is. The servant pair is attractive and their scenes go better than any others, which says something about the way the piece is treated. Leporello is scabrous, a suitable servant for his master. Peter Savidge’s Giovanni was off-colour on the opening night, but seemed intent on a rather lowkey portrayal of one of opera’s most selfadvertising creations. Stealth is Savidge’s mode, and he slithered into ‘La ci darem ’, his best moment. A general lack of high spirits, even some debility, seemed to affect the action overall. But it isn’t irremediable, I think, though this opera causes more problems at present, to judge from the productions I have seen over the past decade, than any other of Mozart’s.

Pop music Single minded Marcus Berkmann

Agreat surge of lipsmacking new releases is on its way, tragically preceded in my household by a couple of whopping bills, so I am having to restrain myself. The need for new music: is it a physical addiction or a psychological one? Cold turkey would be listening to one of those oldies stations that only play Phil Collins’s greatest hits. But the album I currently want/need the most, the one I keep eyeing on Amazon, is the latest and last from California beardie slackers Grandaddy. Writer, producer and lead beard Jason Lytle announced in January that he was splitting up the band, although it has to be said that even fervent fans like me would struggle to name any of his former bandmates, and I would bet my dog that a Jason Lytle solo album would sound pretty much like a Grandaddy band album. Never mind. Just Like The Fambly Cat (V2) remains a mere click away from next-day delivery, with its very loud and its very quiet bits, its astoundingly morose lyrics and Lytle’s unquenchable (if skewed) pop sensibility. There I am, reviewing an album I haven’t heard yet, but I can say three things with confidence: that I won’t like it much on first hearing, that I will love it on tenth hearing, and that nothing on it will even faintly resemble a hit single. Maybe that’s why Lytle is giving up. After all, his band look like a cross between John Prescott and ZZ Top: they are more likely to spontaneously combust than be invited on to CD:UK . Lytle’s albums become ever more carefully and fascinatingly constructed, and yet we can all picture the faces of record company executives as they hear them for the first time. Where are the singles? It is their

mantra. I don’t hear any singles. Where are the singles? Rock ’n’ roll is 50 years old; no one buys actual singles any more; and, although a few people over 30 do download individual songs from the internet, it’s at considerable risk to their dignity and self-respect. CDs are where the real money lies: more were sold in the UK last year than ever before. And yet we remain in thrall to the notion of singles. Why? It strikes me now that many of my favourite albums are marred, if not ruined, by failed attempts to write singles. Older, established acts don’t need to worry about this: you won’t find Neil Young gearing his tunes towards the Radio One playlist, and David Gilmour’s recent album was wholly directed at the many thousands of people who would have bought it if it had contained 45 minutes of him blowing his nose. The sneering record company term for this is ‘fanbase’. Their fans will buy it, but they will make no serious attempt to engage a wider audience. They won’t write a single. But everyone else has to try, and we listeners must suffer for it. You can always spot the failed single on an album: the obvious, rather schematic songwriting, the simple melody, the bright mix, the dull lyrics. Often you can hear the money that has been spent on A&R advice to bolster a thin tune. There’s the single, right there. Now take it away and bury it in peat for a thousand years. A caveat. I am not of course referring to the self-evidently great singles that do emerge from time to time. Such rare and beautiful creations make you feel happy to be alive. Even when they later turn up three times an hour on those oldie stations that play Phil Collins’s greatest hits. I wonder, though, whether the grand mass of mediocre singles might not put some people off pop music altogether. After all, not everyone is like me, or like you if you have read this far, who listens to and absorbs vast quantities of music in order to ferret out the stuff that makes us

We’ll soon have all the time in the world, darling, my husband will be watching the World Cup on TV

glow. How often is it the single that has this effect? How often is it the strange and unregarded album track? I suppose there has to be some way of filtering the good from the bad: there’s simply so much music made these days that the sheer profusion can weigh on you, if you let it. But the single, in all that it has become, is too reductive. Now I’ve written that, Grandaddy will have a huge worldwide hit, reform for a stadium tour and make more money than is entirely decent. Here’s hoping.

Cinema Watching the detective Olivia Glazebrook

Brick 15, selected cinemas Ihave read all Raymond Chandler’s books, some of them several times, but if you asked me for a synopsis of any of them I think I’d be stumped. I can remember scenes (the stifling orchid house, the blanketed old man in the wheelchair) and dialogue (‘She’d make a jazzy weekend, but she’d be wearing for a steady diet’) but not the plot. This film has had rather the same effect: I watched the credits roll four hours ago, and already its plot is blurring at the edges. It’s not surprising: Brick is a detective story, a film noir, an homage to films like The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown and The Long Goodbye . A baffling plot and an incomprehensible lingo are therefore de rigueur, as is the clutch of archetypes: a washed-up corpse, a loner who plays detective, a mysterious beauty behind the wheel of a convertible, and a hired thug wearing a wifebeater’s vest. But where you’d expect to find a tired chief of police, meet the vice-principal. This film noir is set in a high school: instead of trenchcoats and fedoras we get jeans and a Rubik Cube. Geeky-but-cool Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) finds his ex-girlfriend’s body on a concrete riverbed. She had telephoned him, afraid for her life, two days earlier. He had tried to save her but couldn’t. Brendan embarks on a quest — which borders on the pathological — to find out what happened. He dives into the drugaddled underbelly of his home town and is soon taking punches from every side. Each confrontation brings him another bruise, and an inch closer to the truth. So if we’re in a sun-soaked Californian high school, how do we know it’s a film noir? Well, everyone (but for our detecting hero) smokes. Characters go by nicknames

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