Radio column: Key moments

It's Piano Season on Radio 3. That's right, Piano Season. Now, I'm no expert when it comes to classical music, but surely, just as every day is guitar day on BBC6 Music and auto-tuned-twazzock-whining-over-fizzing-euro-pop day on Radio 1, on Radio 3 it's "piano season" all year around. Which raises the question: how is this current celebration doing anything out of the ordinary?
Read more...

Book review: How Music Works, by David Byrne

In his new book, the former Talking Heads singer David Byrne, dubbed rock's Renaissance man by Time magazine, looks at the roles played by time, place, technology, architecture, money and human relationships in shaping music. If this sounds like a stripping-away of music's romantic heart, fear not.
Read more...

Radio column: Story of a good sport

"Everyone believed it would be sorted out within a couple of days," Salman Rushdie told Andrew Marr, talking about the extraordinary moment on Valentine's Day, 1989, when he received word that Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini had ordered his execution following the publication of The Satanic Verses. 
Read more...

Book review: Winter Journal, by Paul Auster

Paul Auster sets out his stall at the start of Winter Journal. Writing in the second person, he outlines his plan "to put aside your stories for now and try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one." If only he'd stuck to the brief. 

Read more...

Radio column: Talking the talk

So what's the deal with radio playlists, asked Pat, Mike and Marie on Radio 4's Feedback. Who gets to decide the music that gets played? Do listeners have any input? Why do we have to hear the same record repeatedly throughout the course of a day? Do DJs actually DJ anymore?
Read more...

Britpop bad boy's back on a high

“I've never liked standing around waiting for stuff to happen, I like to do new things,” remarks Tim Burgess. He's not wrong. 
Read more...

Radio column: Sorting the men from the boys

"In his secret fantasies," said the historian Amanda Vickery in her Radio 4 series Amanda Vickery on… Men, "I wonder if every British man isn't something of a hero, questing, intrepid, undaunted." Really? Most of my male friends' idea of courage doesn't extend much further than venturing out to the chip shop at pub chucking-out time. But what do I know? Perhaps my ownership of ovaries renders me blind to man's primal instincts.
Read more...

TV review: Dallas, Channel 5

Praise be, they've kept the title sequence. Dallas, the mama of all American soap operas, is famous for a lot of things - Stetsons, satin sheets, surreal shower scenes, the slow disintegration of Priscilla Presley's nose - but perhaps the most memorable component in its Eighties incarnation was the opening credits in which mirrored skyscrapers were juxtaposed with the bucolic idyll of Southfork, and split-screens showed JR, Bobby, Sue-Ellen et al pulling panto poses to a histrionic orchestral soundtrack. Such things are sacred. 
Read more...