page 21

Rock and the Classics

Tony Palmer and Richard Heyworth are rock and classical music writers respectively for The Observer.

Palmer: Don't you think, it's a pity there should be two columns in this newspaper—one called 'Music' and the other called 'Pop'?

Heyworth: No, I don't. I think it's an acceptance of fact, an acceptance of the situation as it is. There is a difference, isn't there?

Palmer: No, I don't think there is. But calling your column music and mine pop is to imply that pop is not music.

Heyworth: Not at all. It simply implies that there are different sorts of music.

Palmer: There seems to me no essential musical difference between the works of Stockhausen, John Tavener, Geo Laine, the Beatles or Bob Dylan. To arbitrate between them is silly and destructive. Contrary to expectation, the difference, if any, is certainly not in the degree of popularity.

The best of pop music isn't popular. It doesn't make the Top Twenty, so you can't judge it by the charts. The best of pop is a minority . . .

Heyworth: Ah! So you're arguing for one minority against another minority?

Palmer: Not at all. I'm arguing for a proper understanding of what pop music is. It does not consist exclusively of stuff that's heard on the Jimmy Young Show.

Heyworth: No doubt. But don't you think that, putting it very crudely, one could say that pop is the musical expression of the demands of the new rich—the post-war young. For the first time in history the young can put down some money for what they want. They may not be individually rich, but—considering their numbers—as patrons they're as rich as the haute bourgeoisie of 150 years ago. The arrival of pop surely dates from their arrival on the scene.

Palmer: Perhaps; but pop is not just expressing the demands of the new rich. It is expressing now, 1970, in a way that no other music is.

Heyworth: You said in The Observer that the Beatles were the best song writers since Schubert. Do you really believe that?

Palmer: Of course I believe it.

Heyworth: You don't think that the range of emotion they can cover is limited, for instance, in comparison with Schubert?

Palmer: It depends which songs you take. If you take simple children's songs like Yellow Submarine, yes obviously you're right. But I am the Walrus, for instance, is as complicated in its emotional intention and in its musical and linguistic expression as any song of Schubert. It may not ultimately be as successful but it's as complex.

Heyworth: We must talk about 'success'; complexity is not a virtue in itself. The fact that pop makes itself complex doesn't make it better, does it? And the risky thing about your comparison with Schubert is that you're assuming a life expectancy of 100 years.

Palmer: No. I think the notion of good art having something to do with long life is nonsense.

Heyworth: The notion of eternal art is crap, I must say. None the less, I think it means something if a work of art shows durability . . .

Palmer: What do you mean by durability?

Heyworth: Simply an ability to go on satisfying people for a long time—because it communicates about things that preoccupy people from one generation to another. Maybe not many works of art nowadays can be expected to do that. Perhaps life has changed so much that even basic preoccupations change. But still I think that if a Beethoven symphony can still go on yielding some sort of kick, reaction or whatever you like to call it, then it's fair to say that it's better, more valuable, than something that merely produces a thrill that in 10 or 15 years' time is worn out and discarded. It isn't at all that I think serious art is necessarily better than frivolous art.

Palmer: I agree with you that a work is more valuable if it can go on fascinating generations in the way that it fascinated the generation that it was made in. Except fur one other consideration. For example, a Beethoven Symphony played in 1802 to Fred Smith was probably fascinating. Played in 1820 to the same person; again, very fascinating. And again when played in 1825 to the same person-because Fred Smith or any person living then might only have had the opportunity to hear it on those three occasions. Now I am a Walrus, within hours of it having been recorded, can be heard by millions of people, and they can hear it endless numbers of times.

Heyworth: But, goodness me, Beethoven has also been recorded-and time and time again, unlike the Beatles. Of course, all this over-exposure on records, radio and the rest puts a terrible strain on a work of art. But Beethoven has had his share of it-and not just in the last five years.

Palmer: Maybe, but that's precisely one point I was making. Not all the Beatles' songs are good, of course. But there are about 280 of them—which is a lot for four years of work. You would agree that it's a mark of something that some do survive that kind of strain.

Heyworth: It's a bit early to say, isn't it? Though I'm prepared to agree they may.

Palmer: All I'm saying is that they do survive it now. For I am the Walrus to go on being played even a year after it was written, indicates something more than 'may'. Nowadays you don't measure survival in centuries. It's measured in months.

Heyworth: There you are, you're admitting my point. The fact that the turnover of a successful song is so quick suggests some sort of limitation. After all, what's so remarkable about classics like Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven is that they evolved a way of writing music so that audiences were willing to sit silently in rows and listen to it for its own sake. This was absolutely unprecedented. Before that you heard music at the opera, in your church or you danced to it or maybe you just sat and talked through a divertimento.

A concert as we now know it is quite new. And now something different is emerging with the arrival of a new class of natrons. It may well be that concert music is dying. It may be that pop will succeed it, though I doubt its ability to take over the-whole field. But one thing isn't as good as another—and I'm talking about quality—just because one thing comes after another.

Palmer: I'm not disagreeing with that. I'd say that the history of pop music as I understand it does date from the arrival of Elvis Presley in 1955. Not only did he fuse all the various elements that went into pop—rhythm 'n' blues, gospel, soul, country and western—but he happened to arrive at a time when the first post-war generation was growing up free and rich. The first was an accident of parentage, the second a sociological accident. Like everything else in pop, it wasn't planned.

With the arrival of musicians of stature, I would say genius, like the Beatles, Elvis's sound, which was very crude, was translated into a high degree of sophistication. It's ironic that it was they, not Elvis, who set the youth of the world on fire.

Heyworth: Good God, no one planned Beethoven either. No one's out to attack Elvis Presley. At least, I'm not. But it seems to me that you're coming very close to suggesting that pop is the whole truth so far as the contemporary scene is concerned. At one time some people said the same about jazz—that it alone was real and all the rest was phoney, that it had taken over from defunct 'classical' music.

Palmer: It isn't. It was at the time. Anyway, the best defence of pop music cannot necessarily be made cither for the words, which are for the most part indifferent, or for the music, which for the most part is banal, but for a combination of the words and music, plus the kind of cataclysmic effect that the playing of pop music has: its loudness, its sense of occasion, its sense of excitement. Curiously, the kind of effects that Stockhausen is working on, and the kind of effects that Henze and other composers you admire are working on, are very like those that pop music is working on.

Heyworth: I don't think that Henze or Stockhauscn would appreciate being put in the same pot. But I agree that pop has a number of qualities that so-called serious music seems for the time being to have lost. And incidentally I think there's a connection between one side's gain and the other's loss.

I'm not against pop. My doubts are merely as to how far its language extends and whether it can express the full range of human experience. Because the Final justification of art must be its relevance to our experience of the world, its ability to enlarge it. I'm not saying that pop doesn't do this. I just wonder whether it has it in it to cover all experience and cover it in depth. Won't you settle for co-existence?

Palmer: To which the proper reply is that of John Lennon when somebody said to him. 'You're now 25, Mr Lennon. Don't you think by the time you're 35 you'll have grown out of all this?' Lcnnon said, 'No, bv the time I'm 35 I'll be writing about what it's like to be 35'. The music you so vigorously advocate has little new to say to the new generation, to today's young people. And pop has. Art can only live as an enlargement of experience if it is constantly being revitalised by fresh stimuli. Pop is not the complete answer, but at least it should be given a chance.

Roger McGough

Let Me Die a Youngman's Death

Let me die a youngman's death
not a clean & inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73
& in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party

Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
& sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
& give me a short back & insides

Or when I'm 104
& banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
& fearing her son
cut mc up into little pieces
& throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax & waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death