Named after keyboardist, Mr. Andrew Chilton’s favourite Cathedral city, Coventry is the fourth in a long line of three Vichy Government records.

With The King of Limbs, the done thing was to live-blog one’s first experience of the record. I was on holiday at the time and hardly in any position to live-anything. Even if it were possible, I would have been immediately too late: it had been live-blogged to death. Luckily, I had Coventry secreted in my luggage when I arrived home; I hadn’t listened to it yet and, well I imagine, neither had anybody else. I live-blogged it instantly, by which I mean I mumbled things to the cat as we wandered through the empty house, listening to the record quite loudly. The cat was kind enough to record everything as soon as she returned.

Turn On, Tune In, Vote Mugabe
“Their cocks are glistening with pre-cum as they line us up against a wall”… “As the youthful idiots go marching through the streets, Lenin looks down from his balcony and nods”… vile homophobic screed directed at The Kremlin gay bar in Belfast, with its fiberglass statue of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on the balcony over the door. Disgraceful propaganda for notorious homophobe Robert Mugabe.

Flytipping
“Flytipping deserves a quiet night.” Like the titular activity, the songwriting here consists of dumping dated odds and sods on an otherwise beautiful setting, that is pop cultural references on what appears to be the backing of Don’t Stop by Fleetwood Mac.

The Nudes of Modigliani
Mr. Manners is at his best when dissecting the ways in which men look at women: The Male Gaze from Whores in Taxis. This is also good.

The Kids in North Korea
Orientalism, based on the premise that the experiences of the children of North Korea will somehow be different to those of us in the West. Lazy exoticism; Edward Said furious! Has music not progressed since Claude Debussy?

Siberia
Using the same conceit as Mr. Momus’ A Lapdog, Mr. Manners uses exile to tundra as a metaphor for absence. “Siberia is wherever your face and voice are not” Your arse?

All the Young Dudes
Having heard this one too many times at a Christmas party, I am now immune to its charms. Now, Arthur, stop that! Stop scratching the settee! Bad cat.

St. Jamie of Islington
Mr. Manner’s teetering conversion to Catholicism has been en point and on the edge for years now. Like many of the finest Catholics, though, it is purely aesthetic.

Oranges are the Only Fruit
An imaginary present in which post-modernism prevails and homogeneity is the only option. The only heterodoxy permissible is in sexuality, which, of course, results in Ms. Winterson being heterosexual herself, which means that she never writes Orange are not the Only Fruit and Mr. Manners is never inspired to write the song.

I’m Jack
Unusually polished production for The Vichy Government. Arthur, stop it. Stop it. Now stop.

The Man Delusion
No! Bad cat. Fine! Get out. Get out. Through the door. Go on. Go on then!

Iberia
Bloody thing. I don’t know why I put up with you, really I don’t. Why, if you were only four feet taller, I’d… Why, I’d… Get out! And don’t come back! O, a clarinet?

We are Now at War with Germany
No record.

The natural conclusion of pop music was the reality singing contest, as the singing show manages to hold at once two opposing ideas about pop music that help pop music sell: it is something we can all aspire to do, yet it is only truly done by persons with a certain something that we lack. In the end, it is easier to let them entertain us than to entertain ourselves. It is capitalism’s ‘economics of scale’: stars have a bigger talent than we do, so they can produce great performances at cheaper cost of effort.

Musical biopics often try to balance the same two ideas: they must present the musician as being both an ordinary person and a genius. If they do not have an ordinary life, we couldn’t identify with them; if they are not a genius, we wouldn’t want to. As a result, the writer attempts to hang the one on the other; from a single life event, the ordinary guy or girl is tipped into brilliance:- Mr. Charles loses a brother, Ms. Piaf is tragically poor. The life event is never hours and hours of practice, unless one has a father like Mr. Helfgott.

At the beginning of Gainsbourg, we see the eponymous M. practicing at the piano, although, thankfully, he seems, in time, to have a perfectly good relationship with his parents. Perhaps it is down to playing Chopin rather than Rachmaninov; it’s easier. As he grows older, it seems that even the Nazis don’t faze him. His only concern is his perceived ugliness and, surely, this cannot be the cause of his greatness, can it? No, because there he is practising again. And painting too. Always, frequently, mostly painting. And playing piano. And smoking. He honed everything to perfection.

While we wait for the tragic event to set him on the right path, we are introduced to La Gueule, M. Gainsbourg’s imaginary, rat-faced counterpart. He is the embodiment, all at once, of M. Gainbourg’s insecurity about his mug and the difficult decision between following his love of music and his love of art. He chides the musician, challenging him, arguing with him, and critiquing the value of his work. Not, of course, in the traditional method of the pathetic fallacy that peddles the fallacy of one’s being pathetic: even the imaginary rat knows that Serge’s songs and paintings are good; he just wants him to go where the money is.

By splitting M. Gainsbourg into himself and an alter-ego, the film becomes about the on-going conflict, not the event. The complete character is not the result of one or a series of events, but a tugging and pulling between a number of desires, fears, and arguments. In I’m Not There, Mr. Dylan is the sum of six different characters and, in 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, the pianist is fragmented into 32 equal parts. In comparison, M. Gainsbourg seems much simpler and, as a result, the internal conflict can be made to fit into a narrative of sorts, sparing the film from an overreaching artiness.

La Gueule sets M. Gainsbourg’s paintings alight and, as a result of this interference, M. Gainsbourg sells out: discovered first by M. Vian (in a wonderful cameo by M. Katerine, culminating in a medley of Vian’s Je Bois with Intoxicated Man), he sells songs to the comedy vocal quartet Les Frères Jacques, and is finally invited to present to Ms. Greco, which is like being asked to write songs for Elizabeth Taylor, if Elizabeth Taylor was a doctor of philosophy who had slept with Miles Davies. And so, with Ms. Mouglalis, begins a succession of beautiful actresses, most of whom cannot sing, played by a succession of beautiful actresses, most of whom cannot sing: Ms. Gall, Ms. Bardot, and, of course, Ms. Birkin.

Such a film must lack tension, as even the least-informed knows that some of these beautiful women will sing his songs, there would be no film otherwise. The interest lies in that first half, when M. Gainsbourg’s insecurities wear him down into acquiescence. However, once he attains success, the conflict is resolved. The lesson we could all learn is this: become successful and one can do what one wants. Through his songs, he is granted the notoriety and resources to be a painter, a director, and a novelist. Only the successful are granted this luxury: M. Safr, the debutant director of the film, for example, was the successful writer/artist of the graphic novel on which it is based.

Sadly, we do not get to see M. Gainsbourg get it all in quite this way. Once the conflict is resolved – partly by conceding to La Gueule and partly because achievement makes such a conflict void – the film changes pace, turning into a rush to include every charming, cultural anecdote about the man that there is. On a Parisian street, he tells La Gueule never to return, as he doesn’t need him anymore. At this point, perhaps, he becomes La Gueule himself, employing the same techniques that The Mouth had used to provoke him to action to provoke others: he drunkenly gets a police escort to speed him, sirens blazing, to a concert; he records a reggae version of La Marseillaise; he destroys his relationship with Ms. Birkin.

There are, of course, too many such stories to fit into the film. There is no mention of Lemon Incest, the controversial single recorded with his 13 year-old daughter, nor of the famed televised incidents where he burned a 500 Franc note or propositioned Ms. Houston. Neither is there, as a counterbalance, any representation of his famed generosity to the French public (at one point, paying to have all of a taxi driver’s teeth replaced) or the general love with which he was held. This is not a malicious omission, as it is a French film made for the French market, where, surely, almost all of M. Gainsbourg’s life must be part of common knowledge. Thus, for example, when Ms. Birkin tells him in hospital that he can now work on the symphonic masterpiece of which he’d always dreamed, the audience must know she means Histoire de Melody Nelson and it need never be mentioned again; a few seconds of Melody later in the film is the only second-thought it receives.

However, for an English-speaking audience that may not be so well-acquainted with his work, the talk of a long-considered magnum opus may sound like both motivation and a plot-point. If it does not materialise, it could be a little confusing. Similarly, when Gainsbourg suggests to M. Gall that he write the 18 year-old a dirty song, we never hear Les Sucettes, the song that would cause such controversy. To some, of course, there is no need to. In a film about the early days of the Beatles, Mr. Lennon might say “Gee, Paul, wouldn’t it be great if there were no possessions. Think about it.” and we would know all that that entailed.

As an introduction to M. Gainsbourg, it presumes too much and says too little. It focuses both too much and too little on his latter days, the days of being a bastard. Those days must be there, because they are what people know of him, but to did with them so quickly creates a film that is lop-sided: languorous and thoughtfully in the beginning and, then, racing through to the end, as if slightly embarrassed by its drunken, inappropriate protagonist. The beginning is a conflict worth telling: how one can aim for success in art or successful art or how, in reality, the two can merge. This is theme beneath that makes M. Gainsbourg’s music so precisely ambiguous, not the inflammatory amorality or provocative games he frequently played on top.

The title of J-K. Huysmans’ most famous novel, À rebours, can be translated as Against Nature or Against the Grain. But, for me, it is the second possibility that is the more appealing.

In the novel, the high-dandiacal protagonist, Des Esseintes, escapes into a Hinterland of his own creation, living a stylised, aesthetic life far from the nearest townfolk; he reads heretical literature, he mixes experimental cocktails, and he emblazons the shell of his pet tortoise with a wealth of precious stones. His tastes are decadent, gaudy even, and in their concentrated contrarianism, they are against nature. But Des Esseintes’ desire to escape is entirely natural; that he contrives to do it, and succeeds in doing so, is against the grain.

The idea of Against the Grain is wider-reaching, spanning from the self-indulgent aesthete to the self-effacing ascetic and all the points between. Any Escapologist (and you, reader, may be one) would fall somewhere along the spectrum, as Escapology itself requires one to break from convention or go against the accepted way of doing things. How else would one escape?

Huysmans himself never made the sort of escape that Des Esseintes did (although, interestingly, they would die in similar circumstances). He whored and debauched in his youth, but was subsidised through it all by his well-paid job in the civil service; he was a weekender, working five days, writing at night, then carousing with artists in his free time. It was only after the success of his novel, Là-Bas, an exploration of Satanism in 19th century Paris, that he contemplated change.

His research into spiritualism brought about his conversion to Catholicism, which would (as it so often does) affect his life irrevocably. It was an unconventional choice at the time, as anticlericalism had been fierce in France since the Revolution and was especially strong in Huysmans’ later religious decades of the 1880s and 90s. He would document his slow conversion over the span of three novels (En route, La cathédrale, and L’Oblate), detailing his retreats and short stays in country monasteries with Trappist and Benedictine monks.

The simple life of the cloisters appealed to him; it was far removed from the Bourgeois concerns of then-modern Paris, from meaningless jobs, fanciful decadence, and empty, sensationalist literature. He considered himself, however, unfit for the monastic life, but hoped to become an oblate – a lay Catholic who lives near the grounds of a monastery or convent, helping the brothers and sisters in their hermitage. In fact, he planned to found a commune of artist-oblates, who would aid the monks for part of the day and create redemptive art for the remainder.

When his idea of becoming an oblate was made public – revealed in the paper by an unscrupulous literary journalist – his employers at the Ministry of the Interior were both embarrassed and supremely helpful, suggesting that he retire from their department at once. Still, even with this forceful encouragement, Huysmans had his doubts. He recorded them, in his writerly fashion, in a list; his novels are full of them, though this is the only one reproduced in Robert Baldick’s biography.

Many of us will avoid romantic confrontations with the Spanish woman (the Countess de Galoez in this case), but, for most would-be Escapologists, the other pros and cons read here will be familiar: others are against or do not understand your escape; life will be somehow tougher; fear; that you may do more good within the system; and for “no holiness” read lack of discipline, self-sufficiency, or ability. And I have only listed those Against.

For anyone contemplating an escape, the “Against” column will often look bigger and the things in it more concrete and real. They are genuine uncertainties about the thoughts of friends and family and our capacity to take care of ourselves. In comparison, the “For” column is meagre, populated only with “obscure feeling(s)” and “vague attraction(s).” All that spurs on Huysmans is dissatisfaction with his life as a journalist (and any opportunity to trounce the Spanish woman in debate).

But the “For” column represents the future and, as the future is unknown, it can only be guessed at, intuited, and obscurely felt. That it totes up only unhappiness with one’s current life and the belief that a better one exists should still trump all in the other column. The minutiae of “Against” is, on reflection, nothing more than Bad Faith.

Tackled in Issue Four of New Escapologist, Bad Faith is the notion that one will roll over at the command of the world, playing one’s role in society, and taking no responsibility for one’s own actions. It can be a hard thing to beat and Huysmans’ list shows why: society is all around, it is set in its ways, and its arguments seem to outweigh the few wisps of hope that are “For”. To overcome Bad Faith, one must take chances, look to the future (where the unknown is kept), and go Against the Grain.

Huysmans is probably not the best example to follow though. He did not stay an oblate for long, abandoning the commune idea and, upon returning to Paris, he wrote a fictionalised account of the experience, which received heavy criticism from his own Catholic church. He probably spent too much time worrying about lists to concentrate on his religious duties.

At the end of À rebours, Des Esseintes decides he must return to Paris too. He saw no other option. Even the feckless dandy figure had his doubts; still, he died straight away.

It can be a difficult thing to do, breaking Bad Faith; Huysmans and Des Esseintes would agree, certainly. And, though each of them was disheartened, there is no reason that you should be. For Bad Faith is overcome, not by success, but by action that may lead to success. If one’s effort fails – you do not found your oblate commune; you tire of your ornamental hideaway – there is still the fact that, in so acting, one overcame Bad Faith. This is an achievement in itself and, once done, it can done again and again, each time more easily and more naturally. For there is no point in going only partially Against the Grain.

“The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean.”

Pop music is kept buoyant by hot air. It is the heat of hyperventilating fandom, the prefab puffery of the press release, or the hyperbole of the press room that fills and carries it.

This is not a slight; at least, all this warm breath proves that the participants are alive. But, as Umberto Eco, wrote of football, so the same is true of music – the empty chatter of the spectator removes them from the event itself.

Speak of a football fan and one suggests a person that supports and watches a team, not a person who plays for one. And, certainly, watching a side is carried out with more passion than playing ever is. Once this is sanctioned, one can see how the fan comes to care as much about the results of all games as the action of any one of them. And, thus, the empty chatter of the back pages and the tickertape of match results passing under the Sky Sports presenter become a means by which the spectator engages with the game. But these are far removed from the fundamental purpose of sport: fitness, exercise, and fun.

In a similar fashion, pop music, as a sort of spectator sport, removes the consumer from the technicalities and important banalities of music. Writing about pop seldom engages with the music itself, but, then, pop music as we know it, rejects technique and theory, so pop writing must do so too. Instead, most pop journalism focuses on the structures around the music: the lyric, the aesthetic, the biography, the sub-cultural context. And, perhaps, like the chatter of sport, these angles are just ways of trying to capture the feeling of excitement long after the goal is scored or the last note struck.

It may all work as a distraction as well, maintaining the mystery of the music, making it something distant and unknowable, a subject that can only be talked around. Even attempts to describe music seem to obfuscate it all the further. A clichéd reference to ‘angular guitars’ or ‘thundering bass’ does not allow the reader to replicate the song in their own head, as a detailed description of a painting’s composition or, even, a winning goal might. There is, of course, a method of translating music directly through print, but for music writers to reproduce scores would be asking too much of them and of their readers.

And, so, as pop cannot be seen to exclude anybody on grounds of musical knowledge (although it has its suspicions about age, sex, race, class, and sexuality), it must be spoken about in oblique terms, using only the highest of praise or the most hyperbolic of put-downs. It is from this form of discourse that the basic rhetorical styles of pop chatter come: hype, sarcasm, and mythology. There is not a pop writer alive – or, in the case of Mr. Bangs, dead – who does not depend on these to give their writing force. The problem is that the excitable, ongoing chatter of pop, all that hot air, has the natural effect of hot air pumped into a finite space: it causes a pop. How many artists, in the end, can survive being discussed in this way? Few bands reward the hype, too many are rendered kitsch by sarcasm, and some are made infallible by mythology; so much so that the music is no longer able to sing for itself.

I am happy to say, after all this hot air, that Ms. Newsom comes out of this book unscathed.

I don’t mean to suggest that the writers represented herein intended her any harm, rather that she proves herself worthy of the attention, scrutiny, and talk of the book and that the proof of this is the book itself. Through the pages of this anthology of writings, the 28 year-old Ms. Newsom – still, thankfully, older than me, but only just – justifies having such pieces written about her, by slowly revealing depths, intricacies, and artistic contradictions within her work, or allowing them to be revealed. And, conversely, the pieces within justify themselves by identifying a pop artist (a contemporary figure, not yet established as an icon and not guaranteed as much) who warrants such analysis and treating her work with the appropriate vocabulary.

The topic of Ms. Newsom’s music, per se, is broached only briefly – within Mr. Pepper’s discussion of covers of Ms. Newsom’s songs, occasional references to her use of cross-rhythms, and her relationship to ‘folk’ – but that is to be expected: it is not strictly a scholarly work. It is, instead, a collage of different approaches to pop writing, including the scholarly, but also the standard gonzo of music magazines, poetry, fiction, biography, and memoir. Like the wider chatter of pop, speaking around the central subject maintains the mystery and prolongs the excitement. Taking several angled jets of hot air and focusing them on one point, we see, where they cross, something (if there is anything) held in place, but flickering so fast that we can’t be sure what it is. But, at least, we know it’s there.

This approach to Newsom’s work is –and this comparison is made in the anthology- like the blind men groping the elephant in the poem of John Godfrey Saxe: it is much bigger than them and, as each fumbles about a separate quarter, they all find a different element to it and devise a different purpose. This same analogy was used in Ken Emerson’s introduction to 69 Love Songs: A Field Guide by LD Beghtol and could, in fact, be the most apt description for pop writing altogether. If pop writers are deaf to music or ignorant of technique or presume as much of their readership, they must grope about for analogies and comparisons that don’t quite hit the mark or suggest socio-economic significance when it’s probably not the case.

Not that such writing cannot prove insightful (although, an elephant is not a wall, a spear, a tree, a rope…). The editor’s essay on ‘affectation’ in The Milk-Eyed Mender says, not only interesting things about that work, but about the nature of performance in pop music and how women are received in it, while T.S. Miller’s piece on the folkloric origins of Colleen (from the …& the Ys Street Band epee) reveals Ms. Newsom as being an accomplished storyteller, despite the seemingly fragmentary nature of her lyrics. Even the more creative attempts, the poetry, Mr. Kahl’s strange love note to Ms. Newsom and philology, make valid arguments or recount reactions one has had or one could dream of having.

However, it is when they are taken altogether that they are most potent. Some blow hot, some cold, but together they hold Ms. Newsom in place, just for a second. And what they uncover is that she is contradictory and complex, that no two people hear her alike. There are glimpses. It takes the form of a biography of her presence, from those first of Dave Eggers’ thoughts in 2004 (here re-published from Spin magazine), through her uptake via blogs and cover versions, to the canonisation of Ys as a ‘classic work.’ It takes the form of a biography of her form: Ms. Rodes-Ta’s childhood recollections, the figure of her sister Emily, a history of her voice. It takes the form of a biography of her fans, of how they heard her one evening, one morning, one June. And, yet, Ms. Newsom doesn’t take form.

The musician comes of out the discussion, just like the music, as a mystery, something to be spoken around, as if writer or reader was not capable of fully understanding her. Not that there would have been any more use in printing the manuscript of Cosmia than the lines and dots of Ms. Newsom’s DNA. Even Ms. Fett’s study of the portrait of Ms. Newsom that adorns the front of Ys tells us more, and therefore less, about the artist, although it suggests more and more about the ideas that hang around the music.

The mystery doesn’t sound hollow though. There is no sense of hype, as if the mystery were covering something up; no sense of mythology, as if it came from the certainty of consensus and the uncertainty of our own ear. We can hear ourselves that the music goes back, back into the depths and expands far and wide, too wide for any of us to get a grasp of. The chatter of pop confirms the mystery, rather than constructing it.

And the mystery, here, prolongs the enjoyment. It sustains us, no less, from the last note of …& the Ys Street Band to the first of the upcoming Have One On Me, hoping that the next record will help explain the last. Whatever comes of the albums that follow, we may gather together more hints and clues, more information, to put with those here gathered, in these records, and in this book. For we already know that Joanna Newsom has a tail like a rope, a tusk like a spear, and a trunk, through which is blown hot air.

Mr. Gergiev was described as “the world’s most charismatic conductor” by the Financial Times and, as he conducts, one can see the rapt attention on the faces his players, following his moving hands with the glass-eyed stares of people hypnotised, their shoulders rigid in preparation for an unexpected order. One is reminded most of Mr. Lugosi, who uses, in Mr. Browning’s Dracula, the same double-jointed gesture to draw his victims towards him, while, here, the strings and the winds and the far-off horns swoon elegantly into Mr. Gergiev’s controlling arms. His timing is honed to dramatic effect. A clenched fist punctuates a phrase, not ahead of the orchestra, as if to lead them, but with them, as if the conductor were putting all his weight behind this one unanimous chord. And, where elsewhere, a gentle quiver of the wrist may represent vibrato, his players follow each undulation of that quaking hand precisely. When he reaches, at last, the final bracing call, he brings the orchestra to halt with a grand grasp of his reins – the same motion that Mr. Lugosi uses as the ‘Puppet Master’ in Mr. Wood’s Glen Or Glenda. When he shouts “Pool da strangs!”, we expect the violinists to drop down dead.

This great control keeps the opening of the Leningrad’s Allegretto so tight and martial that one would hardly believe that the flutes secretly represented the freedom of the human spirit at all. Thankfully, come the famous Invasion Theme, the human spirit is crushed by totalitarianism and Mr. Gergiev’s power is truly steeled, tickling out a distant march and breaking out and quelling outrages across the stage. Within ten minutes, the orchestra is unified in a limber lumber towards the audience that seems to stop just short of the city gates. One can’t help but see in the gesticulations of the conductor, or any conductor, the hard rule of the figurehead: the skills of the many drawn in under and directed by the will of the one. And this even from the great Mr. Gergiev, who does so much for good causes; in the man, so are the contradictions of the work. At times, one would rather not look at him.

Many didn’t. The hall was quite empty and, in the final few days, ticket prices were reduced dramatically. His charisma clearly does not extend to the advertising campaign. In all still shots, it must be admitted, he looks like a comic tramp of silent film whose white-shirt front will roll up and snap him in the face this instant. It is a situation quite different to that of Mr. Morricone, who has, at the podium, all the charm of half the podium, but who managed to sell out the same venue two evenings running to open last year’s festival. Let’s not forget, though, that Mr. Morricone is really a movie star; he doesn’t need charisma, as he has gravitas.

An international festival must have an ostentatious opening event and no one would deny that any festival that can coerce Mr. Gergiev to conduct must put him at the top of the bill, but the principal show of the seventeen day run must match a worthy headliner with a worthy reception and it could have been anticipated that the Mariinsky Orchestra would not equal the success of Mr. Morricone and his large ensemble. The latter justified the movement and accommodation of some hundred musicians, all rallied around the great composer. In 2005, Ms. Faithfull performed at the opening show with the Ulster Orchestra. Had the point of this year’s show had merely been Mr. Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the Ulster Orchestra could have hired additional musicians. But the point, of course, was to have Mr. Gergiev here to ratify us as a city of culture, even if classical music is not really part of that culture. It doesn’t necessarily take an arts festival to bring Mr. Gergiev to the province; he visited Omagh ten years ago, in the aftermath of the bomb; but we must presume we have some choice between the two.

There is no ensemble I would rather have play the Leningrad in Belfast than the Mariinsky, nor no one better to conduct them. Mr. Gergiev’s impassioned relationship with the music is clear through every movement; the Russian national character is as etched in his face as it is scrawled on that manuscript; for those players to engage with that music is to engage with their nation’s troubled history and their heritage. To those listening, it had only a fraction of the resonance it had for those playing. For, while there are individuals in Northern Ireland that love this music (plenty of whom turned out), they are only every individuals. We have no heritage of classical music; rather, it feels like an affectation that has been grafted into our own culture. There is no sense of having taken part in the tradition of Western music; we only started joining in once the boundaries were breaking down. A national character was never asserted musically, as, for centuries, we could not agree on what that national character was. Thus, the canon of Western music was not something in which we played much part and, like the opera house in Ulan Bator, it is an imported sort of sophistication. Like the Seventh Symphony itself, it is music used to political ends, to demonstrate where power lies and classify the masses.

The opening ceremony is not the place to show the weight of the festival; it has no weight. The festival should encourage people to engage with art when normally they would not and the way to do this is not through expensive tickets sold on the prowess of the conductor – the importance of which role many casual festival-goers may not care to understand. The welcoming concert should not feel like a challenge and to many I’m sure it did – they didn’t even hear the festival’s true opening number, Mr. Dutilleux’s awkward-sounding Correspondences. Classical music is, sadly, a marginal interest in Northern Ireland and flown-in superstars will not alter that, because people must first care to know who those superstars are.

Those of us who saw Mr. Gergiev pulled the strings were not disappointed and could not have been, but it may have been wiser to use the money, wasted on empty blocks in the Waterfront, to fill seats at the smaller classical events during the festival, through lower ticket prices and greater promotion. Surely, the festival must attempt to make classical music a living part of Northern Irish culture, rather pretending that a great man’s endorsement makes it so.

In 1979, ‘The No. 1 Song In Heaven’ sounded like a disco 12″ skewed through the sensibilities of the sorts of young men who attend conventions not directly connected with their occupation.

In 1995, ‘When Do I Get To Sing My Way?’ sounded like an airy Balearic dance track skewed through the sensibilities of the kind of people who have hits in Germany.

Whether they have intended to or not, Sparks have always sounded of the era. A common thread of Maelian eccentricity runs through each and everything they do (arch narrative arcs on trivial matters), but it is only because they have been themselves over such an extensive period that they falsely foster an idea of eclecticism. Sparks and the contemporary music scene run as two clocks with their second hands set moments apart: they are not entirely in sync, but each shows exactly the same time.

While others argue over art holding a mirror up to life, Sparks have art turning the spyglass back on itself. However, the reflection is never tainted with malice or scorn. They never showed glam as indulgent and self-destructive nor disco as tedious and banal. They never commented that new wave lacked substance and techno lacked tunes. In music, if not life, they always saw the good in things. It was their only responsibility to avoid all seriousness and suggest, to those who did not know already, that humour and wit can sit comfortably in any circumstance. Modern music, though, is no laughing matter.

With 2002′s ‘Lil’ Beethoven’ and now ‘Hello Young Lovers,’ Sparks gave up their coquettish relationship with the mainstream. No longer was chart music a thing to be played with lovingly. Its seeming lack of substance and adventure (it was everything Sparks had done before) was to be ignored wholly on the avant-classical, hip-hop hybrid, ‘Lil’ Beethoven,’ but on ‘Hello Young Lovers’ it is something to be openly despised, scorned and torn apart.

Sparks heap their disapproval upon contemporary music (which we can describe as being both a con and purely temporary) firstly by excluding every reference point to today’s cool/angry/art rock moral majority and secondly by heralding change at every bar. Modern music (or, at least, that which has leaked into Sparks’ vacuum) sticks its spurred heels in, refusing to be original, refusing to alter, refusing to deviate from any given formula. So, with appalling arrogance and to show up all the young upstarts, the Brothers Mael take a single vocal snippet or brief idea (lead-off single ‘Dick Around’ for example) and shift and shuffle beneath it every chord, tempo and timbre change conceivable. In true modernist style, ‘Dick Around’ contains within itself every Sparks tune that has ever gone before it, if not a whole L’Historie de Musique de Pop. “And if we can do this with one bar,” they seem to say, “just imagine what we can do with a whole song.” If they had one.

Actually, they do. That song is ‘As I Sat Down To Play The Organ At Notre Dame Cathedral,’ a closer composed of just enough separate components to keep track of (that is a great many less than in ‘Fingertips’ by They Might Be Giants). They are all put together with sufficient care that the joins don’t show. Because there are no joins at all.

However, for an album that bristles with such violence in its principles, it sounds, as all Sparks albums do, very pleasant. The attack is not in the music itself, but in how the music is approached, arranged and produced. It is the choice of music they have decided to write over that which they have decided against that constitutes their reprisal. The “auditory assault” the press release promises lies behind the sounds rather than within.

sparksEven in the songwriting itself, Mr Ron Mael seems to have refrained from any cheap slights in the style of ‘What Are All These Bands So Angry About?’ The closest one would come is if one avoided the obvious political reading of ‘(Baby Baby) Can I Invade Your Country?’ and instead saw it as a proposed reclamation of chart territory (of course, chart territory is still territory where Mr Russell Mael’s tired old question, “Who’s your favourite Beatle?”, can spur debate late into the night). But then it could also be Ron’s overdue retort to journalists who ask him why he invaded Poland.

When Sparks, intentionally or inadvertently, sounded like everyone else, it was secondary to the fact that they sounded like Sparks. And now, when they try to sound like no one else, they still sound like Sparks. The delicious ‘Metaphor,’ prinked ‘Waterproof’ and Swingle Singers-like ‘Here Kitty’ cannot hide their Sparks-ness behind unexpected string glissandos and obtrusive rock guitars. Such wild oscillations between styles will blur into one constant noise, leaving only a common thread of Maelian eccentricity. After twenty albums, one can give up all hope of being original; by that point your persona has grown too big to be concealed by mere ideas. No matter how far you divorce yourself from contemporary music, you will always be married to yourself.