Broadchurch 2
52 Authors: Week 44 - Rumer Godden

Chris Rea: You Must Be Evil

I can't tell you how many times I had similar feelings when I was raising children. Not so much about the nightly news and similar things, which we never watched, but about the news/entertainment industry in general.

 

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Amen.

It's a bit encouraging, though, that he seems to be able to have a career as a musician with music like this.

AMDG

I think that song I posted a couple of weeks ago, "The Road to Hell", was something of a hit here. Also the album as a whole. He was pretty popular here at the time (early '90s) but apparently more so in the UK. But then Paul and Grumpy (iirc) didn't seem to know his work. Anyway, he has done pretty well.

He was pretty popular in Australia. I had one of his albums.

Don't take me as an index of anything: I know more about the popular music of my children's generation than of my own. And I have trouble telling celebrities apart at the best of times. I wasn't very snobbish about it (a little, but not very), it just didn't interest me.

It's a trait I seem to have inherited. My parents had folk rather than pop records, and my grandmother, who lived with us, listened to a lot of Gilbert & Sullivan and Strauss waltzes (she was born in 1906, so this wasn't even the music of her generation).

A few weeks ago I went to a rock concert for the first time in my life, but since it was Weird Al Yankovic my wife insists it wasn't really a rock concert anyway.

There were a few exceptions: I could put a name to a song if it was Iron Maiden, Tracy Chapman, Maddy Prior, or The Pogues.

I just asked my wife if she'd heard of Chris Rea, and she reeled off half a dozen song titles and sang a few bars of "Road to Hell".

You and your wife sound a bit like me and mine, with the genders reversed. Except that the "few exceptions" list for my wife would be smaller. It really is funny: if I had been consciously searching for someone as indifferent as possible to pop music, I probably could not have done better. I literally do not know anyone less interested in pop music and pop culture in general.

That's an interesting and slightly amusing list of names--Iron Maiden?! They do seem to attract teenage boys. Who often become men who still like them as much as ever.

What other rock group quotes Tennyson, Coleridge and Chesterton, and samples Churchill's speeches?

You sound like a friend of mine who's also a big fan. As it happens I recently listened (at his recommendation) to their latest, but it's not much to my taste. For many years I never even heard them, but just recoiled from their horrible cover art.

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