Mick Rock, a music photographer who died last week at the age of 72, famously remarked that he was “in the business of evoking the aura” of the people he photographed. It was his great fortune to be working at a period when the androgynous otherness radiating from rock stars like David Bowie, Lou Reed, […]

It was a beautiful bright day in Glasgow on June 25, 2019. I had a good time packing bags with my wife, Jackie, this morning. I was a screenplay writer by day and a songwriter with the Sweetheart Revue, an Americana band that had been going for 14 years. For the first time in my […]

If you’re going to conduct Michael Tippett’s music, you have to like it. His music is irritating to play because it is impractically constructed, sometimes on the border of feasibility, and difficult for musicians to comprehend. Tippett was completely disoriented on the podium at the first performance of his Second Symphony, and subsequently, under the […]