Old school
Marcus Berkmann
The Russian Tatiana Monogarova is beautiful both to see and hear, but she sang in what I take to be some kind of operatic Esperanto, and Desdemona’s pleadings, whether for Cassio or for herself, do enormously depend on precise enunciation. ‘The Willow Song’ and ‘Ave Maria’ were long processions of slow and lovely noises, but there’s a question about their time-scale anyway, and when they are so protracted the question of their contribution to the drama takes on a disagreeable urgency. Anthony Michaels-Moore mainly underplayed Iago, but it sounded as if that was as much the result of vocal limitations as of a plausible reading of the role. Meanwhile Vladimir Jurowski conducted with finesse and ferocity, though sometimes alternating too abruptly between the two. The evening had its excitements but they weren’t cumulative, though that could have changed by now.
The Kirov Opera began its brief visit to London with a potent Boris Godunov, in Mussorgsky’s first version, which is to say in seven scenes, no Polish act, and a quite startlingly different approach to the setting of words, and to the emphases in the drama, from later versions, and especially from Rimsky-Korsakov’s (it’s time that was revived as an independent work). It was everything an evening at the opera should be, at least negatively: no intervals, no gaps between scenes, no applause till the end, no stars; and positively in the commitment to the work, both in the fanatically intense playing under Valery Gergiev and in the elimination of inessentials on stage. Place was suggested by objects lowered from the flies, mainly onion-shaped domes, and by striking costumes: Boris moved in a kind of cage, both grand and restrictive. The whole approach to staging is utterly at odds with what we have come to expect, in my case to dread, from Russia — for that we had to wait for Khovanshchina.
Thanks to a succession of supreme singing actors, beginning with Shalyapin and perhaps concluding with Nicolai Ghiaurov, Boris Godunov hasn’t been able to resist being seen as a vehicle for its central figure, whether presented broadly sympathetically or not. This first version gives Boris far fewer opportunities to expand, and Vladimir Vaneev consequently was bound to come across as a secondrater. Yet he well fulfilled the demands of the part, and so far as ‘integrated’ is a word that one can in any way apply to Mussorgsky’s operas, he was integrated into this one. But the performance was of a kind to make the singling out of individual artists irrelevant. Dramatic focus was everything, concentration on a series of tableaux which presented material for contemplation rather than for identification or the following of a narrative, which in any case is virtually non-existent. The opera’s harsh originality was revealed in all its boldness, not by any means attractive but, in its unique way, overwhelming. It’s always delightful to welcome a new star to the pop firmament, if only because it means that there’s someone else to take the mickey out of. James Blunt’s emergence increases the number of old Harrovian army officers currently making hit records to one, and this is therefore the only thing anyone wants to know about him. It’s an interesting career path Harrow, Sandhurst, Radio Two — but it shouldn’t be a surprising one. I think we have to blame the Beatles here.
The notion that pop music is a purely working-class activity, which has greater credibility when created by the poor and dispossessed, wasn’t actually theirs: like a few things, they stole it from poor, dispossessed American blues musicians. But in their sweet, chippy, Liverpudlian way, the Fab Four made the absolute most of what used to be called humble origins. Paul McCartney has made the best part of a billion dollars, and the other three didn’t do too badly either. And this was when middle-class kids cottoned on. It’s great fun to rebel against your parents by playing viciously loud music with guitars, but when there really are pots of gold at the end of the rainbow, pop starts to turn into a sensible career option.
I have always wondered how the parents of Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford reacted when their sons announced they were forming a band and calling it Genesis. That’s not why we sent you to Charterhouse! And yet their career was launched by another Old Carthusian, Jonathan King. This may be the first reported instance of the old boy network operating in rock’n’roll.
But Genesis weren’t the first public schoolboys to make a career in pop music, and James Blunt won’t be the last. (Incidentally, note that it’s ‘James’, not ‘Jim’ or ‘Jimmy’. And somehow to his parents and friends I bet it’s really ‘Jamie’.) True, some public-school pop stars suffer credibility problems. Chris de Burgh will never be cool, although I suspect this is more to do with his appalling songs than with the fact he went to Marlborough. Nick Drake also went to Marlborough, and no one seems to mind. Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac was at Sherborne, and his father was a wing-commander. Stewart Copeland of the Police went to Millfield, although tragically not at the same time as Tony Blackburn. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd was at the Perse School in Cambridge, but his palpable poshness has never been seen as a disadvantage, except by anyone who really hates Pink Floyd.
When I was at Highgate in the midSeventies, we were all rather proud that top progressive rockers had similar backgrounds to our own. If only we had known that Freddie Mercury was an old boy, but for some reason this piece of information was brutally suppressed by the authorities there. Still, we were not to be deterred. Boys at Highgate went on to play drums for Culture Club, bass for Wang Chung and guitar for the Weather Prophets, among many others. No doubt their efforts are now commemorated on a plaque in Big School.
These days schools seem rather prouder of their musical alumni, and vice versa. To judge by its website, Tonbridge is almost indecently pleased by the success of weeds and wets Keane, who actually named themselves after a tealady there. Radiohead famously all went to Abingdon, where Thom Yorke was nicknamed ‘Salamander’ on account of his ‘weird, wonky reptile eyes’. Chris Martin of Coldplay went to Sherborne and has been known to use the phrase ‘house colours’ in interviews.
Perhaps this is as it should be. I always felt embarrassed for Joe Strummer of The Clash, who had been to City of London and felt the need to apologise for it for the rest of his life. Bob Geldof was very funny about this in Mojo recently. ‘Excuse me? The Clash? A load of middle-class geezers dressed by Jasper Conran and living in Regent’s Park! Their first gig? In a small room for invited journalists! Very revolutionary.’ But before learned critics with beards start writing books about the bourgeoisification of rock’n’roll, let’s not forget that, on occasion, the public-school system simply doesn’t work. After all, Shane MacGowan of the Pogues went to Westminster. ‘Brush your teeth, boy!’ they probably said to him, but to no avail....
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