would be the point of that.

Lachlan MacKinnon - Small Hours

Lachlan MacKinnon, Small Hours (Faber)

Wendy Cope has a well known poem about men being like buses. You wait ages for one then three turn up at once. Well, it would appear that the one she chose to get on was Lachlan MacKinnon because for those who didn't know, like I didn't until recently, they are now married.

Mackinnon is a fine, quiet and thoughtful poet. Much of this latest book is taken up with elegies for friends, and most of it, in fact, by The Book of Emma, an extended biographical work mostly in prose in memory of a friend, Emma Smith, who was a contemporary at Oxford. I'm not sure if that makes it a prose poem and would rather not know. Anybody who knows what a prose poem is probably has too much time on their hands. But like the poems, it is economically written, in short sentences but builds into both a fragmentary personal memoir, shifting in time, and a devoted tribute.

Emma wasn't a girlfriend as such but greatly admired in a way that perhaps goes beyond such a relationship. What MacKinnon can do, and does elsewhere, is suggest something beyond the words that the words are inadequate to say, which is hopefully what the very best poetry aspires to do but most poetry fails in.

A similar idea comes at the end of In Memory of Keith Darvill,

Oh, the silences

men keep between them

when what they are keeping back

is what would spoil in being said.

He moves easily between poems in rhyme and metre and free verse forms, as again is something that the finest modern poets are able to do so that neither option completely defines him although perhaps the free verse here is marginally preferable. So, having said that, we will forgive him A Suffolk Sketchbook which looks suspiciously as if it is written in haiku and thus, for a poet in English, usually punishable by a stint of community service.

Midlands meditates upon history in unregarded places and how they are now in a melancholy, Larkinesque view of England,

I thought of close skies

darkened to monochrome,

of rain teeming

in streets of little market-towns

that turned to manufacturing.

Small Hours, on the slightly dubious ground of looking like a poem about poetry, defines it more memorably than most in,

all you want is a few words

that will say how it was for us

at one a.m. on a Wednesday morning

so clearly that a thousand years may hear.

Canute is a fine poem, as is Edward Thomas. Two touchstones of modesty and humanity that serve any poet as fine models. MacKinnon is aware of the vastness beyond, the unsayable size of his philosophical concerns and it is interesting in The Book of Emma that he declares a religious faith while admitting that true atheism is 'as tough a faith as any'. And, elsewhere reflects,

But a western mind reels at the thought of a world in which the existence of God is not even a question because nothing exists and only nothing. Few atheists deny their own being.

The Book of Emma will be worth returning to again and again. It makes the thought of prizes seem a little tawdry but if Small Hours doesn't feature on all the shortlists and take a generous share of this year's awards then something will have been seriously amiss.

From the archives - Diana

Now that there are some days that The Daily Express don't actually lead on a story about Diana, it might be time for some of the rest of us to publish something on the subject.

I took these photographs on the day, probably in 1990, but it says exactly when on the inscribed stone on the entrance, that she came and opened the extension to Portsmouth Cathedral. She was accompanied by David Stancliffe, who went on to be Bishop at Salisbury, but then was still putting on marvellous performances of Bach cantatas in Portsmouth.

I wasn't one so involved with Diana's death that I needed to buy Elton John's record by the handful but there didn't seem anything else to do on the day she was brought home but to watch it on telly.

Such luminaries as Ted Hughes, Maya Angelou and Carol Ann Duffy published poems in the Sunday papers, as well as, one supposes, any number of lesser known poets some of who might have been writing their first ever poem.

But it wasn't until an image stuck with me from the funeral that I joined in and I've since read that poems that refer to Icarus are often the first to be dismissed when judging poetry competitions. Well, I can live with that. This poem first appeared in the microscopically limited edition Line Drawings that I printed in 1997, that included poems about prominent 'celebrities', from Stephen Hawking to Gianni Versace and from Lisa Simpson to Banana Yoshimoto. The Diana poem appears in Re-read, Selected Poems, still available for a mere three and a half pounds (inc. p&p) or near offer.

But these are the words I made out of it.

Diana

There she goes. London's never been as quiet
as this -a vast but passive riot
has occupied it. One last summer day
is arrived to watch her taken away.

Perhaps I thought of Icarus but then
decided that no such comparison
was needed. Let her remain human if
she can before she is made into myth.

Horizon after horizon she goes through,
returning home, a life folding back into
itself, flowers raining in on the hearse
like a soft explosion in reverse.

6.9.97

Top 6 and Poetry Please Review - Tony Harrison

Poetry isn't well-served by radio. Ian McMillan's tiggerish enthusiasm on The Verb would be best saved for the under-fives and Roger McGough's Poetry Please is a comfort zone that will from time to time throw up an item of interest and one is grateful for small mercies. However, the poems are mostly read by actorly types that make many of the poems sound the same.

Although not all poets are great readers of their own poems it is preferable to hear them try. So in the current series, it is most laudible of them to be featuring a poet or two doing just that. And Tony Harrison is one of the finest at it, his rich dark tones remaining with you whenever you read his poems afterwards.

Today's was a better than average Poetry Please, with Roger offering his biographical note on Thom Gunn after a reading of the surfing poem From the Wave and then Harrison introducing his powerful Newcastle is Peru.

But usually, the companion programme in Radio 4's poetry slot, Adventures in Poetry, is capable of doing more in half an hour by telling the story behind just one poem.

But, while we are at it, the venerable old leftist bard is overdue his turn on Top 6.

His most recent books have perhaps not been his best and the couplets and heavy rhymes that refer back to his classical background have threatened to descend into the doggerel they previously transcended. I was surprised to see his last book the subject of a paper at the British and Irish Contemporary Poetry academic conference at Oxford in 2006 because the earlier work is surely more worthy of attention.

A Kumquat for John Keats and Cypress and Cedar are somehow companion pieces thematically contrasting sweetness and bitterness in finely made meditations.

The Birds of America, about the profligate use of wildlife in Audaubon's artistic methods, and Loving Memory, where he walks the Malvern Hills in search of the grave of Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale, are both from a set called Art & Extinction. The latter is selected partly on account of his brooding reading of it and partly for its great opening line, The fosses where Caractacus fought Rome.

Whereas I'll take The Icing Hand for its last line, along with all its others, that makes fine music as well as punctuating itself so very conscientiously, and first, ebbing, salts, then, flowing, floods this line.

And it wouldn't be right to pick six Harrison poems without including v, the film-poem made unnecessarily controversial by tabloid newspapers, or one in particular, that found it shocking for its perfectly legitimate use of four-letter words when it really should have been celebrated for everything else about it.

Formalism

A rigorous formal challenge is a useful exercise for any poet although it can be taken to such extremes that it is rendered somewhat pointless.

What I thought I'd try to do, and have just done, is write a 26-line poem in which the lines begin with a,b,c, in alphabetical order and end with z,y,x in reverse order and have 10 syllables per line.
Why, I don't know. But here it is, anyway.

An A-Z of Music and back again

A saxophonist who liked to play some jazz
Before bedtime, at the end of the day,
Couldn’t, for some strange reason, find his sax,
Didn’t know where it was, although he knew,
Even though he’d lent it to some spiv,
For one night only, and, in fact, in lieu-
God only knows why- of some short-term debt
He owed. So had to go to bed, undress
In silence that night, jazzless, and under
Just a bit of duress, but PDQ,
Keeping his socks on so that he could slip
Lightly out of bed to fetch his kazoo
Meanwhile if he could formulate a plan,
Not giving up hope of his late-night jam,
Only if he was he able to recall
Perhaps if it was in among the stack,
Quaintly kept from when he was a D.J.,
Roughly somewhere behind his old hi-fi
So that is where he first began his search.
Then, in the midnight hour, he was agog,
Unsurprisingly, for it was as if
Very lucky for him a love supreme
Was looking after him for there he found
Xylophones and the means to make music
You couldn’t have imagined. Here’s the rub-
Zestfully, he played excerpts from opera.

Valentine

I spoil you, I really do. Only four months since presenting the world with a whole booklet of poems - 14 of them in all, here's another one already. And that makes two if you count A Departure from last Autumn. I'm not sure either will make the final selection for whatever book comes next but at least you can see I'm trying my best.

I've been looking through Sophie Hannah's poems with a view to her Top 6. Very witty, most amusing and with adept use of rhyme schemes, I found it hard to differentiate between them in the end, with the exception of The Cancellation, which would be my favourite. It also slightly worried me in her last book that even though she is now, according to the internet, married with children, her poems are still concentrating on settling old scores with feckless, inadequate ex-boyfriends. Nevertheless, having read so many of them, the virus catches and I found myself doing a similar thing. Not the same, though. This poem has a happier outcome.

So, with apologies to Sophie Hannah,

Valentine

She said I'd sent a valentine
to her some years before
but the occasion had slipped my mind.
I denied it and swore

that it wasn't me, I never did
but the next time we went out
she showed me it. Heaven forbid,
it was my writing, no doubt,

badly disguised, but nonetheless
it had to be from me.
It wasn't very hard to guess,
it was - obviously.

So I had to admit
writing that statement of intent
and, when I come to think of it,
it was money well spent.

Top 6 - Frank O'Hara

I've had a strange fascination with the poems of Frank O'Hara for several years, never quite sure if their casual vernacular could really be great poetry and not being a big fan of many of the names he is associated with.

It's unlikely that I'll ever read all 500 pages of the Collected but it is highly likeable, an often optimistic attitude and ad hoc quality that doesn't seem to be interested in immortality or lasting greatness. Although, of course, that might be the trick.

The best poems seem to be tributes to others, O'Hara being involved with art galleries and interested obviously in all aspects of modernist art.

The Day Lady Died is like twitter well before the fact. Perhaps his best known poem and definitive of the method he used of describing what he's doing right now. But For Poulenc is perhaps the one I like best, almost feeling its way towards some appearance of formal structure. It achieves a beautiful effect from its minimal lyricism.

It's not necessarily my fault I'm not the most ardent John Ashbery fan. I sometimes think I've appreciated the great playful nuance of his linguistic tours de force but I'm usually left feeling that I haven't quite seen the point of it. O'Hara might be of some help with this, though, in A Note to John Ashbery which is a tribute perhaps framed in similarly exotic imagery but a more accessible style.

River is desperately erotic and maybe Keatsian in a way, almost too much hyperbole but far, far lovelier than anything produced by Ginsberg, whose immediacy and much-vaunted energy was actually the result of much re-drafting and not quite as 'off the cuff' as it purported to be.

A Short History of Bill Berkson is an inventive narrative in fragmentary, drunken excerpts and Why I am Not a Painter is an equally effective little vignette. It is remarkable, that having died in 1966 in an apparently freak accident, how many of his poems are like much of what appeared in fashionable magazines in the 70's and yet are so much better than them.

There will be much more to discover in this thick book but I've seen enough to understand that O'Hara was a fine and genuine poet, whose imitators weren't really up to the job; one who established a style and was different to and better than many he was associated with; who might have gone on to considerably bigger and better things, like many who died prematurely, but I do sincerely hope that this book won't make me try to write like him- even just the once- because there is no point in gilding the lily or taking cues from someone whose sensibility is so far removed from one's own.

Signed Poetry Books - Lachlan Mackinnon

(scanned image of the signature to follow)

One job I had to do returning from Poetry Live for Haiti last week was seek out more poems by Lachlan Mackinnon and I found this on Amazon new and used for the very minimum price. So, bless my cotton socks when it arrived but it has a signature on the title page - not advertised as signed but would it occur to anyone to forge a Mackinnon autograph.

And it's a likeable book, too, even occasionally providing that rare thing, a poem that one wouldn't have minded writing something a bit like.

Like the Sonnet that ends,

Falling in love's a paradox like this.

Either it happens like a thunderbolt,

So when it makes our lives make sense, it lies,

Or we had long been hoping for the kiss

That changed us, and aware how it could jolt

Our beings, we could suffer no surprise.

It is, in its best places, a quiet, appreciative little book, betraying the dramatic implications of its title. But gentleness and thought can have just as big implications as big bangs.

However, what struck me as much as anything about the volume was the dreadfulness of the blurb, the terrible critical language that is meant to imply such deep readings but actually says almost nothing. It says,

'The Jupiter Collisions' includes two subtle and intriguingly constructed sequences of linked poems, in which the canvas of personal matter (love, loss, contingency) is stretched across a frame of phiolosophical concerns in a poetry which is as unafraid of thinking - 'the heaven of ideas'- as it is firmly vested in 'the pointillisme of what is'.

Well, I never. If I'd seen that first, I'm sure it would have put me off buying the book in the first place. So there is certainly such a thing as bad blurb which persuades one not to buy a book one would have liked.

It is to be hoped that Mackinnon's books on Shakespeare and C20th poetry's Baudelairean inheritance are inexpensively available and equally rewarding and perhaps one day here I'll be able to confirm that they are.

The Poetry of Stuart A. Paterson

It is remarkable what you find when you're not looking for it. It often turns out to be much more interesting that what you were looking for and my room upstairs full of old magazines, concert and theatre programmes, essays and music on cassettes all dusty, dry and yellowing is a place where it is quite likely to happen.

I was looking for an envelope to fulfil that rare thing, an order for books from David Green (Books), when I came across some letters from the poet Stuart Paterson from 1997. He was a friend of a friend and for a time we exchanged a few letters in the days of typewriters or handwritten correspondance. I had forgotten much of those days and was surprised to see how generous he was about my poems. Except that he was the successful poet with the proper book out and, just up until the time it was going to feature my poems, editor of Spectrum, a fine poetry magazine in which I might have first discovered Martin Mooney's poems.

Stuart's book, Saving Graces (Diehard, 1997), was an impressive debut, traditional and formal in many ways. It celebrated nature, had a sense of place and history and was accessible and lucid. All that you need for a fine book of poems, in fact, which is what it is. A Rush of Memory by Polmaise is a personal history of kissing; the title poem is a little meditative masterpiece, Sunsets is a superb elegy to finish on.

Internet research suggests that Stuart might not have pursued his career in poetry that promised so much. His friend and associate Hugh McMillan seems to be regretting as much and the Scottish poetry scene that he seemed to inhabit with Tom Pow and Stewart Conn would have been the better for his contribution. But he might not have disappeared completely. He seems to be travelling, making the most of it all, and so you never know when or where he might choose to reappear.

There was talk of a second volume of poems but I've not been able to trace a copy of it. It would have, no doubt, included perhaps Stuart's best poem John's Christmas, 1992 about the suicide of a neighbour, who left Stuart a note and a can of beer, that ends,

The distance between now and then
I still can’t judge as well as one
small backstep to oblivion;
and then, you know, from there to here,
and soberness with one tin of beer,
has never come so awfully quick.
I drank the beer. Of course I did.

I'm glad I found that poem when I went back to look upstairs again.

Rope - Almeida Theatre

Rope by Patrick Hamilton, Almeida Theatre, Feb 3.

Patrick Hamilton's first major stage success was first performed in 1929, as the Jazz Age reached its decadent height and the crash and depression were soon to follow upon. It takes as its starting point Nietzsche's idea that there is no good and evil, just human perceptions of them and so anything is allowed. Thus two Oxford students murder another for the sake of it and then organize a party with the corpse in a chest at the centre of it as an attempt at audacious bravura before disposing of it.

The Almeida's production, being 'in the round' gave everybody a different view of the action but the movement of the actors throughout meant that it wasn't a limiting factor from anyone's particular viewpoint. It was not perhaps as much of a thriller as one might have thought, lacking tension but gaining much in humour and character acting. Hamilton's career might have trailed off to a sad parody of itself and then nothing at all in his last years but this comes from his early years and contains some of his sharpest writing.

The acting is fine throughout with Blake Ritson and Alex Waldmann as the accomplices in murder, Brandon and Granillo; Henry Lloyd-Hughes is a fine, dithering toff; Philip Arditti the excellnt butler; Phoebe Waller-Bridge is as vacuous a party animal as the flapper generation could have produced and Michael Elwyn (coincidentally the father of the dead body) and Emma Dewhurst completed the cast but Bertie Carvel as the aesthete, poet with well-founded suspicions, Rupert is the main feature. In the same way as I recently saw again Jonathan Pryce as Lytton Strachey completely overshadow Emma Thompson as Dora Carrington in the film Carrington, it is perhaps not the main protagonist who makes the show the success that it is.

Fixing the murderers with his baleful eye and expressing himself in the most precise and erudite terms, Carvel's Cadell (pictured) is a treat. When asked how his poetry and 'big work' is going, he replies,

Indeed, it promises to be not only the best thing I have ever written, but the best thing I have ever read.

Brandon and Granillo are psychopaths, the dark underside of the Jazz Age and will hang. The play, at least in this renewal, is a study of such psychology rather than a suspense drama but it is none the worse for that. The Almeida is a great little theatre, too. I'm afraid there's hardly any time left to see the play which ends on Saturday but I can at least recommend the theatre. Do go.

Top 6 - The Magnetic Fields

The Top 6 is usually a feature about poets but once in a while there's no reason why it can't include something else and so, to mark the release of Realism, and their forthcoming visit to England, let's do the mighty Magnetic Fields.

It was quite a day, sometime perhaps in 2004 it might have been, when my friend lent me a disc with some songs on it. I'd turned down several offers before. I'd listened to The Flaming Lips and thought that was amusing enough. Luckily I gave this next one a chance and I'm glad I did. It kept me interested enough to keep listening until it unleashed Papa Was a Rodeo and gave me one of those rare spine-tingling moments. Such a gorgeous arrangement and yet such dark, unromantic words. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at And now it's fifty-five years later,/We've had the romance of the century. I knew this was something special and from that moment on, I've collected everything else by them and I've all but ended my interest in pop music by finding my all-time favourite group.

The Book of Love is not far behind as a masterclass of understated lyricism, so proper and apparently stilted but full of passionate depth and understanding. This balance between playful irony and expression of love has never been done better.

The great L.D. Beghtol guests on 69 Love Songs to great effect, with a lighter voice than Stephin's, on All My Little Words. Not for all the tea in China,/Not if I could sing like a bird,/Not for all North Carolina,/Not for all my little words.

One April Day is Stephin alone rather than The Magnetic Fields but needs to be in here, sublimely minimal and somehow Chinese perhaps, but pared down to a perfect simplicity that says it only once, so you need to play it three times to get the usual effect of a repetitive pop song.

I Don't Really Love You Anymore is a joyous outpouring of being 'over it', while still remembering every dress you ever wore. He's just the bad comedian/Your new boyfriend's better than who would have, for her (or him) moved to Ecuador and chopped wood to keep (them) warm. The trademark sound of cello and banjo was never better than here and I did once go into a music shop to be shown a few banjos in the hope I might be able to play such a song. Later, I was told that a definition of a gentleman is one who can play the banjo but doesn't. I still can't and, to be fair, I don't suppose many people think I am.

I do wish that when they came to London in 2008 on such a torrential day in August (was it), that they had played All the Umbrellas in London. They didn't but perhaps they hadn't seen how much it was raining. Their instruments had gone somewhere else and their flight from Dublin had been delayed. We were lucky they got there at all, with borrowed instruments, but it was fantastic and, I've been heard to say, I wouldn't have swapped all the other pop concerts I've seen for that one.

I'm not expecting this year's Barbican concert to be as good, second time around, as that in the Cadogan Hall. And I think it's perfectly understandable that no subsequent album is going to be as good as 69 Love Songs. One is just grateful. I once made a Magnetic Fields Top 30 in which number 30 seemed to me to compare very well with whatever would be number 30 in a list of Tamla Motown or The Beatles, or anybody else you care to mention.

But that's what being a fan is like. Not everything they ever did is perfect but nobody seems to hold that against Shakespeare.

Top 6 - Films

I don't know much about films- certainly never seen Star Wars and can't think of a reason why I'd want to- but to celebrate the occasion of the first film review on this website, films get their Top 6, which are-

Noce Blanche with Bruno Cremer as the middle-aged philosophy lecturer and Vanessa Paradis as the enfant terrible student in a study of devastating 'amour fou'. Although not a regular film-goer, it can be an art form of great power and do things equal to literature or music, and did so to me when we saw this in the early 90's.

Tous les Matins du Monde featuring Depardieu pere et fils as the young and then older composer Marin Marais in the adaptation of Pascal Quignard's novel was another sumptuous and fine thing.

As well as Depardieu, my other favourite acting artist is Emmanuelle Beart (pictured) whose best work is Un Coeur en Hiver in which for strictly artistic reasons she manages to keep her clothes on all the way through. Presumably because it said she had to in the contract.

In order to show I'm not completely land-locked in French cinema of the 1990's, I will include Brando and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire. Don't you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans.

But back with the master, Quand j'etais Chanteur grew and grew from what seemed like a vehicle for the ageing Gerard to an understated work of gentle humour and commentary on middle age.

Which leaves one more choice from so many possibilities but one is only allowed to mention one. Boris Karloff's superb monster in The Bride of Frankenstein is more human than his creator and I hope if and when I see it again, it will be just as moving.