Ian Penman

Earlier​ this year someone told me they’d seen ‘something online’ about Andy Burnham, back when he was mayor of Greater Manchester, appearing on Celebrity Mastermind and taking the life and works of Anthony Burgess as his specialist subject. It didn’t end well: Burnham came to grief on the sharp rocks at the foot of the sheer cliff-face of the gargantuan,...

One Sunday​ morning recently I listened, one after the other, to Monteverdi’s Selva morale e spirituale (1641) and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), and it wasn’t in any way jarring. I have to say, though, that it was by Pet Sounds that I felt truly transported. Between July 1965 and April 1966, the 23-year-old Brian Wilson wrote, arranged, produced and sang on songs...

One​ morning in early spring, I dreamed about Brian Eno’s head. It was night-time in a deserted garden centre. At the entrance a sign proclaimed: ‘Twenty Thousand Brian Enos!’ Row upon row, little plant-pot bulbs of his smiling face, pegged out to the horizon. There was transparent sheeting as a guard against the frost, played about by a shimmer of soft artificial lights....

Iwas​ still half asleep when I heard the story on an early morning TV show one day in April. It was so odd I wondered later if I had dreamed it. But it was true: government authorities in Chechnya had imposed a ban on any music deemed too fast or too slow to comply with the ‘Chechen mentality’. Taylor Swift is a no-no – too fast. The Russian national anthem – too...

Start with those eyes: distrustful, assessing, imperious. An art critic’s eyes. Rakish eyes. Pharmacopoeia eyes. His face is mask-like, giving little or nothing away. Bored, cigar-smoking, distrait. He could be lost in reverie, or just bored to tears. Charles Baudelaire might be one of the first great poseurs of our time – a not inconsiderable legacy.