- Music
- 12 May 01
In a popular music world that has become increasingly schizoid and fragmented, it was appropriate that the best records came from those folk who have always boasted independence and individuality.
In a popular music world that has become increasingly schizoid and fragmented, it was appropriate that the best records came from those folk who have always boasted independence and individuality.
REM made their best ever record in ‘Document’ and proved that they are the finest band on the planet. tom Waits brought the dynamic frenzy of ‘Swordfishtrombones’ and ‘Rain Dogs’ to the mighty pinnacle of ‘Frank’s Wild Year’ and toured with a band and a show which trounced notions of acceptability into a bashed homburg. Lloyd Cole showed that mainstream can mean ‘Mainstream’, whilst the Marsalis brothers, Wynton and Branford, delivered a pair of records each that were daunting in their daring and delicious in their sheer exuberance. The other notable jazz cut came from Bristol main man Andy Sheppard, whose eponymous debut has continued to be nothing but sheer joy.
Otherwise Springsteen did the decent thing and kept his profile low. Robbie Robertson did the decent thing and mined his biblical imagery into high-suspense songs. Marshall Crenshaw proved as decent as ever and Alexander O’Neal made the best soul record of the year with ‘Hearsay’, another blinding Jam/Lewis job. reggae has vanished from the planet into the charts. T-Bone Burnett gave us the wisest record that has appeared in yonks, but otherwise popular music and myself drifted further apart than ever. My favourite record of the year was a recording by the German soprano Brigitte Fassbaender of songs by Richard Strauss and Franz Liszt. Accompanied by the pianist Irmin Gage she made a record of timeless, almost perfect poise that contains, simply, the most beautiful vocal music I have ever heard. Nothing in the popular arts even approached Fassbaender’s extraordinary compassion and humanity.
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Other delights; Elmore Leonard, who wrote his best novel with ‘Bandits’, the American author Rachel Ingalls, the science fiction of William Gibson, Woody Allen’s ‘Radio Days’, a much neglected wonderwork, and above all ‘Raising Arizona’, a film which proves that the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are the finest talents in cinema today.