According to Old Holborn, everyone is already doing this, so I am probably late.

Top 5 rock albums:

1 Emerson, Lake and Palmer: Emerson, Lake and Palmer
2 Magma: Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh
3 Emerson, Lake and Palmer: Brain Salad Surgery
4 Yes (with Patrick Moraz): Relayer
5 Premiata Forneria Marconi: Photos of Ghosts

Pretentious, complicated and classically-based: now that’s what I call music…

[The Blues Brothers]

I really shouldn’t listen to the BBC.

Having completed the pre-news political indoctrination slot, in which a member (or fanatical supporter) of the Labour Party holds forth, usually upon the topic of social engineering, without any pretence at balanced debate, Radio 4 got on to the news, the main story of which was a School of Rantzen piece about a very sick baby whose life-support system will be switched off in due course, all of the doctors, the court, and the appeal court having agreed that this is the best thing to do, being opposed in this decision by the parents, ’some of the nurses’, and the BBC.

Following this there was the most absurd item about Rugby, and singing, and the Welsh.

Now I am not myself Welsh {huge, perfectly synchronised stage whisper from 90-man Male Voice Choir: “Not Welsh? Oooooh!”}. Nor am I much of a hand at singing. I have, however, played some Rugby.

The point of the absurd item seemed to be that the Welsh sing songs at Rugby matches. One of these songs is Delilah, by two fellows whose names now escape me, but made famous by the celebratedly Welsh Mr. Tom Jones, he of the leather suiting and decidedly-other-than-Anglo-Saxon attitudes.

This was bitterly complained of by some woman from the Welsh Assembly, whose pursed lips were clearly audible on FM, and who considers Mr. Jones’ song to be politically incorrect. Apparently it is something to do with domestic violence.

To me it sounds like a song in the American country and / or western tradition. Because the musically specific ‘country and / or western ballad’ is insufficiently cute, Americans sometimes use instead the term ‘a someone-done-somebody-wrong song’. Most country and / or western songs seem to be about domestic strife of some kind, unless one counts ‘The Ballad of Hollis Browne’, which is about multiple murder and suicide.

Billy Connolly, years ago, was quite specific about the requirements for a successful folk-song:

You need death, and plenty of it. Lots of stuff about babies, dying. In the snow. Outside churches.

So presumably folk songs are also ruled out. The prescriptive, repressive nursery-school in which we are all expected to live has almost completed its metamorphosis into a Sunday-school. Eventually there will be a list of Party-approved songs, and proles singing anything not on the list will be vapourised.

To bait the politically correct, I propose to sing darkly ominous songs in a language that they do not understand.

Hortz fur dëhn štekëhn ŵešt
Hortz zi ŵëhr dünt da hertz
Hortz da felt dos fünker
Hortz zebëhn dë ğeuštaah
Hortz ŵïrt tlaït üts mïtlaït
Hortz ŵïrt tlaït üts mïtlaït
Hortz ŵïrt tlaït üts mïtlaït
Hortz ŵïrt tlaït üts mïtlaït
Hortz fur dëhn štekëhn ŵešt
Hortz da felt dos fünker
Hortz zebëhn dë ğeuštaah
Hortz ŵlasik Kobaia

[Magma: Mekanïk Destruktïŵ Kommandöh, 1973]

The Register reports that

A dozen London boroughs have implemented a “risk assessment” policy for live music that permits the police to ban any live music if they fail to receive personal details from the performers 14 days in advance. The demand explicitly singles out performances and musical styles favoured by the black community: garage and R&B, and MCs and DJs.

The Metropolitan Police appear to believe that there is a ‘terrorist threat’ from Popular Beat Combos playing vigorous modern styles of Jazz.

A reference is provided by El Reg to the so-called ‘Form 696′, which is supposed to represent a ‘risk assessment’ of the likelihood of an audience becoming violent as a result of being whipped into a frenzy by the music.

UK Music chief Feargal Sharkey told a House of Commons select committee that the policy had already been used to pull the plug on an afternoon charity concert of school bands in a public park organised by a local councillor… “No alcohol would be sold, tickets were limited to three maximum, and the councillor offered to supply eight registered doormen. Police objected on the grounds that the names, addresses and dates of birth of the young performer could not be provided.”

One wonders what sort of music the school bands were expecing to play.

Of course people can be influenced by music; it would be a pretty poor show otherwise. However, one cannot help but wonder about the wisdom of selecting for special attention only those forms of contemporary music favoured by black people, and leaving out Wagner, whose track record in respect of inspiring acts of violence is probably very much worse.

Johnathan Pearce, at Samizdata, says that Ayn Rand

…regarded Beethoven as “malevolent”, which is a pretty bizarre comment on the creator of “Ode To Joy”, about as unmalevolent bit of music you can ever hear.

I beg to differ. I feel that Rand was prescient in this, as perhaps in other matters.

The Ode to Joy has been hijacked by the EU as its anthem, and is therefore played by the dutiful BBC so often that it is becoming quite tiresome.

This is, of course, no more Beethoven’s fault than was the use of his music to accompany films of Nazi atrocities in Kubrick’s film of Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (“Beethoven just wrote music!”).

However, I’m still sick of hearing it. Perhaps it’s time to read up on Rand.

David Davis, at the Libertarian Alliance, appears to be a member of that highly exclusive group sometimes referred to as ‘hi-fi subjectivists’.

Once upon a time everyone was into hi-fi, and very good some of it was, too. Then (just as with cameras) people stopped worrying about quality, and started wanting automation, convenience, and features which covered up the fact that they didn’t really know what they were about.

Nowadays almost all audio equipment is bought as furniture, solely on its appearance (what in the 1970s we called the ‘Bang & Olufsen Effect’). There are a few die-hards, who have special shops (like most persecuted minorities).

I went into one of these once (to buy a stylus). They had some loudspeaker cables, one of which was two and a half inches in diameter and contained a core of foam rubber surrounded by a couple of dozen welding cables. For this they were asking (some years ago, now) £300 per linear mono metre.

It was explained to me that this cable had been deemed the most ‘musical’ by a particular reviewer.

Exactly how one was supposed to connect this stuff to the equipment at either end wasn’t made clear. Neither was the reason why one is justified in using it when the wiring inside the amplifier (which should, to correspond, consist of massive nickel-plated copper busbars an inch thick) is only ordinary wiring, and the wiring which carries the signal from the frame of a loudspeaker to the voice-coil is two pieces of braiding of a most insubstantial kind.

A friend of mine fell into the clutches of these people. He bought a very, very expensive CD player, on which to play the CDs the edges of which he’d painted with a special pen (to stop the light from leaking out). This CD player was mounted on the same little gold pyramid things as he’d used for his record player.

Then he bought a box full of digital-to-analogue converters, because someone in ‘Hi Fi News’ had said that the ones in his expensive CD player weren’t ‘musical’ enough. This box was supposed to be connected to the digital output of the CD player. He asked me how to do this. I told him he needed an optical cable, looked it up in the RS book, and got him a price for it.

He spluttered with indignation, and asked whether there wasn’t a cheaper way of doing it.

“Well, yes,” said I. “You could do it with an ordinary RCA cable, because there are sockets for both. Really, though, if you’re going to spend a couple of grand on the boxes, then fifteen quid for the cable’s hardly excessive.”

“But it’s round the back,” he said.

Now I would not allege that DD is quite in this category. He may really be one of those people gifted with hearing so precise that he can tell the difference between two new copies of the same record, and all that stuff.

All I can say, having dealt with audio gear for much of my professional life, is that once one exceeds broadcast specification then one has probably passed the point of diminishing returns, because the system will exceed in specification any signal that one can reasonably supply to it.

What my friend always said, when I remonstrated with him thus, was “Well, mate, it’s my money, they’re my ears, and it’s my system,” with which of course there is no argument at all.

I always hated valves. They were a bloody nightmare: expensive, slow, unreliable, short-lived and dangerous. I remember fondly the time when six units of massive and expensively hand-built chassis full of hot, glowing bottles sitting among their high-voltage supplies wasting power and waiting to die was replaced by a single unit of sleek black elegance, its front panel just sufficient for two suave meters and the silkscreening of the not immodest words ‘Vertical metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor’. When it was no longer an offence punishable with instant dismissal to unplug a loudspeaker without written permission. When one could leave the big steel barrow at home and settle for a mere hernia instead.

I also like big bargraph meters with PPM ballistics, rather than ex-equipment types, and to be brutally frank I can think of better uses for five grand, but that’s probably because I’m just another cloth-eared git.

I’m so glad I never had to work in the lab next door to this fellow’s.

It is a finely composed (by him) and executed (by his computer) piece of something between musique concrète and the Art of Noises, but while he was working it all out I bet it sounded no better than his camerawork looks.

The Proms concert tonight features Stockhausen.

This is the sort of music referred to by Sir Arthur C. Clarke as ‘atonal cacophonies’, and by Mrs. Underclass’ mother (a classical soprano) as ’squeaky gate music’.

If I were properly English then I should be obliged to like, or at least plausibly pretend to like, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten and the rest of that sort of ‘God-is-an-Englishman music’. Fortunately I’m not, so I don’t have to.