nostalgia not what it used to be shock

I should have known when, a couple of years ago, there was a minor kerfuffle in the media about the thirtieth anniversary of punk - the features, the documentaries, the grizzled veterans, the ubiquity of Billy Bragg - that following hard on its heels would come the New Romantics. And here they are: a dramatisation of Boy George - the early years - on TV; the reformation (no, not that one) of Duran Duran (or is it Spandau Ballet? Or both?) - anyway, the reunion tours, the features, the documentaries, the ubiquity of some style guru or other. And so wearyingly on.

I have an interest to declare here, because I was a punk before you were a punk (perhaps: at least I was a punk after seeing the Stranglers play at the Doncaster Gaumont on June 16th 1977, a date that must have changed my life because I've remembered it for all this time). And after the stripped-down truth-seeking rawness of the best that punk had to offer, the mincing synthesisers (Ooh Vienna!), awful clothing, awful haircuts and vacuous partying of the New Romantics signalled less of a new dawn than a return to the proggish self-indulgence of the 70s. Plus ca change.

Other people's nostalgia is usually less attractive than your own, but my dislike of this latest outbreak is tempered by a chastening recollection. My generation, in its forties and fifties, in power in TV, in the newspapers and in politics, looks back fondly on its funny clothes, its hairstyles, the drugs it took and the music it listened to. What did my parents look back on in their flabby nostalgia for their own glory years? The austerity of the war and the struggle against Hitler.

Ignoring the critics

A review by Andrew Clements of James Macmillan's trumpet concerto in this morning's Graun has put my back up.

 Clements wrote "(The soloist's) virtuosity was unfailingly impressive, MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch as depressing as ever".

 It's worth pausing for a moment to savour the use of language here. Note that Clements doesn't say, "MacMillan's mix of bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch was as depressing as ever". No. The was is in the previous clause praising the soloist, and we the readers carry it by inference into the criticism which follows.

Why so shy Andrew? Surely you don't lack the cojones to come right out with it?

Note also that MacMillan's bombastic posturing and sanctimonious kitsch are taken as a given. Clements has no room to persuade us that MacMillan's music features such qualities, preferring to record his own reaction at finding those things.

As ever with criticism, this is opinion masquerading as objectivity. After all, one person's bombast is another's grandeur, and my kitsch may well be your expressiveness.

But these are run of the mill objections to art criticism, I hear you say. Fair enough. Yet what irked me about Clements's snide little put-down was not the inherent weaknesses of the shabby trade it reveals, but the sheer lack of manners and class.  Whatever else you can say about MacMillan, it seems pretty certain that he is ten times the musician Andrew Clements is. Does the critic not feel even moderately embarrassed to find himself excoriating in print someone who has forgotten more about the composer's trade then he himself will ever know?

Sibelius once said, "Ignore the critics. No statue was ever erected to a critic."

 If only it were so easy.

Thierry Henry and Climate Change

Climate change deniers the world over will have been delighted by the mass hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. What a can of worms they reveal.

Details are all over the web, but in summary they destroy the credibility of a leading climate change Cassandra, Professor Phil Jones. They reveal him in turn to be conspiring to suppress papers by climate change sceptics ("Kevin and I will keep them out somehow", he writes), conspiring to marginalise a journal which had published papers by sceptics ("I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor"), trying to downplay the extent of the Mediaeval Warm Period on the basis of a "gut feeling, no science", threatening to resist Freedom of Information requests to reveal data even to the extent of destroying it, and proposing a "trick" to substitute one set of data for another in a publication. More extraordinary still they show him corresponding with a colleague baffled at absence of recent warming ("The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't... ").

So should we stop worrying? Probably not. The people revealed by these leaks to be manipulative anti-scientists are not the only ones working in the field. They are merely some of the most influential. I do realise that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I was in the Alps in the summer and I saw with my own eyes how the glaciers were retreating.

But hasn't the climate always changed? Didn't we have glaciers in Scotland at the end of the 19th Century? Hasn't humanity has always managed to adapt, hating change at the same time as being really good at dealing with it? And though the science is persuasive, can we really be sure that humanity is actually responsible for global warming? What if it's just nature? And shouldn't we be worrying about the next ice age instead?

On the whole I, like Professor Jones, would rather keep the Climate Change gravy train going. Not because my department's funding and my reputation depends on it, but because it offers the best hope of getting out of the ludicrous cycle of consumption and over-population which besets Western society, wrecking natural habitats and turning us all into mall-zombies.

But when that arch clown George Monbiot apologises in the Guardian today for misleading his readers, revealing himself unexpectedly to be a bigger man by far than Thierry Henry, the handball cheat whose manual assist got France into the World Cup finals and kept the Irish out, you know that something truly extraordinary has happened.

Houllebeq's "Atomised" (2)

Attentive readers (if there are any) of this blog may recall a piece back in May on Michel Houllebeq's novel Atomised. It tells, I wrote at the time, "the miserable life stories of two French half brothers Bruno and Michel, abandoned by their hippy mother in childhood. Bruno turns out an inadequate sex pest; Michel an unfeeling scientist. The West, Houellebecq tell us, has given itself over to a cult of individualism. The more selfishly we behave, the more unhappy we are." I agreed with much of Houllebeq's analysis, whilst disliking his book thoroughly, finding it badly written and boring.

Now what's this in today's Guardian? A Comment piece which contains the following - "But just because big government has helped atomise (my italics) our society, it doesn't follow that smaller government would automatically bring us together again". And later, "The big government approach has spawned multiple perverse incentives that either discourage responsibility or actively encourage irresponsibility. The paradox at the heart of big government is that by taking power and responsibility away from the individual, it has only served to individuate them (great verb, individuate). What is seen in principle as an act of social solidarity has in practice led to the greatest atomisation of our society."

Has the Graun taken to commissioning op-ed pieces from reclusive French writers now resident in Ireland? Er, no. This was by David Cameron.

I guess the disparagement of big government would be the give-away.

He goes on, "The once natural bonds that existed between people - of duty and responsibility - have been replaced by the synthetic bonds of the state - regulation and beauracracy." Spot on.

So now we know: the Tory leader has been reading Atomised. Is this a good thing? Probably: after Messrs. Thatcher and Major, whose tastes ranged from Milton Friedman all the way to Jeffrey Archer and the cricket scores, any fiction-reading Tory leader would be progress. Can he fix Broken Britain? Probably not. But identifying what's wrong might be the first step.

The BNP on Question Time redux

Apologies for revisiting a story that already feels like stale buns.

As predicted, Nick Griffin was less than impressive on Question Time. He isn't a bright bloke, but I suppose it shouldn't come as any surprise that a party of meat-heads can't find anyone better. You would have thought however that in the absence of brains, the BNP could at least come up with someone with a bit of charisma. Think of Wodehouse's Roderick Spode, leader of the Black Shorts: now there was a man to make the average arts graduate quail.

What garment should Griffin endorse? There is something of a fascist John Major about him, and I favour a variant on the underwear theme. The Black Y-Fronts has a certain ring to it.

After the show was broadcast Griffin made a complaint against the BBC, saying he felt as if he had been attacked by a lynch mob. Since he's admitted to having shared a platform with a Ku Klux Klan leader, this might not have been the most tactful way of expressing himself. Although I suppose intimates of the Klan ought to know if anyone does what a lynch mob is like.

I found it heartening the other day to hear Rio Ferdinand telling all and sundry that Griffin had the right to be heard. You can tell the depths of folly the liberal no-platform lobby has plumbed when a fading Manchester United central defender has a better grasp of the issues than Oxbridge-educated Guardianistas.

The BNP on Question Time

OK. Disclaimer time. I am not a BNP supporter and I would never vote for them.

Now that's out of the way, what to make of the furore surrounding Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time tonight?

Well, first I have been absolutely baffled by the people who say he shouldn't be given the platform. Really? Don't they understand what democracy's about? It isn't a spectator sport. It's something everyone can have a go at; otherwise it's not democracy at all. Mrs Thatcher made a similar mistake when she banned the IRA from the airwaves. So hats off to the BBC for giving Griffin an appearance - a refreshing display of moral courage from Mark Thompson.

I believe Griffin will be condemned out of his own mouth. I once heard him interviewed on Radio 5, and for a Cambridge graduate he was woefully ineffectual. I find his assertion that you can't be black and British repellent, but also perplexing. I really don't understand how you can say that someone born and raised here can't be British just because they have a brown skin. I am a bit old school on this - for me Kevin Pietersen shouldn't be playing cricket for England: living here for a few years doesn't count. On the other hand Monty Panesar is as English as buttered toast, and it's irrelevant that he's a Sikh. He's a Luton boy through and through.

The Guardian has been full of hand-wringing nonsense about Griffin in recent weeks. Its leader writers settled for opposition to his Question Time appearance, illustrating that one of the seductive tendencies of extremism is to make otherwise reasonable people into idiots. Gary Younge, writing in today's paper, urges that the solution to racism might be, er, anti-racism. I'm afraid I have no idea at all what this means.

The reality is that the BNP is thriving because it is the only political party which opposes immigration. Its leadership and supporters may well be racist, but I suspect most of the people who vote for it aren't. There is a case to be made against immigration on grounds of economics, the environment and cultural cohesion, and yet public discussion of the issue has been as thoroughly vetoed by today's polite society as discussion of prostitution was vetoed in the Victorian drawing room. There's an interesting article here (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/6400553/Cowardice-on-immigration-has-allowed-the-BNP-to-flourish.html) by Frank Field and Nicholas Soames of the Parliamentary cross-party Balanced Migration group which makes exactly this point.

Incidentally the BBC reported the Office for National Statistics' quite extraordinary prediction yesterday of a population increase to 70 million in the near future as largely attributable to "migration". I suppose we should be grateful the prediction was reported at all, but it's precisely because of this kind of mealy-mouthed attempt to avoid drawing attention to the consequences of unrestricted immigration that the BNP are on Question Time tonight.

Barry Manilow and the decline of classical music

A couple of recent conversations, both with educationalists, have filled me with gloom about the future of classical music in the UK. The distinct impression gleaned from both is of the slow death of classical instrumental teaching in schools. "My school used to have half a dozen outstanding musicians at any one time", one said to me. "But now they all want to do electric guitar or drums". Another lamented the death of the local youth orchestra. "They lost the endangered instruments first, oboes and bassoons, and then they just didn't have enough players and had to shut it down". What, I asked, was the prospect of finding a good local young soloist to do a concerto? Much shaking of heads. "You might find someone, perhaps in one of the private schools. But I'd have to put out feelers. I can't think of anyone off hand." This autumn a local University renowned for its music department, one told me, had no string players in its new intake of students.

It is a cliche that things are not what they used to be, one widely mocked because we all know that things have a tendency to remain exactly the same; but let me record one way things truly were different in the 1970s. I had violin lessons till I was 17, but hardly had I got into double figures when I realised that girls had an irrational weakness for boys who could play the electric guitar. So the violin was a chore (enjoyed playing, hated practising), whereas the guitar was a pleasure to be indulged whenever there was a free moment. The school had a visiting guitar teacher, but the kids who had lessons were universally useless at rock and roll. That's because you cannot teach someone to play it. You have to work it out for yourself. Classical music requires technique, and if you can acquire one it will take you almost to the highest level, where only the last few percentage points of musicality marks the difference between Alfred Brendel and a journeyman. But rock and roll is not like that. In a discipline which prizes above all else the ability to improvise, every player has to find their own way: after all, the great masters of the electric guitar, from Hendrix to Richard Thompson to Tom Verlaine, have styles so divergent they might be playing different instruments.

Not only were lessons useless, but they were given by adults. Pop music was ours, the music of the young, and we would no more have let them teach us about it than they would have known how. You may say that the slow death of classical music (if that's what it is) is just a natural consequence of an art form's obsolescence. Perhaps. But is not that also true of pop music? Is it not the case that when a medium is taught in schools, when there are exams you can take in it, when Phd students pore over the lyrics to Dark Side of the Moon, the medium's time is up? When my children know more about the Beatles and AC/DC than I do, when the latest in electro-pop (Lady Gaga, La Roux) is just the 80s revisited, when pop is condemned to rehash the cultural stylings of its heyday for a new generation, when the X-Factor churns out singing strippers who would make perfectly capable cruise-ship chanteuses in another life, isn't that the sound of a dead horse being flogged? When will the new punk come to sweep it all away? And if it does, will it just be a re-hash of the old?

Kids do not need adults to tell them about pop. They will spend their youth discovering it and making it for themselves. But they do need adults to tell them about classical music. Why? Well, because although it's amongst the greatest art the West has ever produced, because although once discovered it is an emotional and psychological resource for life, most kids won't find it on their own: they are put off by the language and the lack of surface glamour which most pop music strives assiduously to cultivate. There are other reasons for the decline of classical music in Britain, but a woeful blindness on the part of educationalists must take its share of the blame. I have heard teachers say in all seriousness, "We're glad we don't have to teach classical music at GCSE any more: it helps with inclusivity. Now we're doing keyboard and karaoke more kids want to get involved". It is with difficulty have I restrained myself from shouting, "Take that, you smug bastard", whilst beating them with a riding crop. Would they make the same argument about Shakespeare? Can you imagine someone saying, "We don't bother with Macbeth or Hamlet any more, because the kids don't want to get involved. We let them do Harry Potter or Garth Nix instead"? And yet that is effectively the place we have reached. A generation of teachers who were themselves taught little about classical music is now responsible for teaching a new generation of children. We have sown the wind, and are reaping the whirlwind.

My remedy? How long have we got. I would start, and it would only be a start, at the very bottom, in primary school. Every classroom has a CD player already. Make teachers play classical music every day while the kids are doing reading or drawing. This already happens in my youngest daughter's school. Play the Brandenburgs. Some Handel. Start them off slow. Get the language into their heads. That would do to get them going.

Unfortunately my daughter's teacher is a Barry Manilow fan. She now knows the words to Copacabana by heart; but when I conduct Beethoven's 5th tomorrow night I know my wife will struggle to persuade her to come.