Knocking Down Musical Barriers - Paul Morley at the Hampstead Arts Festival 2015

Paul Morley music writer, critic, and iconoclast
Burgh House 05/011/2015

Paul Morley interviewed by Piers Plowright at Hampstead Arts Festival

​With a noted background in pop music journalism at NME and then music production, not least Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Morley explained how he has belatedly discovered the emotional and intellectual riches contained in the classical music back catalogue. 

He feels that having run a half century course of evolving creativity and sophistication, with the creative process intimately associated with the recording studio, pop is over, now captured by multinationals for marketing purposes, the remaining output seeping into every corner of money led promotion and marketing. He feels that it has become largely debased as an art form and has become boring. ‘Pop is now last century.’

​By ‘down with classical music,’ he targets the stuffy formalised institutions and conventions which are associated with classical. Somehow these have come to represent the genre and put him off as a teenager.  Belatedly discovering the riches of classical music he has bypassed the conventions and has jumped head first into the deep back catalogue using as an interface a piece of thoroughly modern technology already in his pocket. In this case Spotify has been his choice of music provider, mainly streaming classical from the internet under smart phone control to a selection of WiFi equipped music systems around his home. He related how he chucked his vinyl albums for CD and now has chucked those for online streaming. Paul feels that the new informal access to classical, in all its depth, richness and variety, is a fantastic advance in the art of music and could help free classical from its historic conventions and rightfully transform its popularity.