Everything Must Go

The Manic Street Preachers are about my age, and grew up some seven or eight miles down the road from where I did. The first time I saw them they were on TV, and I felt an acute - misplaced - embarrassment on their behalf. They were gawkily, earnestly pretentious, gabbling away in their broad valleys accents - the same accent I'd striven to mask and suppress during my student years in London. Their presence showed up the folly of my own pretentions to urbane sophistication.

I've always been interested in their career by virtue of the local-boys-made-good angle, but only some of their music has ever grabbed me - I wouldn't quite call myself a fan. I do have a soft spot for Everything Must Go, however. I bought it on cassette soon after its release in mid-'96, which was a painfully difficult time for me. I was in Rome, ostensibly living the cosmopolitan dream, but felt isolated, stressed & depressed thanks to my awful job.

This album, together with an unwise excess of alcohol, espresso and Toscanelli cigars, afforded a therapeutic catharsis that helped drag me from one difficult day to the next. Even then, I didn't like it all: churlish as it may be to complain about their presence, Richey Edwards' lyrics just aren't my cup of tea. Not all of the anthemic moments fully connected with me either, but the high-points, which, to my mind include 'Enola/Alone', the title-track, 'Australia' and 'No Surface All Feeling' more than made up for that. I'll always be grateful to the band for this record.

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All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

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