New music - no way to run a railway?

The other night I went to a concert.  A friend of mine was having a piece played.  A set of pieces actually, for voice and a small ensemble.  It took place in a small and chi-chi performance room in a reclaimed industrial building with the usual bare brick, entrance through a small temple to cappucino.  

I liked my friend's piece.  S/he is a talented composer.  There was a degree of hip-hoppery, with a bit of minimalism and some Second Viennese School spread over all.  The performers were all young, or aspiring to look young; black clad, with the disappointed but defiant mien that contemporary music specialists share with minor functionaries in a revolutionary state who have just learned that they have been denounced as fifth columnists by former colleagues.

The audience for this event numbered between 25 and 30. As far as I could tell from the social interaction, almost all were either friends, family or students of the composer (and/or the players).

Turning the programme over I saw that the event was made possible with the support of a variety of public funded organisations, including the Arts Council and other usual suspects.

An art that is dying?  A monument to elitism and cronyism?  Or merely no way to run a railway?

Philip Collins, Jeremy Corbyn and the social democratic dream.

"The electorate selects a Labour government to push the nation down the road of progress", writes Philip Collins in the Times today.

Ah, the P word.  A section of political thought describes itself with a self-approbatory adjective, and rests self-satisfied on its intellectual laurels.  So far, so tendentious.

But what's this?  Collins continues, "That effort inevitably leads to an excess of public spending . . . (the electorate) call on the Conservative Party to tidy up".

An admission.  Crikey.  A fascinating insight into the mental world of a Social Democrat, occasionally called to serve as speechwriter at Tony Blair's table.

 Mr Collins is too complacent.  Whilst UK's debt to GDP ratio fell consistently from the highs of WWII, it began to rise again with Gordon Brown's spending spree, doubling from about 30% in 2002 to 60% by the time the coalition government came into office in 2010.  Since then HMG has struggled to deal with the aftermath of the 2008 crash, bearing down on public spending to restore some order to the public finances.

Labour meanwhile has tried to have it both ways, criticising the Tories for cuts as well as for borrowing too much money. The worm in Mr Collins' bud is that, although now marginally falling, debt to GDP is now wobbling between 80 and 90% of GDP.  It has tripled in 15 years.  It would be astonishing if the ratio had dipped significantly by the time this Parliament limps to an end. 

Thus it is overwhelmingly likely that the next Labour government will take office with a background of vastly higher existing debt levels than at any time since the 1960s.   I wonder where Mr Collins thinks a Corbyn/McDonnell government would leave Britain's fiscal position?

The reality is that the cosy dualism Collins describes is broken.  The Tories have struggled to restore the public finances in an age of low inflation.  Public services are undoubtedly suffering (although when we are still borrowing £1bn every week just to stay afloat that's hardly austerity - profligacy lite anyone?).  An incoming Labour government will ratchet up spending still further. A crunch is coming.  The public's expectation of decent public services is meeting economic reality.  The Social Democratic dream is over.  Britain is going to look very different when the progressives wake up.

Finishing War and Peace

I have just finished War and Peace. Like most readers, I endured rather than enjoyed Tolstoy's ruminations on the nature of history and philosophy which interrupt and then bookend the trials and tribulations of Natasha, Pierre, their friends and families.  But I can see their importance, partly because the contingency of the characters' complex affairs makes in a human way the point about history Tolstoy sets out in his theoretical disquisitions.

War and Peace doesn't really finish - it sinks back into the earth, and so imperceptibly that at the end I had to leaf back through the pages to find the last mention of the people in it. That's where the real glory of the book lies.  Tolstoy shows the weaknesses of his characters without ever really seeming to condemn.  His is the magnanimity we might hope for from God.

He also shows something true about life which the translator Anthony Briggs puts so well in the introduction.  "Virtually everyone - even people in privileged or advantageous circumstances - finds the living of life a worrying and difficult business most of the time".

So true; and funny that when I read those words in the afterglow of finishing the book, I thought immediately of Larry McMurtry's peerless Lonesome Dove.  For McMurtry has the same compassion, and the same lofty sense of observing poor humans doing their best to be happy despite their manifold self-inflicted mistakes.  As much wisdom as folly is given to Woodrow F Call and Augustus McCrae in Lonesome Dove, and you don't have to search far into one of the many fan sites devoted to McMurtry's book (and, more particularly, the TV spin-off which followed) to come across the following.

(Lorie is the young prostitute yearning for the bright lights of San Francisco.  Her interlocutor is McCrae, the lazy, sardonic old Texas Ranger).

"Lorie darlin'", says McCrae, "life in San Francisco, you see, is still just life.  If you want any one thing too badly, it's likely to turn out to be a disappointment. The only healthy way to live life is to learn to like all the little everyday things, like a sip of good whiskey in the evening, a soft bed, a glass of buttermilk, or a feisty gentleman like myself".

Amen to that.  But of course the genius of Tolstoy and McMurtry is that their characters are poignantly unable to take their own advice.  

I might just have to start on Lonesome Dove again.

Harvey Weinstein - Hollywood is another country

To be clear, if half the allegations against Harvey Weinstein are true, he should have been behind bars long ago.

The crimes of which Mr Weinstein is accused are commonplace in circumstances where priapic men have something approaching absolute power.  So far, so awful.  And so banal.

The fallout really is interesting however.  Actress after actress has come forward to accuse Mr Weinstein if not of rape, then of sexual assault; if not harassment, then threats to their career.  Where have they been until now?  Weinstein did not begin his behaviour last week.

Pressed on this point, a generous number of women have stressed that they feared their career prospects might have been in jeopardy if they reported Weinstein.  But although no doubt true (and unattractively tawdry) as far as it goes, it is not quite the whole story.  For they all must have known that their silence would expose other young women to auditions the Harvey Weinstein way.  

Their calculation went like this.  A - Expose Harvey = career jeopardy, but also the chance to stop Harvey doing it to anyone else.  B - Don't expose Harvey = career advancement, but also other actresses suffering the same fate.  

As we know, none of the people bleating about Weinstein now took option A when they had the chance.  They chose their own career prospects over the chance to protect others.  Few of us can truthfully claim we would have done differently, but it isn't very edifying.  The victims are now spotless.  On the other hand Weinstein has been condemned without trial.

Weinstein has claimed that mores used to be different, and that's true.  But what's really different is that Hollywood is a place where women whose USP is their looks are so desperate for money and fame that they're willing to ignore their moral compass to make it there.  And for every actress who walked out on Weinstein or fought him off there will be dozens more who thought, "Oh well, it's worth half an hour's misery for the sake of getting the part".

The Weinstein affair tells us a lot about Mr Weinstein, and a lot about his accusers.

Jonathan Liew's farewell to Henry Blofeld

Henry Blofeld, who has retired from Test Match Special after more than forty years in the job, was the subject earlier on this week of a withering assessment by Jonathan Liew in the Torygraph. Blofeld, says Liew, was the beneficiary of privilege.  After Eton and a tedious spell in the City, the broadcaster (a promising cricketer until his bike collided with a bus) fell into the BBC via a stint in county cricket reporting arranged by a personal contact.

Liew is not very forgiving of Blofeld's faults.  He points out that Blofeld wasn't a terribly good commentator (which is true, particularly in later years), being ill-prepared, prone to embarrassing gaffes and with a tendency to lean too heavily on his trademark observations about pigeons, buses, planes and (in the years before new stands obscured Old Trafford's railway station) trains.

Liew is shrewd enough to have worked out that to some extent Blofeld's upper-class twit persona is a front (and certainly no one watching Blofeld's final stint on TMS, broadcast live on Twitter, could have been in any doubt that here was a vastly experienced professional giving the occasion 100% of his attention), but he nevertheless makes the point that Blofeld got the job without by any stretch of the imagination being the best person to do it.  This does, Liew says, tell us something about the extent of our meritocracy.

I think Liew is only partly right.  It's certainly true that Blofeld got the job in the early 70s because of his connections, but times have changed.  Whereas in the old days personal contacts might have got you into Oxford (as Polly "One O Level" Toynbee might attest), into medical school or into a pupillage in Uncle Christopher's chambers, nowadays attempts to use such connections would be more likely to be greeted with embarrassment than with understanding.  Moreover, Blofeld may not have been the best cricket commentator but he was often an entertaining one, and the love which his colleagues and listeners evidently felt for him helped foster the sensation that one was eavesdropping on a friendly, slightly dissolute bunch of spectators who'd had a glass of wine before lunch high up in the stands.

More seriously, the kind of patronage Liew identifies is not only dead but has been replaced by another - tokenism.  Are Alison Mitchell and Ebony Rainford-Brent really the best people to do the TMS job?  I doubt it.  They were given the chance because they were a woman and - Holy Grail! - a black woman respectively.

I've mentioned before Robin Day's controversial assertion that Anna Ford only got her job on TV because men wanted to sleep with her.  Day was pilloried, but he was right. He wasn't suggesting that Ford couldn't do her job well enough (nor am I suggesting Mitchell and Rainford-Brent can't do theirs).  He was suggesting that someone else might have done it better.  Very much like Henry Blofeld in fact.

But ironically, whereas Blofeld was an entertaining gasbag, Mitchell and Rainford-Brent are competent broadcasters at best.  TMS now has quite a lot of these.  People like Blofeld don't grow on trees.

RIP Walter Becker

I'm trying to remember where I was when I first heard Reelin' in the Years.  Probably in my parents' bedroom listening to the radio.  This was a place more or less guaranteed to be unoccupied during the day, and therefore free from the fierce disapproval of my father, who hated pop music.  This would be about 1973, I think.  I have been listening to Steely Dan and therefore to the work of Walter Becker, whose death was announced yesterday, for nearly 45 years.

Thanks Walt.  To say that Becker's death leaves a hole in the world of music would probably not be true, since the years between 1972 and 1978, when Steely Dan released the six albums at the heart of their output, are decades in the past and their work still lives.  But it's sad all the same.  Ask not for whom the bell tolls, and all that.

Such is the pleasure their music has brought me, I once reflected that amongst the downsides of death would be that I would no longer be able to listen to it.

Unlike many great songwriters, Becker and Donald Fagen's material doesn't travel well to other artists.  Almost none of their best songs have been covered by others, partly because they were so brilliantly realised by the odd mix of Becker and Fagen themselves, regular players like Jeff Baxter and Denny Dias, and a coterie of session wizards; but perhaps more pertinently because the material was so idiosyncratic and so obviously a consequence of their own hipsterish personae. 

Becker and Fagen liked jazz as well as rock and roll, and the idea of the Sonny Rollins-loving cool cat with the black polo neck, the pallor of late nights, the succession of cigarettes and the copy of The Naked Lunch in the pocket oozes from their work, and from the way they presented themselves.

Although enthusiastic about jazz, it's hard to imagine Becker and Fagen being in favour of much else. A rich vein of cynicism courses through their stuff, and if they ever considered charting the obvious emotions it rarely shows.  There's little doubt that this was what Becker and Fagen were really like - there are interviews online which display their mordant humour to good effect: it wasn't a front.

They were sceptics at a young age.  Whilst still students at Bard College, New York, they quickly grasped that the 1968 Summer of Love was a sham.  "I heard it was you", Fagen sang on Only A Fool Would Say That a few years later, "Talking 'bout a world where all was free / It just couldn't be / And only a fool would say that".   Cynicism and irony can be overdone however - they are good responses to some aspects of life, but other emotions are useful too.  Becker and Fagen sometimes struggled in their personal lives, and Becker's descent into heroin addiction was one reason for the long hiatus in the pair's collaboration which followed Aja in 1978. 

Nevertheless, some of their best work displays a wonderful tenderness and subtlety.  Their songs are musical short stories.  I read Gaucho as a monologue by a man who returns home to find his gay lover with a young Hispanic.  Glamour Profession may or may not be the tedious boasting of a Hollywood driver-to-the-celebs.  Kid Charlemagne recounts the panic stricken flight of LA drug dealers.

And all these songs are set to a dazzling variety of jazz inflected stylings - ballad, rock and roll, gospel, waltz, reggae, disco, funk and blues.  Some - for example Your Gold Teeth II and Home At Last - seem to invent a new genre all of their own.  For me, it's no accident that the pair's most popular tunes - Reelin' in the Years, Rikki Don't Lose That Number, Deacon Blue, Do It Again - are the ones whose subject matters veer closest to the mainstream (they could have made a lot more money if they'd wanted).  Coincidentally or not, female Dan-heads are in short supply.

And yet I also feel that Becker and Fagen saw the limitations of jazz.  They worked very hard and spent huge sums of record company money to find soloists who could add something other than virtuosity - although there was plenty of that - to their material.  They were aware of the possibility of empty note-spinning, and of the blandness of jazz-rock fusion.  Music always says something, and a good deal of the genre seems to devote itself to saying, "Look at this F sharp 7th chord suspended over an A/G diad", or "Look how many million notes per minute I can play".  Not in Becker and Fagen's hands.  The writer Richard Williams described Steely Dan recently as "clever" above all else. Not so.  Yes, they were clever.  Smart arse if you like.  But they never allowed cleverness to be the goal.

Becker was a decent enough bass player and rather underrated guitarist, who also played a bit of keyboards.  Like Fagen, he preferred others to play on the band's records, and only performed himself when he had to.  Although he never sang on a Steely Dan record, those who bought his first solo album, Eleven Tracks of Whack, were surprised at the strength of his scratchy baritone voice.  With Donald Fagen, he mined an art form with results that can induce dizzying pleasure, and charted the underbelly of the American (and human) condition with rueful wit.  Thanks again Walt.

Andrea Leadsom, Mishal Husain and diversity at the BBC.

Andrea Leadsom MP has been widely mocked on Twitter for telling the BBC presenter Mishal Husain that it would be a good thing if some journalists could be a bit more patriotic.

This was a stupid remark, for obvious reasons, not the least of which is that it gave the government's opponents the opportunity to ridicule Ms Leadsom for her naive devotion to the idea that a bit of patriotrism might be a good thing.

But there is another reason why Leadsom gave the wrong answer to Ms Husain's question, now forgotten in the hoo-ha, and this tells us a good deal more about the interviewer, and about Britain. The question was, in terms, "Is anything going right for the government?"  It was Husain's persistent repetition of this question which made Leadsom snap.

The answer she should have given was, "Well, since 2010 we have had a steadily growing economy, we've created hundreds of thousands of jobs, unemployment is at historically low levels, and we have succeeded in reducing the deficit from £150bn a year down to about £50bn, a fall of about two thirds. So I would say quite a lot is going right for the government, wouldn't you?" Game, set and match to Leadsom.

But if Leadsom's was a stupid answer, Husain's was a stupid question. It was stupid because she should have expected to receive both barrels from Leadsom. But Husain didn't anticipate the answer Leadsom could have given. Why not? Because Husain, a low-wattage intellect who surely was promoted from the ranks of other low-wattage intellects (and perhaps even higher-wattage ones) because of her beauty and diversity box-ticking qualities, does not think the government has achieved anything worth mentioning. She genuinely thought she was asking Leadsom a hard question. It was actually a long-hop outside leg stump which Leadsom, not the sharpest herself, comprehensively missed.

Partly that's the government's fault. It didn't campaign sufficiently on its steady economic record during the election. Partly its because people take the present situation for granted. But partly its because the BBC tends to employ people who went straight into the Corporation with a good humanities degree from a good university, where they were taught by academics who had never left university themselves after attaining their own humanities degree (recent research shows that the overwhelming majority of British academics are Labour voters). So of course Ms Husain is a Hampstead liberal of cliche whose distaste for Toryism is visceral.

I have no enthusiasm for Ms Leadsom, and I hope she isn't the next Tory leader, but it just goes to show that the BBC's enthusiasm for diversity only goes as far as diversity of appearance. Diversity of view? Not so much.