The Royal Pump Rooms in Leamington Spa has had a chequered history since it was opened in 1814, as the New Pump Rooms and Baths, with the pumps themselves manufactured by two great names of the Industrial Revolution, Boulton & Watts of Birmingham. As ‘taking the waters’ became less fashionable, and those that wished to do so travelling to Europe, business and revenues declined throughout the 1840s and ‘50s to the extent that, in 1860, the building was to be demolished and the land sold for re-development.

A group of local investors managed to save it in the short term, but – failing to make a profit – sold it to the local Board of Health, and it has remained publicly owned ever since, lately under the control of Warwick District Council. In the 1990s, the Council proposed that it should become a private operation, and it took a concerted campaign by local people, with the help of luminaries such as Earl Spencer, Lady Diana’s father and a really nice guy, to thwart these Thatcherite plans and, instead, transform these famous buildings into a cultural complex, which incorporates a library, a museum, an art gallery, a tourist information centre, and the refurbished original assembly rooms. This last has an ambience and an acoustic which are particularly well-suited to chamber music and, in my view at least, has contributed immeasurably to the continuing success of Leamington’s International String Quartet series.

This is where I was on Friday evening to hear the Atrium String Quartet play a concert which included the first of Haydn’s Russian Quartets, Opus 33 No1, the second Prokofiev, Opus 92, and – in the second set – Beethoven’s quartet in A minor, Opus 132, perhaps the finest of Beethoven’s great, late quartets.

I am a huge fan of these four young Russians from Leningrad (or St Petersburg as I fail to learn to call it). Having seen them in Leamington, I have travelled to London for a couple of performances of Shostakovich in the Wigmore Hall; so I was looking forward to seeing them again at the Pump Rooms and hearing, especially, the Beethoven, which was written just 11 years after the building opened its doors.

They were in a hurry. The presto of the Haydn was taken at breakneck speed. The Prokofiev came and went in no time at all. And the great slow movement of the Beethoven came in, I estimate, at well under 15 minutes.

Now, I was brought up on the Amadeus, who would usually extend this movement closer to 20 minutes. Which it should be – despite the faster moments of renewed health which punctuate it. So the Atrium’s version lacked that sublime gravitas to which I was accustomed.  And it occurred to me, walking home in the rain, that this is to do with the age and maturity of the four players.

The A minor is about mortality. It was written whilst recovering from a life-threatening illness. The slow movement is dedicated to a god who had spared him. I am not sure that the youthful precocity of the Atrium is ready for the profound emotions which I find when listening to the Amadeus renditions. 

This is not surprising, really. Would one wish to see Lear played by a 20 year old actor? One looks for the life experience and depths of pain and pleasure of a significantly older man.

So with Beethoven who, at this point, had less than two years to live.

There is no doubt that the performance was technically accomplished. It was played with spirit and power. But perhaps because I am now of a certain age, I look for more emotional resonance, more appreciation of the uncertainties and inconclusiveness of life.

So it's back to those distant memories of the Amadeus in the '60s and to those definitive recordings.

Back also to The Swaps at Wilde's tonight. Still an age gap but I'll hack it.

Today from the everysmith vault: in addition to the Amadeus recording, I have also listened to the Lindsays. Interestingly, Peter Cropper and the boys come in at more than 18 minutes for the slow movement. 

A recent graffito  from France reads “Hollande et toute la class politique dehors”:  Hollande and the whole political class get out!

The French unashamedly develop their political class, and have in place a structure which ensures progress to the Grand Corps of the state. As a rule, future leaders begin at the Institute d’études politiques de Paris and move seamlessly to the  École nationale d'administration, from which graduates, knowns as énarques, take up their positions of power. Presidents Giscard d’Estaing, Chirac and Hollande are énarques, as are half a dozen prime ministers and – on average – between a third and a half of every cabinet since the ‘60s. The majority are strangers to any occupation other than politics.

Aren’t we fortunate that we have no such institution in the UK, regurgitating 100 graduates a year onto the top of our political hierarchy?

Of course, we do have such a system. And it’s called Eton and Oxford. It could – at a pinch – be St Paul’s, or Harrow, or Winchester. And it’s possible that a Cambridge graduate might sneak in. But the principle is sound.

Eton and Oxford train those of a certain class in the same way as Ecole nationale d’administration. The difference is, the French is a meritocracy (established by de Gaulle to democratise access to the senior echelons of the state); the English version is about money and class.

Yep, we’re back to this recurring theme.

I have banged on about this a number of times, pointing out that not only is our cabinet from this background, but also many of the journalists and civil servants and lawyers whom one might expect to maintain checks and balances.

Back in 1968, Stephen Sedley (at that time not the Right Honourable Lord Justice Sedley) pointed out to me that only one High Court judge at the time was not educated at public school and Oxbridge, but the real issue was that one could not tell which one!

And this is the broader point. In the same way as capitalism re-invents itself constantly, so the ruling political class absorbs those from different class backgrounds and transforms them into upholders of the status quo, rewarding them for their change of allegiance.

A case in point is the former Labour leader of Sheffield city council, David Blunkett, who became Home Secretary under Blair, and was yesterday defending the political class, claiming that we should be grateful for this “volunteering” for public service. When Will Self pointed out that he had been forced to resign not once but twice and that he had managed to find a role within the Murdoch empire which paid him £45,000 for a few days work, he “would not deign to respond to such a slur”.

But it’s not a slur. It’s a statement of fact. And a particularly relevant and significant statement of fact.

This prominent player in the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire has become part of the establishment and is unable to recognise the contradictions in his position. Or perhaps he can but refuses to admit them.

Either way, we have a problem. It is the structure of the class system which makes it impossible to make the profound changes to a system which works to the benefit of a single class at the expense of others.

We are emphatically not in this together.

Today from the everysmith vault: Celebrated the 39th anniversary of BOTT on Monday by playing both versions, New York and Minnesota. But, subsequently, it's been Mahler, conducted by the late, great Claudio Abbado.

I listen to a great deal of music. 

I have music playing pretty much the whole working day and, often, not in the background. I have a specially constructed – by the estimable James Johnston – 240 gig iPod which I carry with me at all times in case I should suddenly get the urge to listen to some obscure set of noodling by Garcia and Cippolina, or a forgotten single by Mouse and the Traps, or that Dylan show in Avignon in 1981.  Last night I sat in Wilde’s and listened to a remarkable set of cool and clever jazz played by the Interplay Duo - Richard Baker (trombone) and Adrian Litvinoff (bass). I have moments ago booked my seat for the Atrium String Quartet, four young Russians who are as good as it gets in this genre, and will be playing Haydn, Prokofiev and the extraordinary Beethoven Opus 132 at the Pump Rooms in 10 days or so.

At the same time, we are scheduling more Mondays Unplugged, an eclectic Mayday extravaganza featuring The Rosenberg Appeal and the Swaps, and choosing between a plethora of gigs at assorted bars, pubs and clubs in Leamington and Warwick.

Is it all too much? Is the surfeit of sound making it impossible to make any kind of judgement about the quality of what we are hearing? Does it all merge into a single soundtrack with fewer and fewer distinguishing elements?

One of the ways in which I avoid this danger is by focusing for long periods of intense concentration on a single band or a single album. (Recently, it’s been the Pixies but I think I’m over that for the moment.) And another way is to open one’s ears to new stuff which one absorbs from the children or from the staff at Wilde’s, where several of the part-time staff are musicians “between gigs”. And another way is to be responsive to the fear that one is missing or has missed something remarkable.

This last has been facilitated by Wolfgang’s Vault. I have been a subscriber to Bill Graham’s archive since it started, primarily because it offered some soundboards of the Dead in the great days when they were still raw, before they got so fucking good. Recently, members have been inundated with shows and fragments of shows from a remarkably diverse assemblage of bands.

Much of the stuff I want I already have. But I listen to each at some point, even U2. And occasionally, down from the ether comes something of which I have never heard.

This happened over the weekend just gone with a show from The Dream Syndicate. From the first song, which took me back to the first time I heard the Velvet’s Live at Max’s Kansas City, I was hooked. And when they launched into a version of Neil Young’s Mr Soul, I was riveted.

Who were these guys? It turns out they were part of what was known as the Paisley Underground, a phrase I had heard but never bothered to investigate. Something to do with Scotland maybe? According to one profile, they were “critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful”. Just my kind of band! How come I missed out on all this stuff in the 80s?

Of course, I was listening to old GD tapes and Dylan for most of the decade, wallowing in what had been and might have been. But boy, did I miss something vital and vibrant and alive.

And that is why, despite the fact that quantity is dominating quality, I will continue to play and listen to too much music. It’s for those moments – a sublime Jerry exploration, an unreleased Bob song, an exquisite Shostakovich riff played by the Atrium, a Flo melody under Pip’s hard rocking guitar at a Rosenbergs show, Tommo’s blues harmonica at a Swaps gig, or a thousand other spots of time in basement bars and on headphones.

Is there too much music? Yes. Is it a problem? If it is, I can live with it.

Today from the everysmith cellars: Marquis Anselme Mathieu 2010, a Chateauneuf du Pape which was a gift from my Red Sox Nation brother Myers. 90% Grenache but with all 13 allowed grape varieties. Exemplary. Thanks, bro.

One of the rituals of New Year that I look forward to is not the announcement of the award of assorted gongs to people one has never heard of or to people who have earned millions and donated some of it to whichever party is currently in government.

It is the release of those cabinet and government documents that have been kept secret under the 30 year rule; in this case, the assorted stuff from 1984.

1984 was the year of the miners’ strike, which split the country pretty much down the middle. Or rather, the government’s response split the country.

It was class warfare. Raw in tooth and claw. It lasted from March 1984 to March 1985 and although some miners had returned to work earlier, ministers later admitted that they had lied about the numbers involved in order to destroy the morale of those still striking.

Thirty years later, we now know that this was by no means the only lie told by the Thatcherite Tories of the time.

Now we know that their total dismissal of Scargill’s belief that there was a hidden agenda of pit closures was unjustified. Not only that but it had been discussed in a secret meeting, attended by only seven people, the minutes of which were not to be made public, but which agreed that 75 pits were to be closed with the loss of 64,000 jobs.

Whole communities were to be destroyed. Families were to be thrown into poverty.  Two-thirds of Welsh miners would become redundant. One third of those in Scotland would lose their jobs, together with half in the north-east, half in south Yorkshire and almost half in the south Midlands. In Kent, not a single job would remain.

You will not be surprised to learn that final paragraph of the document read: "It was agreed that no record of this meeting should be circulated."

A subsequent document, penned by a senior civil servant, argued the same small group should meet regularly in future, but that there should be "nothing in writing which clarifies the understandings about strategy which exist between Mr MacGregor (Ian MacGregor, the chairman of the Coal Board) and the secretary of state for energy".

Today, I doubt whether any of this surprises us. And it wouldn’t have surprised me at the time – most of us were convinced that this strategy was in place and that the objective was to destroy the organised working class.

But we are thirty years on, and the proof that we were right then is irrelevant. 

“History to the defeated
May say alas but cannot help or pardon”.

It will come as no consolation to those families throughout the mining community of Britain that they were right. They, and the movement, was destroyed. And it was destroyed in no small measure by working class people, the police constables who surrendered their principles in order to gain unprecedented overtime and who relished the legalised punch-ups.

I know this because my brother-in-law at the time was a traffic policeman. One day, in the middle of the dispute, he brought round to see us a brother officer, who regaled us with stories of beatings up and how much he had earned and what he was going to spend it on: video players and Majorca, as I recall.

He was confused. My accent, my home and the wine I was serving made him assume that I was on his, and Thatcher’s, side. I was not. And the defeat of the NUM, and the recent disclosures that the union was right all along, confirms my instinctive loathing for Thatcher’s strategy and those who supported it.

They are still denying that meeting, and what was discussed and agreed, despite the fact that the minutes are, finally, in the public domain.

Their guilt is manifest. And we cannot help or pardon; we can only say alas.


Today from the everysmith vault: EP2 from the Pixies, four great new songs, released today.I commend it to you.