Radio column: Where's the party?

In another universe, this would have been the mother of all office parties. Senior editors would have been caught on smart-phones dancing Gangnam style on their desks, a bottle of bubbly in one hand and a hunk of birthday cake in the other. Arses would have been hoisted on to photocopiers, with the choicest images used to add a layer of soundproofing to the Loose Ends studio. 
Read more...

Radio column: Is classical music for everyone?

Is classical music really for everyone? This was the question posed by the writer and presenter Tom Service, chair of a live debate at the Sage in Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking festival, to which the answer is: if only. 
Read more...

Book review: I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, By Sylvie Simmons

Where do you start with Leonard Cohen: poet, novelist, singer, songwriter, father, son, womaniser, traveller, bon viveur, drug-user, depressive, spiritual recluse? The sheer size of Sylvie Simmons's biography is testament to Cohen's many incarnations, assorted narratives and vast back catalogue.
Read more...

Radio column: Flush of joy

Is it acceptable to talk on the phone when you're sitting on the toilet? The American humourist David Sedaris says not, though his sister Tiffany would beg to differ. "Don't mind me," she has been known to say, with the strained tone of someone engaging in heavy lifting, while clasping the phone to her ear. "I'm just… trying to get… the lid… off this… jar." 
Read more...

Radio column: Waiting for the man

Focusing on a single band over a weekend is a tricky business on the radio. Get it wrong and you risk provoking the ire of the music police, who are a bit like the fashion police only more militant. They will rain hellfire and damnation down on you on Twitter, picket outside your office and very likely follow you home, barge into your house, skim through your record collection and locate the copy of Kylie and Jason's "Especially for You" that you had studiously hidden from your family, and hold it up as evidence of your abominable taste.
Read more...

Radio column: Wrong direction for the travelling man

Over the past week the ghosts of dead DJs have been stalking the corridors of the BBC. Among the nastier apparitions has been Jimmy Savile, a man alleged to have abused scores of children though who, because of his connections and charitable work, was deemed beyond reproach. More cheeringly, we have also seen the reappearance, from beyond the grave, of Kenny Everett, a groundbreaking DJ and comic who was denounced from some quarters as a pervert on the basis of his homosexuality.
Read more...

Radio column: Tory stories starting to show their age

Consider, for a moment, the title of Radio 4's Five More Ages of Brandreth. Should anyone be wondering what was going through the minds of commissioning editors when they gave the series the green light, the clue is surely in the word "more".

Read more...

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...