Rod Clements saw considerable chart success with folk-rockers Lindisfarne, penning their hit Meet Me On The Corner. He currently works as a solo artist and with his band, The Ghosts of Electricity. He also collborates with other musical kindred spirits and has worked with the late, great Bert Jansch, Michael Chapman, Rachel Harrington and Rab Noakes, among others. We trust you’ll enjoy the latest of Rod’s regular musings in which you’ll find he’s NICELY OUT OF TUNE I’m not a big fan of so-called ‘reality’ TV shows and I rarely get excited about choral music, but having been lured into watching the nation’s favourite bespectacled choirmaster, Gareth Malone, coaxing vocal performances out of a bunch of truculent school kids and a random posse of soldiers’ wives, I was impressed by his ability to communicate and motivate, and it’s clear that his novice singers emerge from the experience enriched with new-found belief in their own potential. Gareth is obviously classically trained and has at least a nodding acquaintance with the genre still quaintly referred to as ‘popular music’, so I was a bit disappointed when I came across this quote from him in a recent profile: “I love classical music above all other forms but I like something frivolous in the morning.” Like, if it’s not classical, it’s frivolous. Not just rock and pop but blues, jazz, folk and any music at all that isn’t in the European classical idiom – all frivolous. Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, Johnny Cash, you’re all frivolous. All right in the morning, like Ken Bruce or cornflakes, but not for serious consumption later in the day. I know Gareth didn’t mean that literally, but the way he said it suggests a mindset that I suspect is instilled along with a classical musical education. It’s the same default setting of unconscious superiority that lets Nigel Kennedy think he can ‘let his hair down’ after a ‘serious’ concert and get ‘down and dirty’ with his mates playing something he thinks is jazz. Like Yehudi Menuhin’s ill-advised attempt to get up on TV with that wily old boulevardier Stéphane Grappelli and ‘jam’ with him. Because they can play ‘proper’ music they think they can easily play what they dismiss as ‘frivolous’. Well, they can’t and if you’ve seen them try, you’ll know what I mean. It used to be fashionable for ‘serious’ music writers to try to boost their ‘hip’ credentials by publishing learned treatises analysing The Beatles’ music and comparing it with Mozart, showing that however unsophisticated and ‘frivolous’ they might be, there was actually a glimmer of musical talent involved. It was about as credible as Gordon Brown pretending to like Arctic Monkeys. It was even suggested that young people starting off on a musical diet of pop songs might be weaned onto Cole Porter and Broadway musicals, thence to light classical entertainments, and eventually – if they had sufficient mental capacity, kept their ears washed and ate their musical greens – to the rarefied heights of Beethoven and his peers. It’s no wonder that, confronted with such pomposity, an entire generation turned its back on classical music. I won’t deny that there has been some unfortunate traffic in the opposite direction too. The history of pop music is littered with examples of performers wanting to be taken more seriously, whether it be last year’s chart-topper having a go at West End theatre or a bored muso in his country pile penning a concerto for fuzzbox and orchestra. One suspects such aspirations are born out of the same nagging sense of being ‘frivolous’ when you should be doing something ‘serious’ and ‘proper’. Of course, frivolity is an essential component of pop music, sometimes the whole point, though the classicists don’t do themselves any favours in dismissing everything outside their own genre as trivial. We don’t go round calling them stuffy and boring, do we? Oh, all right, but we shouldn’t. But if you catch one getting all superior about ‘serious’ music, you can soon shut them up by using just two words: ‘Gilbert’ and ‘Sullivan’.