Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

When two or three gather together and hear ‘Blockbuster’, ‘Blowin in the Wind’, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, ‘Come on Eileen’ or ‘Relax’, there is that other dance to be danced, the generational dance in which listeners are united in their decade, the age they were at the time of the music’s release, the ridiculous trousers they wore, the television programmes they watched, the sweets they bought, the hi-fl set-up they spent weeks arranging and rearranging in their bedroom, the girls and boys they thought of as the love-lyrics and guitar licks pounded into them.

To earlier generations ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’, ‘A-tisket, a-tasket’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and Glenn Miller’s ‘Moonlight Serenade’ might perform the same office. Those same people who, listening to the Andrews Sisters’ ‘Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy’ will shriek, ‘Oh, that takes me back to my very first dance! My very first nylons! My very first Alvis motorcar!’ will have been young and bouncy when Britten wrote The Turn of the Screw or when Walton produced Belshazzar’s Feast, but you won’t hear them squeal with the delight of public reminiscence and the memory of first snogs and first lipsticks when the ‘Sea Interlude’ from Peter Grimes floats over the airwaves. Classical music is private art, stripped of that kind of association.

That, partly, is why classical music is also very nerdy. Its decontextualised abstractions take the classical music lover and the classical music practitioner out of the social stream and into their own heads, as do chess and maths and other nerdile pursuits. Mussorgsky’s ‘Night on the Bare Mountain’ is not nerdy however, when it makes everyone brighten up and do their whispering impression of the slogan for that cassette tape TV commercial: ‘Maxell! Break the sound barrier…’

Classical music can be ‘rescued’ therefore from the void of abstract nerdaciousness by association with film, television and advertising, so that Beethoven can make you think of power generation companies, Mozart of Elvira Madigan and Trading Places, Carl Orff of Old Spice aftershave and so on, and no doubt our own contemporary composers Philip Glass, Gorecki, and, God help us all, Michael Nyman, will be similarly pressed into service by Laboratoires Gamier and Kellogg’s Frosties before the century is out. It is customary for those who like classical music to damn the advertising industry and the producers of commercials and TV programmes for vulgarising their beloved music. If you can’t hear ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’, they say, without thinking of Robert Robinson and Brain of Britain, or Mozart’s ‘Musical Joke’ without Hickstead and the Horse of the Year Show galloping through your head, then you’re a philistine. Well that’s just the arse’s arse. The same snobbery is being applied now to pop music and we are starting to hear complaints about the Kinks being yoked to the Yellow Pages and John Lee Hooker turning into a lager salesman.

There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.

Hugh Laurie made me laugh for a week early on in our friendship when he re-enacted the youthful party scene in which some nameless figure will approach a stack of records next to the hi-fl, go through them one by one and then say, his brow wrinkled with cool, sour disfavour, ‘Haven’t you got any decent music then?’

The mirror-shaded NME journalists have no idea how close they are to the opera queen, the balletomane and the symphonic reviewer for Gramophone magazine. They are sisters under the skin. Cysts under the skin more like.

The tribal belonging, the sexual association, the sense of party - these are what popular music offer, and they have always been exclusion zones for me. Partly because of my musical constipation – can’t dance, can’t join in the chorus – partly because of my sexise of physical self, feeling a fool, tall, uncoordinated and gangly.

On the other hand I’m not Bernard Levin. I am not in love with the world of classical music or set upon the intellectual, personal or aesthetic path of a private relationship with Schubert, Wagner, Brahms or Berg. Nor am I a Ned Sherrin, devoted to the musical, to Tin Pan Alley and twentieth-century song. I did well professionally first crack out of the box with a stage musical, but musicals don’t mean much to me. I am not a show girl I fear.

There is no proper way for me to express what music does to me without my sounding precious, pretentious, overemotional, sentimental, self-indulgent and absurd. No proper way therefore to express either what it has done to me over the years to know that I would never be able to make music of even the most basic kind.

I would like to dance. Not professionally, just when everyone else does.

I would like to sing. Not professionally, just when everyone else does.

I’d like to join in, you see.

Guilty feet, as George Michael tells us, have got no rhythm.

I can play… I mean, as an effort of will I can sit down and learn a piece at the piano and reproduce it, so that those who hear will not necessarily move away with their hands clutched to their mouths, vomit leaking though fingers, blood dripping from ears. Then of course, a piano needs no real-time tuning. I strike middle C and I know that middle C will come out. Were I to try and learn a stringed or brass instrument that needed me to make the notes as I played, then I hate to think what might be the result. Playing the piano is not the same as making music.

None of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I have always felt separate, why I have always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped or joked from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self-conscious self-consciousness.

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing – they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

Singing began for me; as it does for most of us, in a communal form. Whether it is ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, ‘Little Bo-Peep’, ‘Away in a Manger’ or ‘Thank You For the Food We Eat’ that is how children first raise their voices in music. I joined in like every other child and never thought much about it until prep school and Congregational Practice.

It was the custom of prefects to patrol the pews during Cong Prac and make sure that everyone was paying attention and doing his best to join in.

One Saturday, perhaps my third or fourth week at Stouts Hill, Hemuss the music master had selected the hymn ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ for the next day’s service. We had never sung it before. Don’t know if you re familiar with it – it’s very beautiful, but not easy. Lots of unusually flattened notes and set in a subtle rhythm that seems a world away from the simple tumpty-tum of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ which is a hymn any old fool can speak-sing without drawing too much attention to himself.

We listened to Hemuss playing this new tune through on the piano a few times then, as usual, the choir had a stab on their own. Next came our turn.

I wasn’t really thinking of much, just joining in aimlessly, when I became aware of a prefect, Kirk, standing next to me. He pushed his face right up to mine, his ear against my mouth and then called out in a loud voice.