Happy to announce that I’ll be taking part in Brentford Creative Mile for the second year in a row. It’s a really nice, positive arts festival in a lovely part of London. This time, the courtesy goes to the Reverend Allan Bell, creator of The Silence Project, who is organising a series of various events within the festival, and I’m one of the artists on his roster. Alan is a wonderful human being, and I’m happy to call him a personal friend. Hope to catch some of you there.

P.S. In the meantime, my summer is shaping up like this: frequent but unpredictable open-air, impromptu busking recitals in Bishops Park; a holiday in Bulgaria in August (probably no gigs, but who knows); and then Brentford and beyond.

Have a brilliant summer.
Lots of love,
A.

In April 2023, I launched a new venture: Soundwave Socials. It’s one half an event planning company, and one half a community of artists who support each other. Out first event was in late April at the wonderful deli Nature’s Delight on Fulham Road. Sadly, one successful evening didn’t prevent the deli from closing down a few weeks later, but that’s a different story. Our next event is on 31 May at Matt’s Cafe, also on Fulham Road. These events are promoted as “open mic nights” but I like to think of them more as ritualised gatherings of creative minds.

For anyone interested, be sure to follow Soundwave Socials on TikTok to stay updated on upcoming events, to experience our live streams, and to see curated content featuring the artists who have graced our stage.

Our next event is at Matt’s Cafe on Fulham Road, on 31 May. Again, it may be promoted as an ‘open mic night’, but be prepared for much more than that. Expect a vibrant gathering of artistic minds, great wine, and an evening that celebrates creativity and collaboration.

Here are three films that I saw recently and enjoyed thoroughly:

Private Life (2018) (outstanding Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn)
Worth (2020) (outstanding Michael Keaton and Stanley Tucci)
The Guilty (2021) (outstanding Jake Gyllenhaal)

I make no apologies for liking films that use zero CGI and rely solely on well-written dialogue and old-fashioned acting talent.

With a mellow ambience that takes your mind away to a more tranquil place to heal inside, Alexander Kyd takes us all into a better world that is filled with so much peace and love, ‘Of Time and the River‘.

Alexander Kyd is a Sofia, Bulgaria-based composer/guitarist who makes that peaceful classical music you can just swim into and let your soul soak inside.

”I use the stage name Alexander Kyd to pay homage to the great English playwright Thomas Kyd and, by extension, to all the great masters of literature written in English.” ~ Alexander Kyd

Showing us a tranquil blend of true skill and wonderful quality, Alexander Kyd guides us to exactly where we need to be on this timeless single of wonder.

‘‘I teach music in the prison Wormwood Scrubs and I work with the unique social enterprise/record label InHouse Records, contributing to their monthly magazine AUX and supporting their aspiring artists.” ~ Alexander Kyd

‘Of Time and the River‘ from Sofia, Bulgaria-based classical composer/guitarist Alexander Kyd is one of the most relaxed singles you are likely to hear today. With class personified at every corner, this is a stunning release that will bring you into a better world that has no carnage, only smiles and good energy to lather all over our souls.

Sometimes you hear a song that shall take your breath away, and remind you that life can be so simple if you can find that quiet place to reflect.

Listen up to this new single on Spotify and see more on IG.

Reviewed by Llewelyn Screen

This beautiful story comes from Scrubs. The author prefers to remain anonymous. 

My musical journey started when I was seven years old. My dad, a jazz pianist, had left suddenly a few years earlier and my mom was a broke single mum raising three kids in a tiny two-bed council house in Suffolk. To make ends meet, she took a job as a breakfast waitress at a hotel. That meant she couldn’t take me to school in the mornings, so she auditioned me to be a chorister in the local cathedral choir on the condition that after morning rehearsals the choirmaster would drive me to school himself.  I quickly fell in love with singing and found I had a real talent for it. It was a baptism of fire in music education. We had to learn and perform about five hours of new music every week, so I learned to read music fast.  By the time I was nine or ten, reading sheet music was as natural to me as reading words in a book. I learned so much that a few years later I managed to get a musical scholarship at a top university.  Even though my degree was in English literature, I did so much music that by the time I graduated I knew I wanted to be a classical singer. After a year of postgraduate study at music college in London, I started to get work as a singer all over the world,  either in professional choirs or as a soloist, as well as doing quite a lot of opera. 

My first professional job was in an opera at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.  It was well paid and they covered all my travel, hotel and food expenses too. Not bad for a kid from a council estate! By the time I was 30, I had performed in Buckingham Palace twice, Paris Opera house four times, the Albert Hall five times, and travelled all over the world as a singer, all expenses paid and more.

In one year alone I performed in New York, Boston, Berlin, Mexico City, the Forbidden City in Beijing, and Milan. Another year I did backing vocals in a gig with Annie Lennox, met Desmond Tutu, recorded the vocals for an IKEA advert, and was on the soundtrack for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I’ve also travelled to the West Bank in Palestine five times to give music workshops and concerts in refugee camps, once literally over the sound of nearby gunfire.

I’ve always hated the idea that certain genres of music (like classical) are only for certain types of people. Good music that speaks to the heart can be found in any genre. So too, by the way, can bad music be found in every genre. Ask any serious jazz musician who the greatest musician of all time is and most will say Bach. Those four chord harmonic phrases perfected by Mozart – without them there would be no Beatles, no Ed Sheeran, no pop music. The more styles of music you listen to, the more you can discover and enjoy. To me, people who only ever listen to one genre of music are like chefs who only ever cook with one single ingredient. Why would anyone limit themselves and miss out on so much?

John Muir once wrote, “Everyone needs beauty as well as bread.” In prison we get plenty of bread, but beauty is much harder to find. Music is one way that prisoners can bring a little beauty into their cells. Sometimes I replay some of my favourite pieces in my head: that moment in Gerald Finzi’s Eclogue when the strings come in; Robert Lucas de Pearsall’s Lay a Garland; the second movement of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto. When I hear these I find that after a lifetime of music opening doors for me, for one brief moment – if only in my head – music can open one more door for me. The heavy metal cell door at the end of my prison bed.

Prison is not the end of the world. Life continues in prison. You have access to music. You have access to classic literature. You can work and get paid (waste management, laundry, kitchen). You can take up a trade like gardening (with proven therapeautic effects). You can study English, maths, business, and even a foreign language. You can do a distance learning course in any conceivable subject. If you use your time wisely, you can emerge a better person capable of making better choices and living a life of dignity.

Jim and Jonathan are two young Irish Travellers who are currently serving time in Wormwood Scrubs. I asked them to share a little bit about their culture. What follows is my retelling of what they told me.

CARAVANS

As the name suggests, Irish Travellers are nomadic people – we move from place to place. These days, this is mostly done by caravan. We learn to drive and maintain caravans from an early age. The best brands are Hobby and Tabbert. We never use the caravan toilet. If somebody dies inside a caravan, it is customary to burn it out of respect for the deceased. 

LANGUAGE

We have our own language – we call it Cant and it’s based on Irish English, with influences from Irish. 

BARE-KNUCKLE FIGHTING

That’s how we settle our disputes – no weapons, no police. The expression “Take off your coat” is an invitation to a fight. Respect, honour and loyalty are very important to us. 

MUSIC

Irish Travellers listen to a lot of Irish rebel songs (songs about Irish history and heroes), as well as golden oldies from the 50s and 60s – Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison. 

HORSES

The horse is a very important element of our culture. Many of us buy, sell and breed horses. We learn to ride them from a very early age. 

RELIGION

Irish Travellers are mostly Catholic. When somebody dies, we give them a Catholic funeral. A horse-drawn carriage takes them to their final resting place, a Catholic graveyard. No cremations. 

HOBBIES & SPORTS

Hare coursing (the pursuit of hares and rabbits with hounds) is a very popular activity in our community. The resulting rabbit stew is a favourite dish. Boxing is the most popular sport. World heavyweight champion Tyson Fury and his cousin Hughie Fury come from a family of Irish Traveller heritage.

MARRIAGE & FAMILY

It’s very uncommon for an Irish Traveller to remain unmarried. We get married and start families early. The woman normally takes care of the children, while the man works and handles finances. 

The final (and by far the juiciest) installment of my long conversation with the brilliant Theodore Dalrymple. Architecture, music, humour, the Eagles of Death Metal, Schubert.

AV: You’ve written about architecture on many occasions and I know how you feel about Le Corbusier and Brutalism and the like. From a more positive point of view, do you have a favourite architect or at least a style?

TD: No, not really. You see, I’m not an architect. I’m not sure I could build anything very well. All I can say is, for example, in the city of Birmingham there is a little area that modern architects have built that is modern – it’s clearly not of any other date or era but our own – and yet it’s highly civilised. And it’s a very small area and it’s pleasant to be in it. And I can think of very, very few equivalent places. It’s fairly humane architecture on quite a large scale, it’s not just sweet, tiny little cottages, it’s office buildings. But it’s extremely pleasant. Unfortunately, though there is this example before them, the architects in that city and many other cities continue to build completely inhuman… and it’s almost as if they want to be inhuman. And incidentally, as it happens, today I’ve been writing an article about music. Well, not about music but about a man who survived the Bataclan massacre in Paris. A history teacher and obviously an intelligent man. I don’t agree with all of his political views but he is obviously intelligent and thoughtful. Now, the kind of music that he likes – and he is 40, he is not a child anymore, he is not an adolescent, he is 40 – he thinks that the group called the Eagles of Death Metal is wonderful and he describes how at a second concert that he goes to one of the chaps in this band is drunk and drugged, he breaks the strings of his guitar, he sings badly – he is out of tune, insofar as there is a tune – and he is completely in accord with the audience. Well, this seems to me like a Walpurgisnacht. This is a kind of Black Mass of music. It was quite interesting. I didn’t know anything about the Eagles of Death Metal – I think the name alone tells you quite a lot. For some reason, when I looked it up on YouTube – you know when you look up things on YouTube other things come up as well, suggestions – and for some reason it was Horowitz playing a Schubert Impromptu.

AV: What prompted the YouTube algorithm to suggest Schubert?

TD: Well, maybe I had looked at Schubert before. I could stand about a minute, not even a minute, really, of the Eagles of Death Metal and I looked at Schubert. Listening to Schubert had the same effect on my mind as a shower has on my body after I’ve been involved in something dirty. The point about this is that the man that I am writing about is not an unfortunate who comes out of the slums of Paris, where people don’t have any hope, the education is terrible and there are no jobs and so on. On the contrary, he is well educated, he is intelligent, in a certain way cultivated, and yet he likes this almost satanic music – if that’s what you call it. And I thought, ‘This is a culture that is really in danger.’ I’m talking about the upper 5% of the population as far as knowledge and education are concerned.

AV: Yes, if history teachers listen to the Eagles of Death Metal…I agree that it’s a ridiculous band name and thought of an even more hilarious one. I don’t know anything about their music but from the name of the band I already know what to expect and I’ve protected myself from it. The name of the band is I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness.

TD: Well, in a way that’s what they’ve done, they’ve chosen darkness! ‘Evil be thou my Good.’ ‘Ugliness, be thou my beauty.’ And architects have done the same.

AV: Do you know why? After writing so much on the problem, have you come closer to the answer why it happened?

TD: I suspect part of the problem is this kind of romantic cult of originality.

AV: Originality at all costs?

TD: At all costs, yes. Originality as a virtue in itself. Like many virtues, it’s not a virtue in itself. There’s nothing easier than to be original. As Dr Johnson said of a book, he spoke to the author and he said, ‘Your book is both good and original but the parts which are original are not good and the parts which are good are not original.’

AV: What do you call this kind of compliment that’s not really a compliment?

TD: A backhanded compliment. In fact, it’s not a compliment at all, of course.

AV: On the surface it sounds a little bit like a compliment but it’s actually a terrible blow.

TD: Utter condemnation! It’s like Disraeli – he was at a large public dinner, at the end of the meal they served some champagne and he said, ‘Thank God for something warm at last!’

AV: British humour at its best! But you’ve also written about the decline on British humour.

TD: Yes, I think partly because of political correctness. Politicians now are afraid to make a joke because someone will take it seriously or claim to be offended. People like to be offended, actually. They like to feel offended. Or they like to feel that they feel offended. It’s all very dishonest. But of course if they are outraged, I suppose they feel they must be good people, because only good people feel outraged. When I was growing up almost every class of person spoke in a slightly ironical fashion. I remember – this was a very fine example of it, I think. I was speaking to a patient – he was a taxi driver – and I asked him to describe his childhood and I said, ‘Where did you live?’ and he gave the address. And then he said, ‘We lived there until Adolf Hitler moved us on.’ What he was describing was his house being bombed!

AV: But with a stiff-upper-lip attitude.

TD: And a detachment! Which of course makes it much easier to accept it – not in the sense that it is a good thing – but to bear it and to overcome it. I don’t think there’s anything like that now. It still exists a bit. I think that humour is in decline.

AV: I want to ask you about your musical tastes. You mentioned Schubert. Is he your favourite composer?

TD: Well, one of them. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn. I’m afraid it’s a fairly conservative kind of taste. I haven’t been for a long time, but I used to go to the opera fairly often. I used to know lots of classical musicians when I was younger. People would say, ‘Your dislike of the Eagles of Death Metal is just prejudice against what seems to be demotic.’ But that’s not so. One of the things about a lot of Western popular music is that it seems so completely savage to me by comparison with the popular music of almost any other area of the world. The man writing the book I told you about says that he went to this concert, where they were singing of fun and sex. And then he says, ‘In other words, Life.’ Well, this seems to me a very crude view of what life is. And certainly of music. What about love rather than just sex? Or happiness rather than fun? And it seems to me that the connection between love and sorrow of course and so on is much stronger, shall we say, in African popular music now than in our music. So it is actually we who have become uncivilised in this respect. The same is true of Arabic music or Indian music or Latin American music. It may not be my favourite music but it doesn’t have this hatred of life that this horrible Eagles of Death Metal, et al. – I mean they’re not the only ones, they’re not even the worst ones. They are far from the worst. I mean, I was once sent by a newspaper to one of the worst. This particular group specialised in urinating over the audience while calling the audience ‘You motherfuckers.’ There were thousands of people who wanted to go to this. I mean, they were not musically accomplished. What on earth is going on that people want this? Another one I went to – this was in Glasgow. They sent me to go. This time I identified myself as someone who is going to write about the so-called concert for a newspaper. So the first thing the press secretary did was to give me some earplugs. I said, ‘Does this not strike you as a little odd that you give someone earplugs who is supposed to listen to the music and report on it?’ And he said, ‘This is normal, it’s to prevent the tinnitus after.’ Well, what kind of world is that? And that’s the world I think that probably your prisoners are largely living in. Musically, anyway. It’s not that I’m completely close minded. It’s just that I think that some things are horrible.

AV: They are horrible and honesty is the best policy. But too few people think that way.

TD: The other thing that’s very interesting is that when I wrote about this – I used to write a column in a Belgian newspaper – and I said something about this, I can’t remember exactly what I said but it was probably very similar to what I’ve said to you – and they produced howls of outrage! There is no subject on which people feel so deeply, actually.

AV: Than the vulgarity of their music?

TD: Yes, they don’t like being told that their music is vulgar. It’s worse than telling someone that he smells. Except that I was telling hundreds of thousands of people that they smell.

AV: You’ve mentioned that you found your popularity in Brazil very surprising. And people from Brazil have told you that they recognize everything that they’ve read in your books from their own lives in poor parts of Brazilian metropolises. When I read your writings on architecture, I immediately recognized my own surroundings from my childhood in Sofia. I was surrounded by Soviet-style Brutalist tower blocks. And it made me appreciate more the humanity of traditional Bulgarian architecture, for example from the mid to the late 19th century. We call it the Bulgarian Revival. When I read your thoughts on Brutalism, it opened my eyes to the warmth of this much more humane style of building. And it struck me immediately that these beautiful houses from the mid 19th century in rural Bulgaria were built by unschooled people, by peasants. A merchant would pay the most skilled artisan to design and build a house. And then a hundred years later, professional architects and construction engineers educated in Sofia and maybe even Moscow would come up with these monstrosities. And they are still there.

TD: And the worst of it is that people will not admit what has been done. I’m in Paris at the moment. It’s very difficult to think of a single building after the Second World War which does not detract from the beauty of the city. It’s difficult to think of any. There are hundreds which are monstrous. They are not even monstrous just because they are huge. Some of them are only the same size as 19th century buildings. But they are hideous. And they’ve done this with the example before them. Before their very eyes they can see what has been done before. Of course, people say, ‘We can’t build in the same way.’ – for various reasons, materials, the cost of labour, or whatever it is – but that’s a different argument from saying that it’s good architecture.

AV: I don’t understand this. Of course, I’m not an architect. But if it’s possible to build a brand new place like Dubai from scratch, how is this less difficult than building a new Bath or a new Florence?

TD: I don’t know. You’ll be interested to know that in the 1950s the council of Bath wanted to pull it all down. They wanted to build a sort of Novosibirsk-on-Avon. And they would have succeeded if the population had not sufficiently protested. As it is, they’ve managed to destroy Brighton. And this has happened all over. In Britain, after the Second World War, there was of course a lot of bomb damage, but much of it could have been repaired. But they didn’t want to repair it. If you take Coventry, for example. Coventry was one of the finest medieval cities in Europe. True, it was bombed. And what they’ve built now is a kind of World Heritage site of modernist monstrosity. Unbelievably awful. It’s so awful, it’s almost comical. It’s almost funny. Except, of course, that people have to live in it. What is to me extraordinary is that the architectural profession refuses to see what has been done. Or to admit it.

AV: Within the realm of music, there are fashions. Short-lived fashions. And they are forgotten very quickly. I think that’s our only consolation. But in architecture, it stays.

TD: Yes. If I were to write a very bad poem, no one would have to read it. But if I build a very bad large building, people can’t avoid it.

AV: You don’t have to listen to my music, but if I build something across the street from you, it’s now part of your life forever.

TD: Well, until it’s pulled down and it will be replaced by something even worse.

Part III of my conversation with Theodore Dalrymple: the art of fiction, Shakespeare, Anthony Burgess.

AV: Maybe 90% of everything you’ve written is non-fiction, but you’ve also tried your hand at fiction, you’ve published several short story collections. Non-fiction comes more easily to me but I would also like to try my hand at every form. What are your thoughts on this? I am very interested in what is prompting you to attempt fiction as well.

TD: Well, because I think you can say things in fiction which you can’t say any other way. Fiction shouldn’t just be a kind of putting forward an idea by other means. I’m not sure whether I’m any good at it. As far as you’re concerned, you see, you should have or may have lots to write about, even in your prison work. I was very fortunate. I began at a time when it was still possible to send an article to a magazine and they would look at it even though they didn’t know who you were. That is no longer the case.

AV: Anthony Burgess was talking about this idea that sometimes when a work of literature is too didactic, it will fail artistically. He actually said this of A Clockwork Orange: ‘It’s too didactic to be artistic.’ He also said that we normally don’t regard our greatest artists – Shakespeare, Beethoven, Wagner – as teachers. We don’t go to Shakespeare for our ethics.

TD: I’m not actually 100% convinced that that’s true. If you just take Shakespeare – it’s true that you can’t just say ‘Shakespeare thought this’ or ‘Shakespeare thought that.’ He was so protean in his understanding. I’ve been thinking about this. If you take the idea of equality: Shakespeare does make very clear – through the mouths of his characters, e.g. Shylock or Richard II – that there is a kind of existential equality of people. He makes that point so powerfully that anybody who reads it or listens to it, I don’t think can forget it.

AV: Yes. “When you tickle us, do we not laugh?”

TD: Yes, that kind of thing. And also with Richard II: “I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, need friends.” And these are very powerful speeches. They are unforgettable in their effect. You could say, ‘Well, Shakespeare is just putting powerful words into the mouths of people for artistic purposes,’ but I don’t find that absolutely convincing, because Shakespeare himself is so protean that he must have an idea that we can understand everybody and so on. If you take Measure for Measure, it’s quite clearly a play that is against moral enthusiasm, to my mind. I don’t see how you could read it any other way other than as an attack on a kind of puritanism. Because he’s saying ‘This is horrible and it’s impossible.’ So I think you can say he would not have been a Puritan. And the idea that the human world is so complex, that it’s not amenable to simple lessons, is itself a very important lesson. And there are characters like Falstaff. He is in many ways a terrible person and yet one is glad that he exists. He’s a thief, he’s a liar, he’s cowardly, drunken, a parasite. And yet you love him.

AV: What was Burgess thinking when he said that if something is too didactic it won’t be artistic?

TD: Well, what he means is that you’ve got a lesson you want to teach, like Chernyshevsky in his terrible novel What Is to Be Done? That is a didactic novel. What else would be didactic…You couldn’t say that 1984 or Animal Farm is not didactic in a sense, or Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. They are didactic – well, not in the sense that they’re teaching you a lesson on the blackboard: here, this is what you must learn today – but it’s not possible to say that they’re not trying to communicate some lesson or other.

AV: There’s a boundary, I think, between too much didacticism and pure artistic creation. Cross it and it will be a disappointment.

TD: The reason why Shakespeare – apart from the wonderful language – speaks to us, is because the problems that he writes about go across time. They’re not just of his day. Suppose someone were to try and write a novel about Brexit. Well, that’s bound to be of limited interest in a short time.

AV: It will be obsolete soon.

TD: Obsolete and boring. I suppose it depends on what kind of things the lessons are about, as well. I know what Burgess means, of course. If you take a novel like Fathers and Sons by Turgenev…

AV: I haven’t read it. I listened to your lecture on it on YouTube and I know that I must read it because it’s a must-read.

TD: It’s a wonderful political novel in the sense that you don’t feel as if some lesson is being pushed into you and at some point you’re going to have to regurgitate it as in an exam. And at the end of it, you just feel life is extremely complex and there’s not going to be an easy solution to things. But that is a lesson. It’s something that you learn. And it’s very difficult to believe that Turgenev didn’t mean you to learn it. I’m just trying to think of a really didactic piece of work. Much of the theatre today is, I think, didactic. It hits you over the head with a message.

AV: I am mindful that this interview will be read by people in prison, unless they just decide to toss the magazine. How can we squeeze in something didactic or at least inspirational for them to read in this interview? Let’s say, what is your advice for someone very young who is now in prison?

TD: Well, that’s very difficult. I haven’t really thought about it. What I would say is this: Try to imagine that the world is larger than the world that you have grown up in.