Your record collection is not complete

Posted on 7 January 2015 by Dominic Minghella

There is a danger of blogging either in anger or grief: politics or the dearly beloved dead. It’s the nature of things, if we aren’t careful.

So here, by way of antidote, is something to celebrate. If you don’t have it (and I bet you don’t) then your record collection is incomplete.

I love this set of improvised concerts (Munchen and Bregenz) by Keith Jarrett so much. It is Jarrett at his liberated, exuberant, joyous – but tuneful – best. Better even than the world’s best-selling solo piano album, the Koln Concert. This will have you singing, gleefully banging your fist on the nearest impromptu drum, smiling, dreaming, crying, thinking. When you know it well you will be able to relax into it and let it transport you, let it free up your mind and allow you to decide where to direct your focus. It is therapy in a pair of thirty-year-old Austro-German gigs.

I had the triple vinyl album in 1983 or so but somehow it ended up in my brother’s collection. It’s the nature of things, if we aren’t careful.

I made do with a cassette copy, and then when CDs emerged, I patiently waited for ECM to release it in scratch- and hiss-free glory. After an age, a single CD only came out. Infuriating. More than half the music missing. I waited for the full version. Nada. I even wrote to Manfred Eicher at ECM begging for a release – by now the vinyl was long out of print.

Finally, just a year ago, ECM released the full set on CD and digital download. You can even get it in ‘high definition’ from HDtracks.com and others.

Run, run to your computer and order it. The world is not all bad or sad.

Anthony Minghella’s birthday

Posted on 6 January 2015 by Dominic Minghella

: Anthony Minghella by Brigitte Lacombe

: Anthony Minghella Photo: Uli Weber by kind permission

: Anthony Minghella by Brigitte Lacombe

: Anthony Minghella shows early talent

6th January. Epiphany. Twelfth Night. The end of the festive season. Decorations down and back to work.

My brother, Anthony, would have been sixty one today. From this brilliant, beautiful man – my only brother – I learned so much about how to be. Except, possibly, how to grieve. He did not equip me for that. How to cope with missing him. How to stop longing for the phone to ring and for it to be him. The warmth in that voice of his, the love in it, the safety in it.

The way he gave things meaning. Things he loved, you loved too. Bach. Beckett. Joni, Jarrett. His ridiculously infectious enthusiasm. When you’ve had that in your life, it’s bewildering to have to endure its absence. When the sun has shone on you, like Jude Law’s Dickie on Matt Damon’s Ripley, and suddenly it’s not there, suddenly it’s cold – that’s what it’s like. It’s maddening – literally. It could make you lose your mind, lash out, kill.

Ah. Maybe he did teach me something about grief after all. And let’s not forget an entire essay on the subject, called Truly Madly Deeply. Yes. My feet will want to march to where you are sleeping. But I shall go on living.

So to all my loved ones, and to all of his – to all of us who knew the warmth of that particular sun and still yearn for it; to all of us who walk now with fire and frost, with the snow burning our hearts, a hug of mutual condolence. Yes, we’ve taken down the decorations. But we must go on living.

Photos: Brigitte Lacombe and Uli Weber. Fine words: Neruda.

The Deficit Halved

Posted on 2 January 2015 by Dominic Minghella

Today the Tories have launched an election poster campaign, bragging about their economic performance. “The deficit halved.”

Even The Spectator‘s Fraser Nelson can’t bear the misrepresentation.

Here is the borrowing picture for the last twenty years.

Public Sector Net Borrowing (Source ONS)

You want more of the last five years?

Vote Tory.

Labour’s message on the economy

Posted on 11 December 2014 by Dominic Minghella

I’m a Labour supporter. But Labour’s message on the economy is unclear.

Ed Balls is today saying he’s written to his would-be cabinet colleagues to warn them that their departments will face cuts every year until Labour fulfils its promise to eliminate the deficit.

And yet, since the Autumn Statement, Ed has been denouncing the Tory spending plans as unworkable, dishonest and ‘colossal’. A return to the 1930s. A country you wouldn’t want to live in.

In short, Labour wants to appear as determined as the Tories to eliminate deficit, whilst branding Tory cuts as ‘extreme’.

This is not an illogical position. With growth (and more tax receipts) the deficit can be reduced with less harsh cuts. Securing growth is, and always has been, the issue.

I prefer centre-left thinking on this, because the Tories are dogmatic in their focus on the supply side, and the supply side can push us out of recession the same way pushing a dog through a cat-flap by its tail works: not at all. We need pounds-in-pockets demand in our economy before any right-minded investor will invest, and supply-side efficiencies cut demand rather than stimulating it.

But that is too complex to explain. So meanwhile the broad messaging needs to be clearer. At the moment it comes across as, “We are as brutal as them on the deficit – but they are wild-eyed extremists.”

That’s as clear as mud. In a game where clarity is all.