Vermeer

No list should ever be regarded as the final answer. A Top 6 compiled today could easily be different by tomorrow and certainly unlikely to be the same in a few years' time. Nominating the Best Books in the House a while back, I should have included Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer ahead of Benjamin Moser's The Upside-Down World. That doesn't mean Moser is taken off the short list but it does mean that Graham-Dixon is closer to being the actual best book in the house. And thus, for me, the Best Book Ever because if I knew of better ones, they would be in the house.

Such books need to be re-read at least once. While there are a lot of books in the world, and a lot of music and paintings, I prefer to stay with known masterpieces than explore unchartered territory in the hope of finding anything else as good because I suspect the odds are against it. Eventually one feels as if one is approaching the limits of the world one is happy to inhabit. Which is not to say that Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and a biography of Wittgenstein aren't lined up for the Autumn.

But Vermeer is nothing short of sensational in constructing not only a life but a comprehensive revelation of what those paintings mean where previously he was thought to be a 'sphinx' whose meanings were undecipherable beneath the quiet, the gorgeous treatment of light and something transcending the ordinary. It belongs right up alongside A.N. Wilson's Jesus and Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare as a brilliant account of a life re-interpreted against some generally accepted versions except Vermeer comes across as much the preferable human being.

All the background detail of the warring history of the Netherlands is relevant where other such books sometimes pile it in to make something book length. The diligent research into contemporary records provides Vermeer with a much more coherent and credible life than Jesus Christ or Shakespeare have ever been provide with. Andrew Graham-Dixon concedes that he is often working with suppositions but I find little reason to doubt his whereas those made by biographers of Jesus and Shakespeare usually come with agendas, and much more dubious guesswork.

After the ongoing wars, mainly with Spain, that marked Vermeer's early years, a peace was arrived at. The famous View of Delft, previously thought to be a town glistening gently after some rain, is thus a celebration of ordinary, peaceful life.

The paintings were often done in pairs but their subsequent separation to galleries across the world helped to disguise the fact. Many of the best paintings of women alone in domestic settings were done for one patron and their themes are subtly religious - liberal, 'free-thinking', non-Calvinist religion - very slowly so that the artist was ever in debt to his patron, his mother-in-law who held contrary religious views and others. But the climax of Graham-Dixon's account is his explanation of the Girl with a Pearl Earring. It represents the moment that Mary Magdalene turned round and recognized the resurrected Jesus which thus puts the viewer in his place.

It could be the best book I've ever read, for several different reasons but that's the main one.

679 Songs

 Playing DGBooks Radio on Spotify, as I sometimes do, it says it is now 679 songs and thus, as it has been for a long time 'over 24 hours'.

It's no rubbish. All carefully considered. I never seem to find it necessary to delete a title. Radio stations can be fairly 'niche' these days, making sure you will hear, say, Dire Straits at least three times a day and two of them will be Sultans of Swing. That failed attempt at 'cool' isn't on DGBooks Radio.

So, 679 x 3 and a half minutes, according to the calculator on the computer, makes 2376 and a half minutes. Divide that by 60 and  it makes 39.6 hours of the best possible, choice pop music. No Queen guaranteed. Tune in.

It will be sometime before it becomes my official Top 1000 but 679 tracks, none of which I see fit to delete means I'm two-thirds of the way there. I'll give it some thought. At first, thinking of it as a radio playlist, I tried not to overload it with favourite artists but if it's shifting towards a Top 1000, it will be necessary to look further into Bowie, T. Rex, Motown, the Magnetic Fields, Al Green, reggae and Northern Soul. Once one has had a thousand guesses there will not be room to say, oh, that one should have been in. There will be no prize for being no. 1001.

Is the fifteenth best track by Bowie better than the best thing Queen ever did without his help.

Yes, it is.   

Best Pianist Ever

 The Times yesterday, in marking 125 years of Wigmore Hall, published the 'ten greatest classical pianists', as chosen by an invited list of some current acknowledged stars. My contribution is not worth having but, as Portsmouth's answer to the musical question that nobody asked, I must pass a Sunday afternoon by putting in my tuppence worth. Me commenting on pianists is somewhat less appropriate than having an American tell me about cricket or a bricklayer advising me on poetry but one never can tell and one mustn't stereotype these people.

The Times panel surprised me somewhat by making Sergei Rachmaninov no. 1. He came with the sort of physical advantages that put him already ahead of most others, all other things being equal. There's no way I could have won a Tour de France up against the heart rates, lung capacity and other attributes of the likes of Miguel Indurain. And, a perennial second in the sports day sprint races at school, I wasn't Usain Bolt either.

Rach had such big hands he wrote music that was beyond others. Claudio Abbado had to help out Yuja Wang with a note she couldn't reach with her lesser spread. But he was a force of nature, too. The Times list goes 2. Richter, 3. Horowitz, 4. Radu Lupu, with Martha Argerich at 8 the only one still living. No Gilels, Gould, Arrau, Brendel, Ogden, etc, etc. but one could presumably make a list of fifty and still miss some.

On the basis of her Bach and Shostakovich, going in with my preferred repertoire, I'd be voting for Tatiana Nikolayeva. I spent formative years with two Mozart concertos played by Barenboim. I've always liked Mitsuko Uchida and hearing a Mozart Sonata, no. 5, the other day means her set of those will be ordered soon. In the flesh I've seen Steven Kovacevich, Emmanuel Ax, Isata Kanneh-Mason and local stars Angelina Kopyrina, who never fails to take the roof off, and Béla Hartmann. I'd have to have Angelina in any top 10 of mine.

I wouldn't be having Glenn Gould. While technical perfection would never be an important consideration for me, I'm not sure how far I'd go with innovative interpretation either. I'm listening more to the composer than what the performer does with their music so I will be all across Tatiana  whose 40-disc box-set has all the right pieces in it and, come a suitable windfall, all £100's worth of it will be given a home here.  

As ever, with such list-making, it's an unhealthy obsession and yet insists on being done from time to time as soon as one concedes that one thing is better than another. If Bach is a better composer than Piazolla then it figures that they can all be put in order of superiority. But aged maybe 13 or 14 and applying devoutly communist principles to anything I could think of, I took all the teams out of my football league ladder because none should be put above any other. Teams should play nicely, pass to each other and socialize pleasantly at half time and afterwards.

Which is, of course, even more ridiculous because it would abnegate the whole point of football. By now, I'd gladly accept that but not the abnegation of music because if we did that it would follow that I'd be just as likely to appear at the Menuhin Room, singing pop songs out of tune, as any proper musician doing something they are good at and all the great work that has gone into building the series would be demolished at a stroke.  

On Not Liking the Beatles

 The way I access the internet, via Firefox, shows me a selection of items that it seems to think I might like and, given the sort of thing that thrives on the internet and my reluctance to engage with much of it, it doesn't do badly at it.

It regularly features Far Out magazine and a series on 5 artists that some iconic artist couldn't stand, in which number one for somebody from Pink Floyd was the other members of Pink Floyd. Well, there wasn't much left to do without Syd Barrett, the only interesting one, apart from resent each other.

But today we have 10 musicians who couldn’t stand The Beatles.

I'm slightly Beatles-sceptic in not accepting everything they did as holy writ but, born in 1959 and being most taken with She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, aged 4, they are in my musical DNA. There are great things in that early-middle period. But they haven't got into my top plenty bands for a long time, don't turn up often on DGBooks Radio and don't come anywhere near the conglomerate achievement of Tamla Motown.

But, who are these dissidents, then? For the most part, largely who one might expect, the usual suspects of the predictably dissident.

I knew Frank Zappa would be there, who is stratospherically in a category of his own in the 5 artists I can't stand. Painfully, boorishly, boringly contrary to a fault. John Lydon had to be there except I had a lot of time for what he did once although the same by now applies to him.

I'm not put out by Julian Casablancas because The Strokes were a busted flush of dumb posturing from the beginning, the answer to their first album, Is This It, being, No, It Isn't. 

We know Elvis and The Beatles didn't get on too well. We also might think Elvis wasn't that bright, or even a musician.

Van Morrison is over-rated and I don't care what he thinks. Similarly Todd Rundgren, although one would like to think better of both.

Trent Reznor is, or was, apparently in Nine Inch Nails. That doesn't register at all here. 

Quincy Jones later apologized for what he said.

 

Which leaves Lou Reed and Michael Stipe, both of who are probably ahead of the Beatles on any list I might make. You'd almost expect it of Lou, though, notoriously difficult as he was while notoriously brilliant at his best in what he did. Sometimes great artists are like that. And sometimes so are the rest of us but we have less of a get out clause.

Which leaves us with St. Michael of Stipe, the paragon of cool, indie sensitivity and surely better than the pop music equivalent of those literary troublemakers who go out of their way to deride Shakespeare.

And, yes, he is. Far Out put him at number one in their list to make it look more shocking but it's not what he said. He's maybe only slightly more Beatles-sceptic than I am. He likes other stuff more. Is all.

While this series of features has seemed worth a look, I've not investigated one before and now I have, I found one scurrilous. And so, 1 Magazine Whose Features Are Not To Be Trusted-

Far Out.

 

That doesn't mean it's not a good game and I can rarely help myself when the opportunity to make a list presents itself. So, 5 artists that I can't stand-

obviously Frank Zappa, inevitably Queen, necessarily Pink Floyd, quite possibly Black Sabbath and Music by John Miles.

But I'd prefer to be writing about things I like, not those I don't like. If you don't like football, Eurovision, the ongoing debacle of politics or Strictly Come Dancing, you don't have to. Don't, then.    

Desert Island Books

 For a long time now I've had in mind a feature for here called The Best Book in the House. It would have been one of those 'World Cup' sort of games in which titles would qualify for the later stages from groups like Poetry, Fiction, Biography, Music, Sport, Painting, Philosophy and even Science.

There might, very approximately, be 2000 books in the house. That's not loads but, along with the CD's, space for them is becoming an issue but I like them and rarely part with any of them. But it is assumed I have all the best books I want because if I knew about any others, I'd buy them. Signed editions by Larkin, Auden, Eliot, Rosemary Tonks and Elizabeth Bishop being beyond sensible at the prices they are.

So, to cut the game short, I stood in front of the shelves one at a time and noted down likely contenders. It's a brutal way of doing it but I can't sit down and re-read them all like a Booker Prize judge. It's a competitive game and if something isn't conspicuous enough then it probably isn't a potential winner.

What came of that was a list of 20 that didn't even have Elizabeth Bishop on it. That's how cruel the process was. But the answer hasn't been arrived at yet and there is still time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse. In fact, there might not be an answer as such. The closest I might get is a list of Desert Island Books. From the 20, I've put stars against 7 and been left in that awful position of having too many to fit into the standard 8 so the list could well be extended to 10. I lined up the 7 that seemed to have become the essential elements. But I'm not sure.

Not on the team photo are Proust, Camus, Hardy, Hamlet, Rosemary and the copy of Touch signed by Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979 because it is the artefact and its significance that matters, too. As yet there are no music books but music is at its best as music and I don't listen to books, I read them, so we will see about that.

But the 7, here lined up in all their glory, are at least among the best books I've ever read.

Dubliners didn't take much thinking about. Of all prose fiction, the outrageously both most artful and most natural. Not just The Dead but the way the other stories expand towards it. James Joyce would have been as much of a hero if that was all he had written. Possibly even more so given my preference for not over-producing.

Religion doesn't feature much in my life. One has to respect that of others while finding it absurd. Jesus Christ had more impact on the world than anybody since, though, and the CofE Conservative, A.N. Wilson, is the ultimate scholar in explaining who he was, in Jesus.

Another life I've taken some interest in is Shakespeare's and it makes one wonder quite high-powered married life can be when Andrew and Katherine Duncan-Jones were husband and wife for many years. Her Ungentle Shakespeare is readily the choice on Shakespeare biography in a wide but often dubious field.

Naturally, the Collected Larkin, I don't mind which. Poetry made sensible, perhaps more than it ever had been before, and the better for it.

Dr. Johnson's Selected Essays. Why. To tell you that, sir, would be no more necessary than to tell you why you breathe. It brings life to you and sustains it.

Not Donne's poems, spectacular though they are but a choice of books about him and them in which John Carey and others are deeply impressive but I enjoyed John Stubbs the most, as I remember.

That's a similar sort of tight choice as when there can't be room for more than one book about C17th Dutch painting but one is overrun with options. So, it isn't Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer or Laura Cumming's Thunderclap. It's not the Vermeer because there's more to it than that and it's not quite Laura because, like Benjamin Moser, she brings herself, and her father into the story. I was enchanted by all three books, almost as much as by the art they take as their premise but Benjamin nicked it by making me wish I lived in Utrecht and so The Upside-Down World it is.

 

It might be best to leave it at this 7 that have seemingly selected themselves rather than not be able to decide on one more and so extend it to 10, then why not 20, 50 or 100. The carnage of any selection process is horrific. What I'd like as the next choice, as ever, is a remedy for the compulsion to want to make lists.

Anthology

 As far as the list-making fetish goes, for a poet or poetry reader the making of one's own anthology must be the ultimate project. Why I thought I'd begin mine I'm not sure but making a list is as compulsive as it is daft, especially if a numerical limit is not put on it. Most lists are themed or else one could please onself with Dadaist lists, like- The Moon, antibiotics, turbot, The War of Jenkins' Ear, Felicity Kendall, kumquat and Afternoon Delight by the Starland Vocal Band.

So it's only now, having got 121 lines on the Excel spreadsheet of my anthology, I begin to consider its parameters. I've limited it to three poems per poet, mainly arbitrarily but a few would get double figures straight off without such a quota. Would I stop at 500. Would I get to 500. There's always just one more. At least the Spotify playlist at DGBooks Radio has decided for itself what my favourite pop music is.  

Going back to basics, what is the etymology of 'anthology'. It's,

'mid 17th century: via French or medieval Latin from Greek anthologia, from anthos ‘flower’ + -logia ‘collection’ (from legein ‘gather’). In Greek, the word originally denoted a collection of the ‘flowers’ of verse, i.e. small choice poems or epigrams, by various authors.'

 

But why and how did 'small' creep in there. Collections of flowers can be extensive, as per the Chelsea Flower Show so we must be careful of definitions.

Certainly the contents of an anthology need to be regarded as worthy. So there must be a remit, like 'these are the best poems ever', 'these poems represent C19th French Poetry' or 'these are my personal favourite poems', etc.

I'm very much tending towards the lattermost of those even if several poets would get more than three at the expense of others getting any without that prescription. If, at present, it goes from Catullus to Julia Copus, it has to be said that poems from 1900 onwards begin at no. 29 out of the 121 so it's hardly a broad sweep of English Poetry and there are 10 translations - from Latin, French, Polish and Russian- so it's not 'English' poetry to begin with. I've tried to include as much as possible from pre-1900 but vast continents of Edmund Spenser, Paradise Lost and John Dryden are lost on me. 

So at whatever lengths it stops at, it will be all the poems I could think of, not including those from fourth place downwards by any given poet except there will be the one I forgot about and then the other one I forgot about.

Not to worry. No publisher is pressing me to do this. There are no 'permissions' to pay for. It's like any other compulsion- 'the four aways', the ITV 7 or not stepping on the cracks in the pavement- golf, for some- that has no end until maybe one day it has been left aside for so long that it's not worth going back to.

Would that it were, as Robert Robinson used to say. It's problem is not so much how it will end but how it was ever allowed to begin.

Meanwhile, I've allocated two poems each to Rosemary Tonks and Wisława Szymborska. I really ought to decide which to put in.

Lists

 The tendency to make lists, or feel one needs to, is something of an affliction. I think it comes from a pre-occupation, in a certain sort of boy, with league tables and pop charts. It was once important where one's favourite record was in the hit parade and where one's chosen football team were in the league. While those concerns have faded in significance, the vestiges of a subliminal need to put things in order has endured.

But there might be a good reason for it. For example, in work, whenever senior management were questioned on any issue, we were assured that diversity/pay and conditions/well-being, possibly even doing the job were 'taken very seriously' and were a 'high priority'. But like tradespeople whose vans advertise them as specialists in many different types of work, not everything can be a specialism and not everything can be of the highest priority. 'Priority' means 'coming before' and so not everything can come before everything else.

I wish I'd written a letter to the in-house newspaper to make the point. I could have asked to see this much-vaunted order of priorities made real so that those whose concerns were lower down the list could ask why the concerns of others were considered more important. By making a list, one answers such questions once and for the time being.

 

A friend takes a virtuous passing interest in classical music and sometimes asks about composers. This week it was Mendelssohn. Very good, I said, and listed some Greatest Hits. I couldn't quite say he was a favourite because about a year ago I made a list of composers in order of preference- 87 of them with Pierre Boulez bottom- and Mendelssohn was 11th. Can one have eleven favourite composers. He can't get into my Top 10, the Violin Concerto in E minor notwithstanding. None of Tallis, Francois Couperin or Sibelius make the 10, their obvious masterpieces not quite comparing with the depth in the catalogues of others. The Top 10 looks quite solidly to be,

J.S. BACH
BEETHOVEN
MOZART
HANDEL
SHOSTAKOVICH
MONTEVERDI
BRAHMS
SCHUBERT
BUXTEHUDE
JOSQUIN DES PREZ

the biggest problem with that being not fitting both Mozart and Handel into the Top 3. Maybe it's Handel at no. 3 on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. 

 

I was glad to hear on R2 in the small hours a programme on Neil Young by someone called Sigrid, a bit of hagiography but an overdue reminder of one who was 'favourite' enough for me to have a few of his albums. Much-loved but not under consideration for at least my Top 50 'pop' artists. But Bob Harris put in an appearance to say he was one of the best. For him more than me, yes, but ahead of The Eagles, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and all the other legends he would say the same about?

Bob at least deserves some credit for venturing outside of his own envelope by beginning Sounds of the 70's this afternoon with Sugar Baby Love by the Rubettes. 

But I'm left the chance to resurrect the old Top 6 feature by doing Neil Young. In no particular order,

Like a Hurricane, Unknown Legend, Harvest Moon, Lookin for a Love, Out on the Weekend, Heart of Gold. 

The Composers Chart

The old, somewhat juvenile impulse to make lists never quite goes away. I think one imagines it somehow classifies the world for us, to let us think we've 'got it', we're in charge, have understood and know where we stand.

However, once you get beyond the Top 10, say, it becomes arbitrary. There's 81 of them here and down to Stravinsky before it becomes borderline whether I like them or not. It is the downside of any judging job, multiplied by the truism of the Olympic Games, that Beethoven, Mozart and Handel are all certainties for Top 3 places, and would be guaranteed second if not for each other, but somebody has to finish fourth. But Beethoven's had a tremendous year with me. Handel could easily have been second this time last year.

Is Dvorak that much more favorite than Ravel - there's not much to choose between the peloton who finish in roughly the same time on this stage.

It's a work-in-progress that could have fifty or a hundred more names slotted into it on the basis of my vague idea of how much I like them but these are composers that I'm sufficiently familiar with to know a few of their works, or what they are like.

It's a work-in-progress that need not go any further, mainly because it's a waste of time and only, like writing a poem, perhaps, finds its author attempting to authenticate an identity for themselves.

However, while I'm in a spending phase, I'm not sure I want a picture of Bach or Mozart on my wall, if only because they are too obvious. I had one of Beethoven when I was a teenager, Handel wouldn't be out of the question but, if such a thing is available, I think I could find wallspace for a picture of Shostakovich.

And there it is and since there was a special offer on, I helped myself to Handel, James Joyce and Josquin des Prez, too, so I have a few days to work out where they can be fitted in.

  

J.S. BACH BEETHOVEN MOZART HANDEL SHOSTAKOVICH MONTEVERDI BRAHMS SCHUBERT BUXTEHUDE JOSQUIN DES PREZ MENDELSSOHN TALLIS BYRD F. COUPERIN PURCELL SIBELIUS RACHMANINOV CHARPENTIER CHOPIN GLUCK SATIE HAYDN BUSONI DVORAK TCHAIKOVSKY D. SCARLATTI ELGAR ROBERT SCHUMANN GORECKI FAURE BIBER PUCCINI POULENC PART MACMILLAN TAVENER C.P.E. BACH BERLIOZ LASSUS MACHAUT OCKEGHEM A. SCARLATTI  TELEMANN VERDI VIVALDI LISZT TELEMANN PROKOFIEV CLARA SCHUMANN RAMEAU J.C. BACH LISZT RICHARD STRAUSS MUSSORGSKY A. SCARLATTI  GLASS CAGE HOLST BRUCH ALBINONI FANNY MENDELSSOHN NYMAN KHACHATURIAN BOCCHERINI BIZET SCHONBERG DEBUSSY BOYCE CORELLI RAVEL BARTOK SMETANA BORODIN DEBUSSY CORELLI STRAVINSKY MAHLER BRUCKNER KORNGOLD WAGNER BOULEZ

Diary, and 100 Books

 I've never been sure how diarists managed to be so. The likes of Samuel Pepys or Tony Benn led active lives and yet found the time to write much of it down. So did Philip Larkin but his admirers (for the poems) should be eternally grateful that one of the girlfriends followed his instructions and burnt them, unread.

Surely if you've not done much, you can only say,

Wrote diary about writing diary

but if you're busy you wouldn't have the time.

But today, taking up again The History of Writing I saw the history of civilisation from the perspective of whole cultures developing from one to the next, through consonants more than vowels, not always by any means from left to right in Aramaic, Nabatean, Tifinigh and all sorts of such systems by which people made themselves understood. Whole languages are passed over in a sentence, giving a glimpse of how there's a bit more to communication that 'i before e except after c'.

I realize my reponsibility to the internet that must be on tenterhooks with my chess career not far short of 'trending'. Well, I got to 1990 today, had a shot at an all-time high rating and blew it but remain well-placed to have another go.

Not only that, I saw an Austin 7 in a car showroom, a well preserved example of the first car I ever went in, except that turns out to have been a Morris 8, and then found myself playing dominoes with strangers who were very happy to be friends in the afternoon. Perhaps it is of such contingent detail that life, and thus reports of it in diaries, is made up. 

But if David Bowie made a list of 100 Books, maybe I should, too. It's not Best, it's not Favourite, it is Important to Me, as they some to mind. There's no point listing the Complete Works of 100 writers and I haven't decided yet whether they can only have one each but Selected might have to be allowed in. Let's see how it goes.

 

James Joyce, Dubliners

Samuel Johnson, Selected Essays 

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived

Shakespeare, Hamlet

Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper

Rosemary Tonks, Bedouin of the London Evening 

Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel

Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare

Ian Bostridge, Schubert's Winter Journey  

 

John Stubbs, Donne

W. H. Auden, The English Auden

Sean O'Brien, Ghost Train  

Wendy Lesser, Music for Silenced Voices

Danny Baker, Going to Sea in a Sieve

Thom Gunn, Selected Poems, ed. Clive Wilmer

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Graham Swift, Mothering Sunday

 

Simon Jenkins, England's Cathedrals

Maggi Hambling, The Works   

Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach 

Haruki Murakami, Clorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage 

Richard Yates, Collected Stories

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

Albert Camus, La Peste

Andre Gide, La Symphonie Pastorale 

Patrick Hamilton, Rope

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

 

Montaigne, The Essays, a Selection

Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu

George Orwell, The Decline of the English Murder 

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch 

Banana Yoshimoto, Lizard

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway 

Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

A.N. Wilson, Jesus 

William Trevor, Reading Turgenev

George Moore, In Minor Keys 

 

Mark Paytrees, Bolan, the Rise and Fall of a C20th Superstar 

John Preston, A Very English Scandal

Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson

Roddy Lumsden, Not All Honey

Martin Mooney, Bonfire Makers

Norman MacCaig, Selected Poems

John Donne, Songs & Sonets

Joseph Brodsky, Of Grief and Reason 

Wislawa Symbosrska, View with a Grain of Sand

Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life, edited and translated by Robert Spaethling

 

--

 

Well, there's 50. I'll have to owe you 50 more, relax the rules or go a bit deeper. What, no Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Bronte, Edward Thomas, etc, etc. Well, no, not yet but I can hardly claim to have lost faith in poems when there are so many poets there. There'd be not much of me left if they were taken out.

That was interesting for me to do. Whether it was quite so gripping for you to read isn't for me to say. Those who write diaries thinking that anybody will later be interested enough to read them risk flattering themselves. Larkin got a lot of things wrong but he got the poems right and did the right thing in preventing us from having his daily record of himself.

 

If I Was Your Girlfriend

 Eventually the list-making for 'A Perfect Day of Pop Radio' must stop. And so it stops now, the last adjustment being made in the Jazz Show, from midnight - 1 a.m., underwhelmed by Miles Davis's cover of 'Time After Time' and so replacing it with this.

And so now I can begin work on my Unfinished Symphony, the little essays on each track that would have made up my book on pop music had I lived long enough to do them all.

Prince & Miles Davis - If I Was Your Girlfriend

 'Cool' is a highly-prized commodity in certain parts of the pop music industry. For many of those who take it seriously, it is a necessary, implicit thing that the artist must have or else one simply doesn't give them the time of day. It's likely to be a high priority among young people keen on establishing the value of their chosen taste and thus in universities but I hope by now most students have seen through that and the situation isn't as bad as it was from 1978-81.

'Cool' is only really what you say it is. It shouldn't be achievable by trying to achieve it. That should instantly disqualify you from it. It should be effortless. Thus, I remain unsure if the 'cool' of Lou Reed, Prince and Miles Davis, three of its most apparently successful exponents, is valid or not. Perhaps their attempts succeed in spite of their efforts because the music was still good whereas the likes of, say, Bono bombed abysmally because it usually wasn't.

Disdaining the uncool, detaching oneself from the bourgeois, mainstream, square sorts that define the ordinary might have seemed a good idea but non-conformity very soon becomes a new uniform. The dissent from middle class standards of dress and behaviour into long hair, denim, some Marxism and maybe even substance abuse was as conservative as Jacob Rees-Mogg is now with its adherence to party lines, properness and herd instinct.

It could be turned inside out. If only they had realized how absurd it all was. They seemed to think they were one step ahead but they were a step behind and drenched in their own righteousness. Nonetheless, If I Was Your Girlfriend is a slinky thing and made for Miles Davis to step into as the two uber-cool giants from different generations overcome all accusations of 'trying too hard' by 'being any good'.

The Soul Show

 The bad habit of list-making continues, compiling this Perfect Day of Pop Radio as and when.

There was some overflow from the Sounds of the 60's and Sounds of the 70's shows and so I'm picking up further essentials here in The Soul Show and in due course there can be The Rock Show, The Reggae Show, maybe a less competitive Sounds of the 80's, perhaps singer-songwriters, Children's Favourites which I'm confident Radio 2 will want to give over a Bavk Holiday Monday to and can also serve as at least the Contents page of the pop music book I doubt I'll ever write.

However many repechages one provides, though, there will be the heartbreak of not having included the next few one wanted to. In the case of  The Soul Show, Macy Gray can consider herself unlucky alongside a wealth of 60's Motown, Stax and Northern Soul but, rather more brutally, if you can't get yourself remembered fondly enough to get into a day's worth of broadcasting then maybe some others were considered more worthy of the honour.

I'm not concerned about what constitutes 'soul', 'rock' or any other genre. Such categories are vague, porous and not very meaningful at the best of times and, as always here, all you have to be is any good. 

William Bell & Judy Clay – Private Number 

Inez & Charlie Foxx – Mockingbird 

Ike & Tina Turner – I Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine 

Brenda Holloway – Every Little Bit Hurts 

The Stylistics – Betcha By Golly Wow 

The Chi-Lites – Have You Seen Her? 

Stevie Wonder – Love’s in Need of Love Today 

Beyoncé – If I Were a Boy 

Rose Royce – Love Don’t Live Here Anymore 

Odyssey – If You’re Looking for a Way Out 

Otis Redding – You Don’t Miss Your Water 

The Staple Singers – I’ll Take You There 

Gladys Knight & the Pips – Baby Don’t Change Your Mind 

Candi Staton – Mr and Mrs Untrue 

The Isley Brothers – This Old Heart of Mine 

Curtis Mayfield – Move On Up 

Love Unlimited – Walkin in the Rain with the One I Love 

Alexander O’Neal – Criticize 

Lauryn Hill – Doo Wop (That Thing) 

Jimmy Ruffin – What Becomes of the Broken Hearted 

Frank Wilson – Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) 

Baby Washington – That’s How Heartbreaks are Made 

Marvin Gaye – I Heard it through the Grapevine 

Garnet Mimms & the Enchanters – Cry Baby 

Darts – It’s Raining 

McAlmont & Butler – Yes 

Beverley Knight – Woulda Coulda Shoulda 

Wyclef Jean ft. Mary J. Blige – 911 

Sly & the Family Stone – Family Affair 

Sam Cooke – Bring it on Home 

Fontella Bass – Rescue Me 

Freda Payne – Band of Gold 

Jaibi – You Got Me