Sleepless with John Tavener

Friday, 9.55pm The Temple in the City of London. Narnian lampposts glow in the twilight; black-clad singers roam the courtyard. I am approaching, with trepidation, the 12th-century Temple Church to witness the world premiere of John Tavener’s new work, The Veil of the Temple. Combining the forces of the Holst Singers, the English Chamber Orchestra and the Temple Church’s own boys’ choir, this piece is, the composer says, “a journey towards God” - an attempt to reconcile east and west, Islam and Christianity. A laudable aim, of course. But it’s going to last seven hours. Continued →

In the cockpit with Bruce Dickinson

Bruce Dickinson is teaching me to fly. We are in the cockpit of a Boeing 737 simulator in the British Airways flight training facilities at Heathrow. Through the windows we see the winking nightlights of Gatwick airport. “You’re doing extraordinarily well here, sir,” says the legendary heavy-metal frontman, as I wrench the joystick around and yellow alarm lights wink on. While he solicitously explains the functions of the banks of switches, levers and luminescent screens, I’m waiting for him to start hollering “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter”. “Too low - flaps,” says a stern electronic voice in an American accent. Buzzers sound. The runway looms up to meet us. Groundrush. I have information overload.

We land safely - thanks, I suspect, to Dickinson’s finessing of my controls. The hydraulic cabin comes to a shuddering halt and the whine of the engines and air-conditioning subsides. Which leaves only one question. What on earth am I doing in a £10m airliner simulator with the lead singer of Iron Maiden? Continued →

A heavy-metal awards party

Something like a polite cocktail party is taking place in a chintzy antechamber to the London Hilton’s Grand Ballroom. A few guests have carefully outrageous hair; many others sport nicely styled goatees and Gap casuals. One man is wearing a leather jacket with the word “REFUSE” printed on the back. Whether that is because his band is rubbish, or he Just Says No, is hard to determine. The throng sips champagne and chatters idly. This is, of course, the annual awards ceremony held by the raucously onomatopoeic Kerrang! magazine, of hard-rock legend. It is so dangerous that Ben Elton has been invited. Continued →

Exploring sound art

Browsing in a record shop one day, you might come across a CD called Ticker. It’s an album-length recording of a ticking clock. The tick is fed through an echo, and the echoes get faster or slower depending on the body temperature of the artist, Alvin Lucier. He made the recording with thermal sensors attached to his body. Sometimes, perhaps to avoid charges of anthropocentrism, he puts the sensors on a potted plant instead.

This is sound art. Normally, I prefer to listen to music. Shostakovich, Rage Against the Machine, Ibizan trance. Just listening to interesting sounds has struck me as the sort of thing an ultra-stoned hippy might do, pushing a door back and forth for hours and swaying in addled wonder to the melody of the creaks. Continued →

I’m a Man
by Ruth Padel (Faber & Faber)

When is a guitar not a guitar? Why, when it’s a cock. Throughout this extraordinary book, Ruth Padel suffers from a kind of metaphoric mania: nothing is allowed simply to be what it is. We are told many times that “performing on guitar, the core act of rock, is whipping out your cock”. What Padel doesn’t try to explain is why so many musicians beat themselves up trying to learn guitar in the first place, if they could just be whipping out their cocks to the same effect.

Padel’s avowed project is to examine how the sexuality and theatricality of rock music owes its structural roots to Greek myth. Unfortunately the case of such a link is never argued, merely gestured at. Either we are to take on faith the assumption that Greek myth “underpins our own imagination”; or the claimed connection is so banal as to be meaningless: “Like myth, [rock music] is amazingly transformative”; “Like Greek myth, pop song is about relationships”. The whole book is written in a spatchcocked, febrile prose, a nauseous fusion of the overheated and the blankly demotic. Music “is brilliant at making things feel natural,” Padel chirrups meaninglessly; Greek tragedy is “like a Lloyd-Webber musical”. Continued →

Oops! I Did It Again
Britney Spears

Why is poor Britney so angry? To watch her dance on Top of the Pops, you might suspect that her body has been taken over by satirical aliens and forced to perform a strange ballet of robotic violence. Only a desperate glint in her eyes hints at the depths of her impotent rage.

Her new album will afford plenty more excuses to jerk around (or off, for her male fanbase): with its clinical percussion and huge cornflake-packet snare drums, 80s orchestral stabs and turbine sound effects, it’s invented a whole new genre: retro girlie industrial pop. Throw in a bit of harassed R&B while you’re about it, for a bizarre cover version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”. (What, still? Even with the new breasts?) Continued →

The rise of the cultural middleman

When the artistic history of the 20th century comes to be written, one remarkable development will stand out. That is the rise of the middleman. As our culture became ever more mediated, we made the mistake of bestowing the aura of artistic genius upon the mediators themselves. The people closest at hand – musical conductors, theatre directors, DJs – became the objects of the awe and admiration that was rightly due to the creative spirits who built the works in the first place.

The most glaring example of this is the invention of the conductor. In the early years of the 20th century, Mahler and Toscanini battled it out for supremacy in Europe, while Theodore Thomas established in America a new template for the conductor as the permanent arbiter of musical taste with the Chicago Symphony. Soon the conductor was not merely a hired hand whose job was to beat time, but a suffering genius swaying in creative ecstasy on the podium. Toscanini, von Karajan, Bernstein: these were the new musical heroes. Continued →

The music of horror

What does a vampire sound like? According to Philip Glass, the undead’s aural analogue is a quivering nest of minor arpeggios, pizzicati and dramatic swoops. Glass has written a new score for one of the mothers of all horror movies, Tod Browning’s 1931 version of Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. Glass is a name in his own right, of course, but in this, he is only the latest in a long line of film composers who have experimented with the music of fear.

Music is especially important in films that are meant to scare us because the soundtrack can slip past the intellect’s guard and act directly on the reptilian brain. Music as a powerful mood-inducer, of course, is an idea that has been around ever since early man started stretching animal skins over wooden bowls and getting off his face on qhat, and in Plato’s Republic, Socrates and Glaucon earnestly discuss the possibly chaotic mental influence of certain musical scales.

Think “scary music” and you might at first imagine big, meaty soundscapes. Spidery low strings, pumping horns, banging orchestral drums and Orffish choirs. But intriguingly, Glass’s score is written for string quartet. Thanks to some studio overdubs, it can build into thrillingly rich, multilayered panic (which in next month’s live performances with the Kronos Quartet will need the addition of Glass himself at the piano), yet most of the time it is eerily intimate, more sinister than directly shocking. Its oozing sonorities blend beautifully with Lugosi’s chocolatey Hungarian accent, and the mood builds in long lines, a pulsing engine of doom. Continued →