"sorry, steve, i just cannot get going with classical music and i have tried a few times. it's the formality of it i think, and the showy-offy singing. i like a bit of surprise or ramshackleness"

Well the singing is something after forty years of loving classical is summat I still need to get me head around! I've been to a few Mozart operas and I'm off to see Carmen next week at the Hall For Cornwall in Truro. But mostly I love orchestral and chamber and instrumental music and I'm totally not interested in stuffy stuff. The classical music scene has changed considerably in the last couple of decades and it's lightened up a lot. There's a lot more of looking at what composers really intended rather than the authoritarian claptrap of guru conductors and critics who would have dissed a whole three-quarter hour's symphony just because the oboe played a duff note in bar 78 of the Adagio. I never let anyone tell me what was good, how it should be played or what I should or shouldn't like. The first music that got me hooked was a set of Schubert Impromptus for solo piano that I recorded on a terrible radio cassette in 1973 off the radio. Then I tuned in and heard a performance of Beethoven's seventh symphony. Then I spotted that Beethoven's seventh was to be performed by the Philharmonia under Riccardo Muti at the Festival Hall so we got tickets and I couldn't believe my ears. Then my mate lent me his records of Beethoven's late quartets. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Beethoven has been my only hero ever since. He was the archetypal hairy-arse, argumentative, untidy, supping far too much vino for his own good, fell out with everybody, then wrote the greatest music of all time when he was stone deaf. You can't get more bloody ramshackle than that. It brings a tear to me eye just typing this! Have another go, mate. Those guys were not snobs. They were writing the pop tunes of the day. There's a story about Mozart rolling home to his missus one day in 1791, over the moon because everybody in the Vienna streets was whistling tunes from the Magic Flute!