September Diary

 Late September is, as it often says here, when I really should be back at school. My friend reads Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal and, if it weren't for the latest incarnation of the battiness of our libertarian government, we hope for some sanity.

The interminable days of August seem like they'll never go away although one knows they eventually will but once they have these more lovely and more temperate days immediately zip by and are soon gone.

But with King Alexander being exactly the right horse to set up the autumn campaign with at Warwick yesterday, we can look forward to some interesting and, let's think, survivable sport while books worth reading flow in, through and either onto the shelves or back to the library.

In a moment of madness, just because I heard a Shangi-La's track I didn't know, I bought the CD. That might not be a long-term top of the playlist prospect but I'll like having such a thing.

And so, one would have it no other way. This is the promised land one spent all those years going to work to earn and if one doesn't make use of it now one only has onself to blame.

Johnson on Dryden

I had thought that Andrew Motion was the first living ex-Laureate, that Carol Ann Duffy was the second and certainly that this is the first time we've had three living laureates. The job had been for life until reformed by Blair and Motion to a 10 year stretch.

But John Dryden was removed from the post in 1689 when Protestant William III came to the throne and,

A papist could now no longer be laureate.

I should have known, it says so in Andrew's Verses of the Poets Laureate (Orion, 1999), but just because I live in a houseful of books doesn't mean I can remember what it says in all of them.

What comes out of Dr. Johnson's highly detailed commentary on Dryden is his own idea of 'poetry', which is perhaps what underlies all criticism, and criticism in its more usually understood meaning is what Johnson does. He doesn't miss a trick but, then again, his idea of poetry might not be mine, yours or ours.

He asserts that,

There was before the time of Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts.

I find that hard to believe and need go no further than Shakespeare's Sonnets and lines such as,

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:  

 

Surely such language is 'refined from the grossness of domestic use' and free from such harshness. Whether that's a good thing or not is another matter but Dr. Johnson is one of those reponsible for putting it about that poetry is a 'heightened form of language'. But so is the prose of James Joyce, to take a paragon example, and so being 'heightened' is not a characteristic only applicable to poetry. If poets and poetry could get over themselves and regard themselves less as something rarified and special they might get some of their audience back.

Johnson offers that,

Every language of a learned nation necessarily divides itself into diction scholastic and popular, grave and familiar, elegant and gross, and from a nice distinction of those different parts arises a great parts arises a great part of the beauty of style.

I don't want to throw that out completely because there might be something in it that expressed in different terms might differentiate between language intended as art and that with a purely functional role but language intended as art doesn't benefit from being restricted to the first of Johnson's binary opposites there. That he and his age thought as much might explain why from his time and for maybe a couple of hundred years afterwards, much of the poetry written seems 'a bit much' and at times unreadable at any length to us now. He seemed to find Donne a bit vulgar and I'm sure he'd find Larkin equally so if he had the chance to read him.

But one can still admire Johnson without agreeing with him. Times have changed. If Bach said he wrote music SDG, Soli Deo Gloria - For the Glory of God Alone, that doesn't prevent us from appreciating it.  

It's not easy to take to Dryden or his poems, which was as expected, but Johnson writing about him is an entertainment in itself and so the 100 pages on Pope should be worth a look before returning the Lives of the Poets, a Selection to Portsmouth libraries and hope that I'm not the last to ever trouble to read it.

Johnson on Milton

Dr. Johnson's Lives provide what he knows of the biography of the poet before assessing the work which he does thoroughly and with unsparing attention. Early in his commentary on Milton, though, he seems to anticipate C20th philosophy,

the rights of nations and of kings sink into questions of grammar if grammarians discuss them.

Isn't that what happened to questions of ontology when the likes of Wittgenstein discussed them. It's what ultimately happens when language is the only way of investigating any subject. The language becomes the subject of the investigation.

And he finds similar non-sequiturs or cul-de-sacs in Paradise Lost where Milton cannot help but describe 'incorporeal spirits' in physical terms. For some people God really was an old man in a white robe with long hair and a white beard and Milton is unable to bring into being the other occupants of the heavens without their physical manifestation either.

The main impression of Milton we are left with, though, is of a difficult man. His associate, Marvell, has left that impression, too, although he doesn't make it into Johnson's account. Marriage, we are told,

afforded not much of his happiness. The first wife left him in disgust and was brought back only by terror; the second, indeed, seems to have been more of a favourite, but her life was short. The third, as Philips relates, opprssed his children in his lifetime and cheated them at his death.

The disgust of his first wife, Mary, was caused by his Puritanism, the lady,

seems not much to have delighted in the pleasures of spare diet and hard study.

 

In this account he is a malcontent, an instinctive rebel perhaps not unlike the protagonists of his most famous poem. He is defined more by what he objects to than what he celebrates,

we know rather what he was not than what he was.

The blindness would have little to improve his temper, memorizing as much as he could of the poem before summoning someone to copy them down. He preferred Paradise Regained, the idea suggested to him by Ellwood,

Many causes may vitiate a writer's judgement of his own works, Dr. Johnson suggests, going on to say those those that were the hardest work would be those they rate most highly. I don't think so, though. Those that come most easily seem to me the best, arriving almost fully formed and only needing to be written down. Those that are hard work weren't quite there to begin with and that usually shows. No amount of editing and amendment can make them as good in the same way that no amount of practice can make a workmanlike performer into a gifted one.

He later offers a definition of poetry as,

the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason.

which predates what Keats was to make his Grecian Urn say. about Beauty and Truth. It's not the worst attempt at saying what poetry is ever seen but I'm not buying it wholesale. What I like about Dr. Johnson's approach is that pleasure is never far away in his critical apparatus and if we aren't doing it for pleasure I don't know why we'd be doing it at all.

Again, a bit ahead of his time, as well as with a long perspective on what went before, Johnson accepts that 'poetry may subsist without rhyme' but 'the subject' needs must 'support itself', which he seems to think it often doesn't unless held together by rhyme but he's good enough to credit that,

I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer, for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is.

The great thing about him is that, having forensically identified all the misgivings he can have in the work, he still admires it, which is how it should be. Woe betide those in who he finds as many faults but nothing to compensate for them. Milton, he says, owes less to his predecessors than most,

The highest praise of genius is original invention.

He admires him for having been his own man and done his own thing and,

his work is not the greatest of heroic poems only because it is not the first.

 

Next up in this selection is nearly 100 pages on Dryden. I'll have to see about that. Reading ought to be for pleasure but if I'm ever going to achieve any better appreciation of C18th poetry then 95 pages on Dryden and 111 on Pope in the company of Dr. Johnson might be the best chance I'll have.

It's a sign of the shifts in fashion that Davenant is a figure of some significance in the C17th and into the 18th but in the early pages on Dryden, it is asked by him 'whether a poet can judge well of his own productions'. Perhaps it can be decided somehow objectively but,

in those parts where fancy predominates, self-love may easily deceive.

Johnson suggests nothing can be 'pronounced good till it has been found to please', by which he means 'please others'. What he didn't go on to say was that what pleased others 200-300 years ago might not still please us now but that's another question.

Dr. Johnson's writing is 'of its time', he can't help that, but he's astute, clear-sighted and a brilliant critic. There's considerably less empty sophistry and 'rhubarb, rhubarb' in these essays than in much writing on poetry that there is now, and it's at greater length..

The next book is delayed in the post and might not be arriving and so with it not being obvious where to go next, it's now or never with Dryden and Pope. I'll read the critic for pleasure if not the poets and, you never know, he might convince me.

Johnson on Cowley

Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (A Selection, ed. J.P. Hardy) was suggested by something I read recently and the library service kindly retrieved it from their store for me. I read Cowley this morning, famous for its summary of Metaphysical poetry as,

the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together;

While Johnson remains an acute and attentive reader and useful in still making Abraham Cowley of interest when he is not so widely read, he is prescriptive and, like most critics, seems to assume that good poetry is that which fits his idea of what poetry should be. While fashions have changed a few times since 1777, commentators only being able to see things from their own manifesto positions has not.

He takes Aristotle as his starting point and justification, who 'rightly denominated' poetry 'an imitative art' but just because it can be and Aristotle said it was doesn't mean it has to be. Thus it is peremptory to announce that, 

these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated anything

 

To begin to 'unpack' that might begin by saying that not all of us care so much for the 'right to the name of poet' but, if we did, wouldn't see why we would accept his verdict anyway. But opinions have always been rigidly held, then as now, and so the good doctor was only doing what they all did then and I'm sure we still read him now because he was better at it than most.

He makes Cowley the last inheritor of the Metaphysical way of doing things, who 

wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature, as beings looking upon good and evil impassive and at leisure 

 

but that may be wherein lies the difference between then and now. There isn't a problem with being a beholder rather than a partaker now.

'Their courtship is void of fondness and their lamentation of sorrow', he says but some ironic distance or detachment is acceptable, if not even desirable, now. One admires the C18th prose style, which one could gladly read for its own sake but expressions of pure fondness or lamentation would be seen as limited now. The point that clever hyperbole is no substitute for genuine feeling might be refuted by genuine feeling not being refracted through the use of language is not of literary interest.

Donne and Cowley, he tells us,

were in very little care to clothe their notions with elegance of dress, and therefore miss the notice and the praise which are often gained by those who think less, but are more diligent to adorn their thoughts

 

but maybe now we admire something more pared down, to the point and less showy. One can't help but wish Dr. Johnson were available to apply his parameters to C20th English poets and see his assessments of Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas and Larkin.

He has rules he wants observed in versification and certainly it remains a truism that one best not end a line on a conjunction or other 'weak' word but there are no rules and such things could conceivably be the right thing to do. One has to admire the time and space spent on pointing out the recondite usages of 'does' in Ode: Upon Liberty as 'inelegance of language' without having too much sympathy for Johnson's stylistic objections.

The great thing is that, having read Cowley so closely and found whatever fault he can, he still rates him, not only,

that he was among those who freed translation from servility, and instead of following his author at a distance, walked by his side  

but also,

he left likewise from time to time such specimens of excellence as enabled succeeding poets to improve it.

That suggests he believed that human achievement 'built on the shoulders of giants' and continued to improve on itself. I'm not convinced about that but Dr. Johnson is good enough to assess those things he sees as flaws in Cowley and yet still endorse him.

 

It made me wonder if I could have quite such pre-set ideas about 'poetry'. It might come down to three elements,

The 'sentiment', which is what the poem ostensibly is saying, including all available sub-texts, ironies, ambiguities, however many 'layers' it is supposed to have without, one hopes, being too 'sentimental.

The music. I'd prefer it very much if poems had music in their rhythm, word sounds and overall composition but that has been thought of and so inevitably some have decided, mostly unsuccessfully, not to have.

And the 'argument', the line of thought that makes its way from a beginning to an ending, as Donne did. It makes haiku, in English at least, inadequate because 17 syllables aren't enough to get from one place to another. 

That's only what it is for me. How Dr. Johnson finds things he doesn't like in poems and how I do are 250 years apart. 'All you have to be is any good' is a regularly repeated mantra here and that's all there is to it but I'm grateful to him for enhancing what I think of Abraham Cowley, what there is of it. The next chapter is on Milton, not a poet I've ever appreciated as much as perhaps I should have. I'll look forward to that.  

     

Letter from Larkin

 There isn't much future in looking round the internet for signed Philip Larkin material by now. It's a 'mature market', he did his best to make himself a rarity. However, at £6 on e-Bay, even this as a photocopy is almost worth having to put on the wall if it wasn't there to download anyway.

Why be gracious when you can go to those lengths, provide a signature for collectors and posterity and act out the role of self-styled curmudgeon.

Ian MacEwan - Lessons

Ian MacEwan, Lessons (Johnathan Cape)

Only her title escapes her capacity for brilliant invention,

is what one reviewer says of Alissa Eberhardt's The Journey. In Ian MacEwan's new novel, it's the first novel by the wife that walks out on Roland Baines and their baby, goes to Germany and becomes a Nobel Literature laureate. It could broadly be said of MacEwan's book, too, and the parallel might even be deliberate. With MacEwan you can't quite tell how self-consciously books his books are. His title most obviously refers to the piano lessons Roland has as a schoolboy but could hint at volumes of other lessons to be learnt if one was inclined to let it. That wouldn't be the sort of 'A' level essay I'd not want to do, though, and I hope there is no definitive list to be read as a sub-text.

Those piano lessons are with Miriam Cornell, who isn't as responsible as she might be with her brilliant 14 year old protegee. His motives, on top of those any teenage boy might harbour, are accelerated by the Cuban missile crisis and the idea that the world might end anytime soon. But Miriam is possessive and needs to be escaped from. What follows is Roland's under-achieving career as a hotel lounge pianist, his marriages and families, all of which are related with reference to how world politics and events impinge on their lives.

MacEwan is never short of cultural reference points either with Velvet Underground records given a minor role and the passing reference to Norman MacCaig only outdone, for me, by the mention of Roogalator in Sweet Tooth. It was suggested in an interview that Lessons could be his last novel and, as such, it is one of, if not the, longest as well as among the most convincing alongside Atonement and Sweet Tooth, possibly just behind On Chesil Beach. It almost has the kind of valedictory, summing-up sense in it that is attributed to The Tempest. But if The Tempest wasn't quite the end, neither might this be. After 17 novels, it might be a hard habit to break. But for some of us, who were the right age to read First Love, Last Rites when it was still quite new, he's always been there and it won't be the same without him.

Having eventually taken up Miriam on her invitation in the early 60's, Roland has reason to find her again 40 years on in what is a well-wrought piece of plotting. Yes, she was guilty of that which she could still be charged for but, as Roland is well aware, they are both different people now. One might find correspondances in the story lines of Atonement in which events in childhood cast long shadows over the rest of the lives involved, or The Children Act which examines what responsibility minors have for their own lives but perhaps Lessons reverses both situations.

Alissa's last novel is,

longer than anything she had written,

which again makes us wonder about its relationship with the book we are reading. In it, she finally uses material from her first marriage but Roland is badly mis-represented if it is such. But it isn't, it's fiction and MacEwan is doing what Shakespeare did in Hamlet when the travelling theatre group turn up in Elsinore and reflecting on his own art. It's not the first time he's done that but it might be the last. A page and a half before the end, reading a story with his grand-daughter, he asks,

'Do you think the story is trying to tell us something about people?'

and she doesn't think so.

He saw her point. A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson.

I think we could have done without that. The editor might have asked if it was really necessary but maybe you don't ask such questions of a writer of such status. But, as in the story, it's too late now. Things have moved on. Several futures have been and gone since some long ago wrongs and we are busy surviving all the newly-minted ones as they occur. That would be what these lessons don't really teach us but confirm what we knew already.

Olive Murray at Portsmouth Lunchtime Live!

 Olive Murray, soprano, Portsmouth Cathedral, Sept 22

Finding your way through Portsmouth City Centre in Freshers Week is like level 10 on some fiddly computer game but at least the hordes of people handing out flyers advertising their bars, cafes and night clubs realized I wasn't part of their target audience. I'm sure it wasn't like that in my day but without students, it seems, the whole economy of some cities would surely collapse.

Programming is everything sometimes. Beginning with Scarlatti and Mozart, Olive Murray was agile and resonant but I wasn't tuned in properly. Three Schubert songs included Nacht und Traume which was crepuscular, almost velvety in Christopher Foreman's accompaniment, and although it's not explicit in the translated text, Olive brought a suggestion of grief to it.

S'il est un charmant gazon by Liszt saw the programme gather momentum and his Oh! Quand je dors was not so sleepy but Cäcilie by Richard Stauss took off into an extra dimension, bringing the piano into a more eloquent role and giving Olive licence to extend into a more ambitious range,

If you but knew, sweet,
the anguish of waking thro' nights long and lonely
 and rocked by the storm when no-one is near
to soothe and comfort the strife weary spirit.

She is an opera singer, and at her very best in Romantic arias, the greater the vocal challenge the more in her element she is.

Three contrasting songs by Poulenc were a dramatic Voyage a Paris, a more reflective setting of a poem by Louis Aragon which, looking up the words, is every bit as nostalgic as Olive made it sound and Les Chemins de L'Amour which was more Edith Piaf perhaps. Two songs by Robert Schumann, who does well in lunchtime concerts, included Er Ist's (Spring is here) about which I noted 'playful', taking a short cut from it being from Lieder-Album fur die Jugend.

But if one suspected the finale might be big, and having seen it was Verdi, one wasn't going to be disapponted. Ah, fors' è lui che l'anima and Sempre libera from La Traviata unleashed further levels of passion and range in a scintillating ending. For once I simply abdicate from the hapless role of the reviewer trying to find words adequate to the performance, which are often not good enough anyway, and just say, 'Wow'. Maybe I'll look up Maria Callas and Theresa Stratas another time but I'm not going to let them influence my memory of Olive Murray yet. The applause, it has to be said, sounded like it came from many more hands than the desperately few who were rewarded for making the effort of attending. Portsmouth can only apologize to artists of such quality for not providing bigger audiences but that doesn't mean they're not very appreciative.

Performers are advised to 'leave them wanting more'. I very much wanted the Queen of the Night as an encore. Maybe next time. I hope there is a next time. 

Goodwood Today

 

Royal Fleet, in blue, comes to claim the big race in workmanlike fashion to land the odds and help defray the expenses.

Once I saw the way the betting was going, I changed my mind from last night.

Goodwood Preview

It's a different kind of week this week, desperately sad to miss Pavlos Carvalho in Chichester cathedral today but with some compensation in a rare day out at flat racing tomorrow.

Goodwood is flat racing's answer to Cheltenham, the main difference being you look down on the scenery rather than up at it. It's less easy to convince oneself of winners with any confidence, though, with the fine margins of short distance flat races, it being a fast, downhill track unlike most and, for the likes of me at least, it being flat racing, of which I'm no more of a student than I was of 'A' level History.

But, having landed the double at Warwick today with the very last scrapings in my account, the heroic rearguard action has got me into the autumn when I generally fancy myself to do some business and I'm suddenly the man in form.

Nearly 1m2f is a long way for 2 year olds in the 1.50 but Galactic Jack's run over 1m here last time had him 'staying on' dourly so he might last longest. Early indications that he'll be odds-on don't make him an attractive proposition but it does make you think he'll win.

One can't help but notice Substantial being chalked up as favourite, well ahead of his betting forecast status, in the 2.25. But it's not as if you can't make cases for a few others. One could do a mad thing for small change stakes and put him in a tri-cast with Red Mirage and Alazwar but this sort of closely handicapped race is a good example of why flat racing is a day out and not an exercise in applying some sort of science in the hope of showing a profit.

In that spirit, I won't even bother with any science in the 3.10 and support the outsider Batchelor Boy, by Cliff Richard out of Pure Sentiment, but not necessarily with money.

The 3.35 is the big race but might not be the biggest race for the highest-rated horses. Royal Fleet last ran in February in Meydan where he had a good winter and one can't help wondering if his main target is his next race. Cadillac keeps moving stables and one wonders why. This ought to be the most straight-forward race to sort out but it's got more traps in it than a greyhound race. It would be a race to see what the betting suggests.

Wickywickywheels in the 4.10 is 'one for the teenagers', a long distant echo of 1980's handicapper Wiki Wiki Wheels and looking for his fifth win a row. Not everybody will want to take him on but I will. I'm initially more taken by the recent form of Roger Varian's horses but realize that William Buick doesn't go anywhere without expecting to win. I'll think about a dual forecast, doing all these 'day out' sort of bets for fun, coupling Strawberri and Secret Shadow.

But having thought the two non-handicaps would be where any proper bet might be, I will take Tommy G (nap) in the 4.45. Re-appearing quickly after a win, preferring to carry a 4lb penalty rather than be re-assessed is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It is at least a clue even if it sounds a bit desperate to point out that the draw advantage is low and he's drawn 1. That is what nap material looks like at a meeting like this. It's not like knowing that Allaho and Honeysuckle will win at Cheltenham all season long.

I don't even want to guess in the last. We could say Glamorous Breeze and, for a laugh, couple it with Mr. Beaufort, him having been the inventor of the way that breezes are quantified.

I feel about as qualified as a tipster for tomorrow as the crowd of over-monied young men in their tweed and Burberry that got on the train to Ascot at Twickenham a few years, throwing the names of horses they intended to back around the carriage like confetti.

I wanted to lay them any price they wanted because I knew they were guessing. And I wouldn't have had to pay out any of them.

One must go circumspectly in such matters and have reasons for doing what one does.

I'll hope for Tommy G, see what price we can get about Galactic Jack, have a day out and look forward to Chepstow over some obstacles in October when one tries to get more business-like.

Westminster Abbey

 Some years ago here I had a go at deciding on some favourite architecture. It might be a better idea, if one hasn't really got a favourite, not to invent one. I decided on some of those flamboyant wavy lines, not really Gaudi and not really Frank Gehry, that are probably 'inspired by' orchids. But, no it's surely far too showy, garish and trying too hard. It's like selecting the dress sense of Leigh Bowery over Giorgio Armani.

Westminster Abbey put in a great performance today. I don't know why I didn't stick with English cathedrals in the first place. Of course they have to try quite hard, they are art, they need to impose themselves on their surroundings and the little country churches gain plenty of credit for their less assuming demeanour but one needs to be impressed.

Once you get into the splendours of Italy one can be put off by the Catholic showiness, the gold on St. Mark's Basilica. If I had to be Christian, I'd be Lutheran. For all its gloriousness, it does it in a measured way. St. Paul's is 'baroque' whereas the Abbey is 'gothic' with, I would have thought, some 'perpendicular' but whereas baroque is a good thing in music, not all these terms translate across genres.

There is a way of being stunning in art without going flat out to be so and Westminster Abbey achieves it by including the necessary sense of decorum in its magnificence. In their ways, Salisbury, Gloucester and

the litany of great English cathedrals all have their claims but I'm nowhere near ready to make any Top 6 out of them and would want to extend beyond religious buildings but whatever our reservations about religion might be, it can be credited with bringing about some of the most brilliant architecture and music.

It's hardly for me to find anything to add to the millions of words of tributes to Queen Elizabeth II. I was an admirer, of course. I saw her three times, always in cars. Once coming out of Dock Gate 4, Southampton; once coming out of Westminster, possibly having opened Parliament, and once while playing pool in the Dorchester Arms, Portsmouth, one lunchtime when we noticed some out-riders going by, in the direction of the dockyard, and waited a minute for the limousine to follow.

We saw the future King Charles III after a concert in Fairford Church, the big selling point of 'Music in Country Churches' being that he was a patron and attended some. Afterwards, some sleek Daimler or Jag was waiting by the side door and I said, 'we might hang round here for a minute' and then there he was, acknowledging the few that had cottoned on with a wave and a brief word.

Simon Armitage had an unenviable job finding an angle from which to say anything remotely original but that's the job he was glad enough to accept. I heard somebody finding fault with it on the wireless but that turned out to be Giles Coren so nobody need worry about that. Simon's Floral Tribute is possibly a B+ in the circumstances, 6 or perhaps 7 out of 10 as a poem but an 8 or more as a Laureate poem when compared with some of Ted's, so it would have been unrealistic to expect anything better.

I spent some time wondering at the minor roles, the vastness of the legions of those with roles to play and tried to spot my old mate, Princess Alexandra, who presented the degrees at Lancaster University in 1981. But the role played by Westminster Abbey was essential and for the most part taken for granted. 

Say what you will. I'm no fervent monarchist. I'm the equivalent of those who would say they believe in God if pushed to say whether they did or not (and I'm not that, either). But you've got to be impressed. Even if it's not the sort of thing you like, and my main objection would be the tendency towards guns, swords and the military, it was immaculate. The ritual, ceremony, fine-sounding words and music might be an elaborate brocade disguising the point that we just don't know anything, do we.

And that, Lds & Gnlmn, is what art does.    

Iestyn Davies, Bach Cantatas

 Iestyn Davies with Arcangelo, Bach Cantatas 36 and 169 (Hyperion)

This isn't exactly a 'new release' but it's 2022 so it's not old either, it's just that I'm not as quick off the mark with it as I like to be.

As in the pop music days, one hears a record on the wireless and then buys it. That was for one item out of the four here but you are unlikely to be disappointed with Bach Cantatas and Schütz which constitute the other three.

BWV169 opens with the busily investigative organ nimbly weaving its way through a bright Sinfonia under the hands of the excellent Tom Foster. Organ music isn't my favourite genre but this is a sparkling beginning before the unreal purity of Iestyn Davies in the Gott soll allein mein Hertz haben which soars in the aria. One of the very greatest Bach cantata records is that of Nathalie Stutzmann whose contralto is an entirely different thing but this is contrastingly equally thrilling. The flowing ornaments in Stirb in me,

Die in me,

Earth, and all your empty pleasure,

are the high point it reaches before the short choral prayer it ends on.

 

Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott is a setting taken from Psalm 51 by Schütz, the same text as Allegri's Miserere, but its downbeat torments accompanied by dark violins and violas don't glimpse the same eternal light.

It was Klag-Lied, the elegy for his father by Buxtehude who it is thought wrote his own grieving text, that sold me the record, though. One recording of such a piece isn't enough when a further version like this turns up, fluid, floating and unearthly. The undertstated viola da gamba accompaniment sets a mood for Iestyn to sorrow gorgeously over, explaining and bereft. It is one of the short list of Buxtehude masterpieces and one can only wonder at what the old maestro would have thought of such a perforrmance.

Back with Bach, Tom Foster again gallops through the Sinfonia of BWV35, headlong towards towards,

I marvel;

For everything that one sees 

Must fill us with amazement.

The oboes are a big feature in the 'joyous alleluia' of deliverance and hope of the aria it ends on and one has to envy those who could believe their prayers would be answered in,

From this sorrow-laden yoke of pain,

...let me soon in your arms

End my life so full of torment.

 

We are blessed enough with countertenors on earth, as we are with cellists, not to want to end this life of torment just yet and Iestyn Davies is on unbeatable form here. I haven't bought many new discs this year but this must be a certainty for any Critic's Choice top few.    

Dmitri and Philip

 

It puts it all in perspective is what we are often told when something enormous happens and our everyday concerns are belittled. It was hardly Philip Larkin's fault, just taking him as an example, that all he had to worry about was his library, three girlfriends and timorous mother. He made fine poems out of his relatively humdrum life, compared to that of Shostakovich and the rest of his story as told in Testimony.

It's a stunning book and whether or not Solomon Volkov adjusted or augmented it in places, it does more than enough to convince that the impression we are left with is not a false one. Shostakovich had strongly held views about his compatriots, fellow composers and his country, as did Larkin, but he had infinitely more justification, one might think, for holding them.

There's 'big' art and art that is perceived as being of less stature even if it is equally well made. In recent years, the general consensus has raised Larkin from 'good, minor' poet to that of one of the finest of the C20th in England but however much one can admire his craftsmanship, memorability and the ironic nuance that diminished over the years, he didn't do what he did in such hellish circumstances. One can only do what one can do and perhaps Shostakovich would have traded his life under Stalin, Beria and Zhdanov for that of a fogey English librarian bicycling round countryside churches on Sunday afternoons. I know I would have, in his position, but he didn't have the option and wouldn't have been the monumental composer he became as a result if he had.

There is an idea that great art is forged in the crucible of difficult periods. Shakespeare lived in volatile times, we are offered the English poets of World War 1 or Wordsworth and the poets associated with him as Romantic taking their inspiration from the revolution in France but Bach poured out his cantatas as a professional musician relatively undisturbed in safe employment and Handel was an impresario, concerned mainly to outdo his rivals in the London opera houses with as much favour from the king as Bach enjoyed from the church. Their lives were a walk in the park compared to what Shostakovich lived through but he still found the time to emulate the Preludes and Fugues as well as reading literature, performing, having an acute appreciation of his contemporaries in music and, as yurodivy (as below in Whose Testimony Is It Anyway) composer. 

It's hardly surprising he takes a dim view of some of his less talented, or more compliant, contemporaries. It's remarkable how he maintained such clear-sighted detachment, which might be one thing he suspects Solzhenitsyn didn't, but it makes some of Larkin's off-hand dismissal of the likes of Edmund Spenser's poetry, The Bible and Ted Hughes look shrivelled in comparison.

 

Testimony is gripping throughout but one passage that I paid particular attention to said that,

The quality of Jewish folk music is close to my idea of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented for so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.

He knows what he's doing. Without wanting to find myself in Pseud's Corner, yes, of course, worthwhile art needs more than one layer. They work off each other to produce the effects that can be appreciated on more than one reading and, possibly, inexhaustibly.

She Loves You by The Beatles sounds celebratory but uses Em and Bm chords that hint at the sadness that the singer wishes she loved him instead. I also understand that the Human League traded on downbeat words weitten over upbeat chords. There's not many new tricks left to reveal, surely, by now and so we just keep on finding new ways to use those that there are. And that's what 'art' is whether it is achieved under impossible conditions, 'for the glory of God' (as well as making a living), while administerating in a senior way at a university library or just waiting for an idea to present itself, knocking off a few lines and then having a lie down.

I don't know if Testimony would make the Top 6 Books I've ever read but in the red hot frenzy of having not long put it down, I'd like to think so.

It made me finally get around to ordering Apricot Jam, the posthumously published short stories of my other 1970's Soviet dissident hero, Solzhenitsyn, but Ian McEwan's Lessons, telling us as much as he could be expected to know, might arrive first. 

There's only so much grim, grey Stalinism one can take at once if one doesn't have to. It's the fact that we don't have to and only have to resent how 'quarterly', money 'reproaches' us, that should make us only pretend to be curmudgeonly for a joke.     

Christopher Johnston in Chichester

Christopher Johnston, Chichester Cathedral, Sept 13

I usually prefer to have whole story - the complete symphony if not the Complete Symphonies or the Collected Poems rather than the Selected. Christopher Johnston's programme in Chichester today was made of 'excerpts from' sets of pieces but the benefit of that was that we got three composers and, to be fair, each piece was self-contained and complete in itself. One can always follow up the rest of these suites later.

Debussy, Liszt and, probably, Nikolai Kapustin (1937-2020) wouldn't always be bracketed together but, as the lady sitting next to me usefully remarked, they sounded similar in these selections. Thank you kindly, madam, I'll have that.

From Debussy's Estampes (Postcards), Pagodes set the right hand floating over the keys, sprinkling light. It increasingly seemed to me that Christopher's hands contribute a great deal to his innate musicianship with fingers unlikely to restrict him to jabbing out Crocodile Rock as Elton John's did.

Liszt's Venezia e Napoli began with Gondoliera relaxed and melodic, moving into the dazzle of trilling ornamentation. Canzone had the left hand rumbling in the lower register before Christopher brought off a range of effects and Tarantella grew towards the more signature Lizst big finish that some of us expect of him. As a latecomer to the joys of Lizst, I was very glad of it and it was for me the stand-out item.

Kapustin's Eight Concert Etudes owed much to jazz, as I think Christopher explained but even from near the front one couldn't pick up all he said. One very much wants to hear what performers have to say by way of introduction to their playing and Chichester do usually give them a microphone with which to do so. Maybe it was at the repair shop and of course the top priority is the music. I never tire of, or apologize for, advertising the high standard of Chichester's lunchtime musicians and Christopher was every bit as good. Some of us regulars there could be excused for taking all that for granted but we don't and we keep on going back.

Kapustin's Raillery was an exuberant boogie-woogie, Pastorale acknowledged ragtime, Reverie suggested a suitably autumnal atmosphere and continued with the torrential outpouring of notes and finally Toccatina was as busy as ever, dashing about in the lower register.

Some people might read these reviews regularly at DGBooks or Music in Portsmouth, for which I'm very grateful, and they will be well used by now to the things I regularly say but some might be here for the first time and so, once more with feeling, our area is spoilt by the opportunities to hear these lunchtime concerts, for those of us lucky enough to have the time to. Chichester is surely the 'jewel in the crown', not only for its wonderful venue but for the great musicians it brings to us. Get there if you can.

Whose Testimony Is it Anyway

One is never left feeling short-changed by anything to do with Shostakovich. Portsmouth Libraries, for once, had to admit they couldn't find their copy of Testimony. I'll forgive them anything, though. They would even get it in for me from elsewhere for a small charge but I'd already found a copy for less than that.

Testimony is 'the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov', his friend. But the 'unreliable narrator' has been around for a lot longer than when the idea became high fashion for that generation of novelists who did Creative Writing at East Anglia University with Malcolm Bradbury. 

Even the blurb on the back of this 1987 edition accepts that some suggested 'that Volkov invented part of it'. It begins with a story about a law lecturer who arranged for one of his lectures to be disrupted by a 'hooligan' and then asked the students to say what had happened and they all reported it differently and,

some even maintained that there had been several hooligans.

So much for eye witness evidence. So much, we might think, for the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, by the way. So much for any idea of history. I'm almost tempted - but not quite - to dig out my terrible second year university essay on Kierkegaard and subjectivity. We might be well advised not to believe what we read but it isn't necessarily the author's fault.

What we do get from Shostakovich's Testimony, enough of which must be faithfully enough reported to bring with it a sense of him, is at least as much of the clear-sighted, uncompromising artist he surely had to be in the extreme circumstances he worked in. Not for him was the decadent luxury of producing a few short poems each year, thinking he'd done enough, and having a long lie down after each one. As per Julian Barnes's The Noise of Time he spent his whole life in expectation of Stalin's goon squad coming to take him away and here he shows that he knew stories about plenty of those who did disappear. It remains quite a mystery why he wasn't one of them but perhaps by being as good as he was and signing whatever Soviet-line statement was put in front of him without even reading it, Stalin was fooled into keeping him on even though he was more dissident, and had more reason to be than those major Russians who did well for themselves in exile. He's very kind about Stravinsky's music, he's less so about Prokofiev but Rachmanninov doesn't even appear in the index. I don't think it's fair to call him 'ambivalent'. That surely undersells the subterfuge he so heroically brought off. 

The first-hand insights into Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk are valuable and not likely to be the bits suspected of being added by Volkov. For example,

I wanted to show a woman who was on a much higher level than those around her. She is surrounded by monsters. The last five years were like a prison for her.

It's hard to imagine that the artist can't help but bring some elements of autobiography into their work. And,

it turns out that a crime is worth committing for the sake of that passion, since life has no meaning otherwise anyway.

Yes, that crime is murder but murder was an everyday thing under Stalin and so perhaps not as unthinkable in Russia then, and in others places at other times, like England under the first Queen Elizabeth, as it seems to us cosy, middle-brow types who benefitted from living so much of our lives in the reign of the second Queen Elizabeth.

If the memoirs don't lead the reader back to the music they won't have been a complete success, however much of a vicarious thrill one gets from them, or how grateful they make one for having lived so far in such benign times. The Piano Sonatas won't be added to the CD collection, I'm well aware that the symphonies ought to be taken on at some point even if I'm happy enough to nominate Shostakovich as the Greatest C20th Composer without knowing much about them. But I returned to the Trio Sonatas and the Seven Romances on Poems of Alexander Blok which proved to be a fine soundtrack to chapter 5.

I'm glad to know the Russian word, yurodivy, someone who 'tells the world about his insights in an intentionally paradoxical way',

he plays the fool , while actually being a persistent exposer of evil and injustice.

There might have been something of the yurodivy in Shostakovich but you couldn't have called Alexander Solzhenitsyn that. I've never read what Solzhenitsyn thought of Shostakovich but Shostakovich has his reservations about Solzhenitsyn. He wasn't easy to impress. These two giants of C20th Russian art and Soviet dissidence each had their own ways of doing it and it's hardly for me to say who was the braver. But it's not easy to come away from their eloquent testimony liking Russians, or anything about Russia beyond the magnificent art it produced and it continues to be a failing, rogue state.

 

I'm only halfway through this immensely compelling book. It's entirely possible that the second half will generate as much to say again. In a way it's almost a good thing the library couldn't find me a copy, it's a book one wants in one's own library.

 

デッドエンドの思い出

 Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories (Counterpoint)

We seem to be a little bit behindhand with Banana Yoshimoto in translation.

デッドエンドの思い出 was published in Japan in 2003 but only now in English, by Counterpoint who are in Berkeley, California.

I'm sure all her titles would be made available in English translation with the same urgency as Murakami's are if there was sufficient demand for them so maybe there isn't. But I'm devoutly brand loyal and find it hard to let go.

One knows what one's going to get with Banana by now. Having begun with the 'other' weirdness, it seemed at the time, of Kitchen in 1988, she either became 'mainstream' or the mainstream became her.

The first of the five stories here, House of Ghosts, uses all the usual ingredients of a Banana story in her recipe that can include, yes, ghosts and food but also young people, loneliness, intimacy, dysfunction or trauma and some kind of resolved acceptance of a happy enough ending. 

Her books may or may not be set texts on courses about New Age therapy or mindfulness but I'm not going to hold that against them. Maybe, reading it just before the outpouring of emotion for HM Queen Elizabeth II, there is a similar need to suspend irony, satire and disbelief, disarm oneself of one's instinctive critical habits and be prepared to believe. I'm almost as happy to accept Banana at her words as I was the late Mrs. Elizabeth Windsor  but woe betide them if I ever find out they were not being honest with us.

Iwakura and Secchu echo the ghosts in the house they live in, in House of Ghosts, by sharing their lives to the point of 'becoming one', or feeling like they have, as did Baucis and Philemon in Ovid and few stories are more moving than that.

In Mama!, the trauma is a case of deliberate food-poisoning in the workplace canteen by a malcontent but it serves to bring Matsuoka more 'into the world' by the care shown for her from her previous, more insular attitude,

I'd thought that people who liked to get carried away with romance were people who could afford to be careless with love - the kind of love you could let run freely and then drain away, like city water from a faucet.

Writing must surely be in some way autobiographical and it's possible to suspect that lines early in Not Warm at All might be such a thing in Dead-End Memories when they say,

at some point you reach the final prospect: the last vista of the thing, beyond which there's no further to go.

A few names, like Wittgenstein, Derrida, Nietzsche or Shakespeare might be able to claim they went a bit further than Banana Yoshimoto but they didn't always leave you feeling better about things. As with most things for her, it might be a lifestyle choice.

In the title story the narrator finds out that her fiance, working away in another town, has taken up with somebody else but even the hurt that comes with that becomes a part of her that she assimilates, lives with and makes her wiser for at least the purposes of a story about survival and the possibility of happiness.

I don't entirely trust Banana or share her consolations. I've never quite been able to decide, find out or otherwise discover if her books deserve more to be compared with Tolstoy or Jilly Cooper. I wouldn't object to either but I'd like to know. I can't help liking them, though, whether it's literature or only a readable commodity I'm enjoying.

According to the list of 'Also by' titles in the front of this, I'm only missing Argentine Hag from being a Yoshimoto-in-English completist but, although very tempted by it, it doesn't come cheap and is likely, let's face it, to be very much the same as all the others. So it can wait.

The Times questionnaire on Saturdays, My Cultural Fix, asks their celebrity guest to admit to a 'guilty pleasure'. I can't even say if that might mean something like this. I don't think it is but even if it was, as I understand it, one is innocent until proven guilty. I'll gladly admit to the pleasure but it's for somebody else to prove the guilt.

Abba, The Day Before You Came

 By the time Abba put out their last single, The Day Before You Came, it was all over. That was a great shame because, having built a world-dominating career on some brilliant pop trash, they became more inward-looking, more or less like Sweden's answer to Fleetwood Mac, making classic pop music out of relationship dysfunction, did Knowing Me, Knowing You and One of Us, before delivering this masterpiece, in the style of a film that could only have been made in France, even if it wasn't, which suggested that they could have been 'writers' after all. 

Nobody got far as a pop singer without being fantastically good-looking. Elvis Costello's achievement is all the more admirable for that but Agnetha got a head start.

The Eurovision Song Contest win wasn't, it turns out, any sort of surprise. They knew what they were doing. They were a supergroup already. It was unfair to ask the other countries to expect to have any chance.

In retrospect.

But, in retrospect, it had been becoming obvious for a long time that Abba weren't a four-piece group but that the other three were Agnetha's backing musicians.

It might not have got any better if they had admitted it was that and had written more songs for her and tried to keep it going.

Why would you if you simply don't feel like doing it any more.

 

No, this is perfect.

Prince, Little Red Corvette

 

I guess I should've known
By the way you parked your car sideways
That it wouldn't last
See, you're the kinda person that believes in makin' out once
Love 'em and leave 'em fast

 

When I e-mailed those song words to an eminent lady not long after Prince died, it was only because I thought they were great words, we had been exchanging thoughts on the great man's premature demise, she had e-mailed me first, the correspondance didn't have much further to go and I didn't hear back from her.

It took me a few days before I thought, OMG, she must have known, surely, that I was only citing great writing. The trouble with Prince is that there's not much of him you can quote without it being overloaded, drenched in the sort of need that could easily lead to depravity.

If I'd been born ten years earlier, I would not have been able to see beyond the Beatles. Born when I was, and having 1971 as the annus mirabilis, it is Marc Bolan and David Bowie that represent an attitude in 'rock' and 'pop' music that is in the blood and can only be bettered by the Motown Hit Factory. But if I'd been born ten years later, it would have been Prince.

He was a bit more than a year older than me and thus one of a generation of overwhelmingly gifted artists that also included Michael Jackson and Morrissey.

You had to go out and buy the 12-inch Little Red Corvette c/w 1999 and you had to have the Purple Rain album. Other musicians might have played all the instruments and done everything on their records but none of them did it as well as this. I'm still not ashamed of having once nominated Marc Bolan as 'best guitarist' - I didn't really know - but I understand that later, when asked, Eric Clapton said it was Prince and so at least he got that right.

It's Little Red Corvette we have here because it was seminal, important. It's not as if the back catalogue doesn't have so many others to offer. MOJO magazine eventually stopped asking their star interviewees what they thought of Bob Dylan and instead asked what they had to say about Prince.

I slightly 'missed the boat' by being a fraction too old to stay interested in everything he did but the short list of pop geniuses who did most of it all by themselves begins with him. It's not always advisable, it's not always possible but, if you are perfectly capable, it's a good idea.   

'Romanticisim' first draft

Not much is of more interest to me than finding three pages of Rosemary Tonks's journal on the website of Newcastle University library, seeing some of the workings of Sean O'Brien poems, where he puts the stress marks in to prove to himself he was within the parameters of iambic pentameter, or such books as Trevor Tolley's Larkin at Work, in which he makes his way through Larkin's notebooks fasitidiously uncovering the process by which the likes of Church Going and The Whitsun Weddings were arrived at.

Not always easily, it seems.

I don't mind how hard Larkin, Rosemary and Sean worked at their poems but I do have doubts about poets I have less respect for putting in painstaking work to make them look as if they arrived in a glorious blast of inspiration. Dylan Thomas is one, who Caitlin was recently on telly again saying he said could spend all day putting in or taking out a word from a line. 

I had thought that was a joke Oscar made about his extreme aestheticism but, no, it's what Dylan actually did. 

Similarly, Allen Ginsberg, apparently, maybe, reportedly, spent a lot of time making Howl look as if it was a spontaneous outburst. It either was or it wasn't. If it was, I'm bored by it; if it wasn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

I would luv it, luv it, in the words of Kevin Keegan, if I could spend weeks, months or even years making a poem better and better until it was as good as it could be. But, when would I know.

For my purposes - and my purposes are the only purposes there are- a poem can look good enough within hours, if not minutes, but certainly within a day or two. Once I like what they look like, they are done.

Romanticism was first of all a few ideas for lines written on the back of my printed-off train ticket to Netley. I did a bit more on Netley Station waiting for the train, had the line endings in before I got home, typed it up and, very unusually for me, took the advice of a friend who questioned,

gorgeous/ with tuberculosis

 

I had thought that was brilliant at first but had to change it. It became restless. I found a better title. It underwent some minor surgery. I abandoned any attempt at a rhyme scheme early doors and then sacrificed any attempt at metrics or syllable count in favour of a music of its own it might have anyway.

 

It's not obvious that any university's library is going to want to blow the very slightest part of their budget on bidding for evidence of how I wrote poems and neither would I. So, here it is anyway.

Some scribble on the reverse side of a train ticket, not wanting to waste paper, becomes a poem that does all a poem had to do. It made its author happy to have written it.     

Miriam Kramer & Nicholas Durcan

Miriam Kramer & Nicholas Durcan, Chichester Cathedral, Sept 6

Summer is a fine thing in fiction, poems or in Vivaldi but for me it need not stand upon the order of its going. The first signs of autumn are most welcome, the drop in temperature, the nights drawing in and, not least, the return of the lunchtime concert season at Chichester, Portsmouth and other such admirable places nearby. There are plenty in the diary from now until the end of November and I'll be trying to find appropriate things to say about them here while the limited stock of language can do any justice to them. I wouldn't be so bold as to call them 'reviews' but maybe 'some sentences arising'. Attending and listening is only half a job. Having some response makes it more complete. To misquote Socrates, the unexamined performance is less worth hearing.  

Miriam Kramer and Nicholas Durcan set the new season in motion in fine style with a glittering dash through their arrangement of The Carnival of the Animals, reducing the Saint-Saëns to ten minutes but still including a few little surprises along the way before a bravura finish.

Schubert's Fantasia, D.940, was contrastingly crepuscular, showing off another aspect of Miriam's tremendous technique. Robert Schumann's Fantasiestücke, Op.73, began in a similar mood but moved through the gears, via some interplay between piano and violin, on its way to a 'fiery' ending. How much time a musician or sportsperson seems to have is an indicator of talent to spare but not all violinists have so much time to spare that they can turn the page of the pianist's music for them.

It wouldn't be sensible, or possible, to pick a highlight from the programme, not with an arrangement of the Brief Encounter music - Rachmanninov Piano Concerto no. 2, slow movement- here entitled Preghiera (Prayer) which could have built to another big finish but decided not to and then more Saint-Saëns with Danse Macabre and all its ghostly effects, including the 'ricochet' bouncing of the bow on the violin strings. But also, I thought, some traces of baroque stylings in the violin. A hint of Vivaldi or a Bach partita. To find such a lucky guess confirmed by Miriam saying she plays Bach, who is her favourite composer (which is the right answer), makes me wonder if I could have a future in this job but I dare say I'll get it wrong as often as I'll get it right. She is the focus of attention in these pieces but I suspect Nicholas is doing plenty and it's a duo act and not a soloist with her accompanist.

It's possible that after the summer drought, of local live music as well as water, the first refreshing splash seems so great that it is more gratefully appreciated than usual. I guess so but, on the other hand, I doubt it. Miriam and Nicholas would be a tremendous show whenever you saw them. And they were an excellent way to get back into the happy routine.

The Beatles - If I Fell

 The Beatles were over-rated. To say as much in an age where blasphemy might not be an offence in itself but has been replaced by 'cancel culture' anyway might be taking a chance but idolatry gets out of hand whether it's applied to Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, Mozart or Bach. And Tamla Motown made consistently better records than the Beatles did, as they should have. There were more of them.

I was a fraction too young to be actually there at the time but, thanks to my parents doing their best for me, I had Beatles wallpaper on my bedroom wall at the age of 5, a framed picture of them by my bed, a plastic guitar on which to do 'yeah, yeah, yeah' and a metal drum-kit on which to be Ringo. George, the thoughtful, possibly the most sensitive and the youngest one was the only one I never thought was me.

The likes of She Loves You, I Wanna Hold Your Hand or Please, Please Me were a 'big bang' that no new thing in pop music before or after could equal. The impact of any would-be revolution since, even including the Sex Pistols, has arrived with diminishing returns.

Great artists will improve, and so they did, arriving at Revolver and Rubber Soul, but it might also be true that becoming too famous while you're still at it makes you feel a bit too god-like, as if your every thought was a gift you had a duty to pass on to your worshippers.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is not, as it is so often listed, the best pop album ever made. To misquote John Lennon on the subject of Ringo, if he ever said it, it's not the Best Album Ever, it's not even the Best Album by the Beatles. 

Success has its end in its own beginning and the Beatles spent nearly as much time 'making it' in Hamburg and the Cavern as they did at the top of the world, by all means more important to a lot of people than Jesus, before imploding, but it's not easy being that big. I don't think it was Yoko's fault- people always need somebody else to blame- and I don't think it was Paul's fault. He would probably have carried on and we would have been saved from Wings. It was John's fault, always the difficult one, the not quite as talented one, even if his solo efforts, not necessarily including Imagine, might outweigh Paul's.

But nothing lasts forever and a better reason for finishing in 1970 was that there wasn't much left for them to do. Motown had hit records before they did, and after, but whether it's the money that confuses them, the egos involved or simply that you've done as much as you could have, there might not have been much more to come.

There are any number of highlights. To ascertain the strength in depth of artists like Lennon-McCartney, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Smkoey Robinson, Carole King or Stephin Merritt, you see what no. 30 is in a list of their best records and see how good that is. The Beatles could easily be Top 5 at that but, in a competitive heat heat for no. 1 involving  I Should Have Known Better, Yesterday and She's Leaving Home as well as those early classics and a couple of cover versions, Baby, it's this. 

    You can see where Doherty and Barat got the idea of singing at the same microphone, loving each other and falling out, from.