I'm not very classically minded, though I do often listen to BBC R3 when I'm in the car. Also Classic FM. That has a major aura of staleness about it, so it's definitely a second choice.
Anyway, a couple of winters ago, on a grey, wet, winter day, I went for a drive in the Mendip Hills of Somerset. Really, to get out of my flat on a Sunday afternoon. After a while, I'd decided that flooded roads, and murk, were hardly preferable to being at home. Till this came on....
Cheered me right up.
Couldn't leave today without mention of the recently deceased Mark E Smith, and his band, The Fall. I wasn't very interested in the music, till I heard this recording, from 1983. The Fall was basically Mark, plus whichever musicians he hadn't yet fallen out with. He took quite a while to fall out with Brix Smith, his wife. She wrote much of this song, and is the vocalist.
35 years down the way, this is Brix Smith with her version of the same song, recorded last September. More mainstream, tribal drumbeat replaced by drum rolls, as English drummers like to do. Mark E Smith might have rolled his eyes at that. I do like it though.
And it's painless, sitting in subterranea
Ancient reference to Mesopotamia
And it's quiet again
Hidden fragments, surface now
Repetitious history
One more time for the record
....
