Desert Island Discs

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/desert-island-discs

At last, after all these years, an invitation from the BBC to choose my Desert Island Discs. I've done it several times since the 1970's and the old website had a regular feature with guests sharing their eight records, book and luxury. And now we can all have a go.
I'm not sure how many of mine will make it onto a most popular eight but, with apologies to Handel, Marc Bolan, Al Green, Francois Couperin, Gregory Isaacs, Deitrich Buxtehude, The Velvet Underground, Puccini and the whole of Tamla Motown except Diana Ross, all of who were well in contention, I went for-

Thomas Tallis, Spem in Alium
Monteverdi, Vespers 1610
Bach, The Well-Tempered Klavier
Aretha Franklin, One Step Ahead
The Magnetic Fields, All My Little Words
Mozart, Soave il vento
Diana Ross, I'm Still Waiting
Josquin Desprez, Deploration sur la mort de Johannes Ockeghem

Welcome Back, Danny

The nicest surprise I've had for a long time was at about two minutes to nine last Saturday morning when the Radio 5 presenter said Danny Baker was resuming his 9 to 11 o'clock spot, like, in two minutes' times.

I don't write to denigrate the inadequacy of his interim replacements but it hadn't taken me long to migrate to Radio 3's morning of CD reviews for satisfactory Saturday morning radio but I'm back on 5 again now and the scholarly reflections on new releases of high-minded musicianship will have to wait. One listener had wondered whether, during his illness, Danny had been taking pink medicine, brown medicine or no medicine at all.

This is the most welcome comeback I can remember. Danny is the broadcasting genius of our generation and now well into my second decade of listening, and just occasionally sending in a contribution, to his tireless stream of chat-tastic entertainment, I'm more than used to it but not in the least wearying of it. Although we might be tempted to drip on about dumbing down in broadcasting values, how much we miss Bamber Gascoigne, Robert Robinson or A.J.P. Taylor, one might reflect on how it would have looked if we'd have lost Danny Baker. That would have been another Golden Age untimely over with.

His guest tomorrow, usually on between 10 and 10.30, is due to be Stephen Fry, the more ubiquitous and differently erudite pretender to his title of Greatest Living Englishman. They are bound to be good. It could not be otherwise. We have a lot of catching up to do.

Top 6 - Katherine Mansfield

I feel as though I ought to be reading new fiction or at least catching up with some of the many classics that my feeble education hasn't yet covered but I've been taking advantage of a hiatus in fresh reading material by re-reading one or two old favourites. Sometimes they are not quite as good as one remembers but other times they show they have retained all the qualities and greatness that you admired so much the first time.

I'm glad to say that Katherine Mansfield's short stories have been thoroughly as good as I thought they were 20 and more years ago.

Bliss and The Garden Party collected her best work, published posthumously. And The Stranger among these is the one that made the biggest impression now as a husband meets his wife off a liner after a long absence. It transpires that on the voyage a young man died in his wife's arms, the two of them alone, and it leaves any number of unanswered questions in his mind, and

They would never be alone together again.

The theme is not unlike that of The Dead by Joyce except it is more compact and simpler in form but equally beautifully made and moving.

Pictures tells a story of an out of work singer and her deluded search for opportunities to perform on stage in lesser roles. One can see the ending coming from a little way out but it is nonetheless a finely-observed and elegantly written story.

In the great tradition of Chekov, that includes Turgenev, George Moore, Joyce and more recently William Trevor, Katherine Mansfield's stories are of ordinary lives and everyday struggles. She can do a great line in brittle or even slightly unhinged hope or happiness but one can be confident it is undermined by character or circumstances. Her First Ball is an exciting evening of rapture and possibility; one can see the suitor in Mr. and Mrs. Dove can't help but be out of his depth in love and the Life of Ma Parker has some more of the immacualtely observed and realized writing that one begins to take for granted in these stories. Some sympathy is due to the writer of whichever fiction one reads after Katherine Mansfield because it is going to have to be doing something special if it isn't to suffer in comparison.

I could leave the selection at 5, partly to balance the the time I picked 7 cover versions in a previous Top 6, but might mention the description of bliss in the opening pages of Bliss.

The tuberculosis that took Katherine Mansfield at the untimely age of 34 in 1923 robbed literature of another 40 years, perhaps, of writing from one who could only have been a major figure to put alongside Virginia Woolf and the great names of that period and the whole twentieth century. She's long been my idea of a major literary idol anyway and a bit of re-reading has done nothing but confirm her as that.

Luckily, there are copies of a biography at nothing prices on Amazon New & Used and so finding out more of her own story is going to fill the available gap I have in my reading for the time being. As well as all the above unmitigated praise that I have for her, and more, she also provides a timely reminder why there is no point, simply no point, in me trying to write fiction if one is in competition with writing like hers.

Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre

Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Sonates Pour Violon, Les Dominos (Ricercar)

Music good enough for Louis XIV is surely more than good enough for me, three hundred years later in a noticeably less graceful, more brutally desensitised time.

Stately, lachrymose, spritely or in singing style, these sonatas for violin, bass viol, keyboard and theorbo continuo provide courtly entertainment enough for those with refined taste, the subtleties no doubt being lost on me, and it was meandering pleasantly enough along until the Aria of Sonata 5, presumably known to Louis as Track 26 on this CD, drew one in and insinuated itself with its poignant devices. Tender and unassuming, a conversation between the two string instruments, it went beyond its formal courtesies and obligations to express some awful sadness that betrays the possibilities of love.
One piece can open up a collection, whether in music or poetry, and having appreciated one part, the others are lifted by it, too. The Aria at the end of Sonata 6, which sounds Scottish to me, ends the collection on a rural, folktune theme, is another simple but arresting movement that sends one back to the rest of the disc to listen again with attention now attuned to the small but exquisitely well-made compositions.

Pure, modest, melodic and understated, this is music that will repay replaying and gain from becoming more familiar. Unfortunately, it has now dropped to number 27,323 on the Amazon chart. That's too bad.

The Hit Parade

Forty years ago, late Sunday afternoon was devoted to listening to the charts on Radio 1. It seemed important at the time and I remember thinking then that, whatever happened, I'd always keep up with the charts on a Sunday afternoon, checking whether my favourites had gone up or down.

Well, of course, that didn't last long. But I noticed on Amazon that my order for this CD led to chart listings and that although Adele is still number one, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre is already sneaking up on her at number 15,835.

This only continues a fetish I developed then to seek out the most obscure and unlikely artists in the belief that the weird, modernist or unheard of (Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, Alquin, Back Door) was somehow more cool and thus better than what everybody else thought. There are plenty of people in the poetry world still old-fashioned enough to think like that. But, rather than buy CD's of Beethoven symphonies, which are all fantastic and I had on cassettes in those days, I now can't bring myself to order much beyond these lush things from centuries ago by composers that have all but been forgotten. I suppose it's the opposite of the instant gratification of Eurovision. Do come back next week to see if I thought it was any good.

Roddy Lumsden - Terrific Melancholy

Roddy Lumsden, Terrific Melancholy (Bloodaxe)

If, contrary to the popular wisdom, we were to judge this book by its cover we would decide it was one of the best ever published. The broken-down jangle-box piano is a baroque study of decripitude redolent of high old times gone by. It is worthy of an award all of its own.

It echoes the mood and theme of much of the book, which is an artful meditation on middle-age in which Roddy Lumsden uses his customary virtuoso talents of diction, cadence, daring form and les mots plus justes which here include haecceity, scotomata, ochlophobic and glisk. So approach it armed with a dictionary or be prepared to struggle.

When Donald Davie suggested a poem was a 'considered utterance', it implied for me that some were more considered than others. Few are more considered than Lumsden's.

These poems might in places have more of a choleric edge than the previous books in which the poet could have been taken as more 'fun-loving' but he points out that,

My kismet was ultimate profundity

and humour just a stepping stone on which I found

myself, wet-shod, light-hearted, momentarily.

But, thankfully, there's not too much of that self-analysis in which poets tend to guide the reader through their poems and tell us what they're up to now. If Lumsden is ready to renounce 'wit' as comedy, it remains central to his work in its other meaning of ingenuity.

The long title poem - a 'sequence' if we must- is outstanding. In an age that might hopefully be gradually realizing that poems can go over onto the next page, it is a genuine test of a real poet to sustain something as long as 360 lines. Many can manage it to nearly the bottom of page one without mishap but this accumulation of scenes from an infatuation maintains a steady, yes, melancholic, music throughout and builds consistently into a powerful set of tableaux full of masterly verses and beautiful, well-made reflections.

The poems in the final section come from travels in America and are similarly haunted by memory, age and sometimes a sense of loss,

As in dreams we hold past lovers

who have lived on half-heartedly, and tell

us so, these coach wheels hold the road

in brief but constant purchase, the creek

holds course, sees through its downbeat drama

and in the dreamt embrace we say, I know, I know.

Earlier, in Duology,

History's dayjob

is to usher us closer to its shady marquee.

And so we age: easier to love, harder to desire.

In the American poems, this pieces in the first section and the long poem, one can hear the world-weary tone of Kleinzahler bringing an exciting and powerful eudition to bear on morose, less deceived thoughts. It is a sombre book in theme but never in its method that continues in Lumsden's customary rich and wide-ranging compass of thought.

Roddy seemed to want to downplay expectations of the book on an internet forum a few months ago. Such modesty was not necessary.

Peter Doherty

Peter Doherty, Oxford O2 Academy, May 6th.

Doherty watchers will be pleased to hear he looked healthy enough last night but it would hardly have mattered if the nation's second favourite drug taker had been groggy. All he really needs to do is play the opening chords of a song or sing the first line and his devoted followers are happy to do the rest for him. This was less a musical recital than a gathering of the faithful for a mass karaoke or community singing.
In a greatest hits selection covering Libertine, Babyshamble and solo material, the most treasured items are celebrated with word perfect congregational joining in as well as arm-waving and beer slinging. You'll have to excuse me but it's a few years now since I went to any concert where you didn't sit on a chair to listen and even then the more recent of them were more sedate affairs than this.
But, in fact, despite the allegiance on the other side of idolatry exhibited by these hardcore adherents, the quieter moments exposed a high level of chat and natter going on in the audience who were clearly not as rapt in attention in the more boring bits - bits made only fractionally more interesting by two girls doing a bad impression of ballet dancers with their parodies of pirouettes and daft dying swans.
Doherty's set, though, is an impressive mix of jaunty attitudes, nostalgic anthems to friendship and good times and slightly rambling, fey sensitivity. They are informed by a sound understanding of pop tradition and he's wise and talented enough to follow in an English lineage of songwriting whimsicality as well as wordplay. Without the involvement of the crowd, you wonder if the set would have been as easily sustainable with only acoustic guitar accompaniment but the venue here was small enough not to need a band to fill it.
Although I thought the support act, Lipstick Melodies, were derivative, old-fashioned and nothing special, the first support, the Law Abiding Citizens, were not bad at all - seemingly owing some debt to the Libertines but impressive in their succinct but neat and tidy set and it worked for me.
I'd all but forgotten that this sort of gig still went on, quite honestly. I thought it was all arenas and festivals now. It reminded me of so many such events in the 1970's and it has changed very little. But if I ever belonged there, I don't any more. I can't make myself a part of this atmosphere of excitement and adulation and I would prefer to hear the performance I paid for rather than the devotions of the converted. But that's the hardcore for you. I'm mostly more sceptical than that.