The Kennedy Conspiracy

2,335 words

Nigel Kennedy. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

He had distinctly seen, while I was playing my variations, the devil at my elbow, directing my arm and guiding my bow. My resemblance to the devil was a proof of my origin.
From the autobiography of Niccolò Paganini

The Devil bowed his head because he knew that he’d been beat,
And he laid that golden fiddle on the ground at Johnny’s feet.
Johnny said, “Devil, just come on back if you ever wanna try again.
I done told you once, you son of a bitch, I’m the best there’s ever been.”
Charlie Daniels, The Devil Went Down to Georgia

Music. It plays a part in your life, I’m sure, as it does in mine. It’s unlikely that anyone with hearing doesn’t have some sort of musical preference, and we are also blessed with access to any music we wish to hear, whenever we wish to hear it. Nietzsche once walked a round-trip of 30 miles to attend a Beethoven concert, but we don’t need to go to those extremes. I can hook up my natty little speaker to my laptop and listen to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony any time I like. I don’t know if Nietzsche heard the 5th that night, but it has always been my favorite. Clichéd, I know, but there it is. I mentioned it to my mother once, how much I loved Beethoven’s 5th. “Well”, she said. “You know why that is? When I was pregnant with you, I used to put a stereo speaker against my stomach and play the 5th to you”. I am rarely completely speechless, but what do you say to that? As I say, music has a part in all our lives, sometimes from a very early age.

My musical tastes are pretty catholic, but sometimes you need to be English about things, make a nice cup of tea, have a bit of a lie-down and listen to some classical music. Actually, “classical music” must be one of the English language’s most commonly used misnomers. There is debate, but the classical period in music was from around 1750 to 1820, and so only really includes Mozart and Beethoven. I imagine they reintroduced Dorian tonal modes, or something else I could pretend to know about but don’t. The rest of the time, when we talk about “classical music”, I suppose we mean any orchestral or chamber music. What difference does it make what we mean specifically by the term “classical music”? You know it when you hear it.

So, a lie-down and some music, not quite as easy by the end of the week as it was on Monday. Things are slightly complicated by the fact that, as of a few days ago, I now have a female living with me, the first time in quite a while. Tuesday, there was a tap at my door and one of the little girls from the houses across the way had a burning question which seemed to require an immediate answer: “Señor! Señor! Necesita una gatita?”

Good question. I hadn’t really thought about it but, yes, I did need a kitten, as a matter of fact. So now I’ve got one and it’s already doing kitten stuff such as being amusing and pesky at the same time.

Anyway, a lie-down and some classical music would give little Claudia a chance to climb around on my head and fall off the bed and so on, and I could relax, which I am not very good at. But what to play? I’ve explained my pre-natal preference for Beethoven’s 5th, but my introduction to classical – or “classical” – music once I was safely outside the womb came later, and was another cliché; Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. I very much doubt anyone in the developed world doesn’t know this quartet of violin-led pieces. There was a time in the 1980s and 1990s when it seemed compulsory to have Vivaldi in ads, movies and documentaries. It had never occurred to me why that was until I looked at the options for Vivaldi on YouTube. There, I found a familiar name, and one often surrounded by mystery and disagreement: Kennedy.

The year was 1986, and the world of British classical music was about as staid as it could be, right up until it had its own version of punk. That is a misleading analogy, however, as the big thing about punk bands (at least to begin with) is that they couldn’t really play their instruments. The same could not be said, however, of violinist Nigel Kennedy. Kennedy was a sensation when he hit the classical music scene, winning a BRIT award not for the violin with which he would later find stellar fame, but for his recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, the one made famous by the tragic Jacqueline Du Pré.

A child prodigy who became ever more prodigious, Kennedy entered the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music aged six, with the great violinist himself paying Kennedy’s fees and personally tutoring the boy. Kennedy’s respect for Menuhin extends to the great man’s love of music outside the usual remit of classical pieces. “Yehudi Menuhin was finding out about Indian music”, says Kennedy, “before The Beatles even knew where that country was.”

Stephane Grappelli would also later mentor Kennedy’s growing talent, so that’s two of the world’s greatest-ever violinists on his CV. After his BRIT Award, for which he beat classical luminaries including opera singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and cellist and composer Julian Lloyd Webber, Kennedy’s breakthrough came in 1989 with his recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which remains one of the best-selling classical albums of all time. The media, always a bit leery of classical music because of its associations with privilege and class, loved Kennedy, with his Johnny Rotten haircut, partying lifestyle (presumably when not playing the violin), and perceived anti-establishment stance. Kennedy dressed like a homeless Goth onstage at The Royal Albert Hall, and often performed wearing the shirt of his beloved football team, Aston Villa.

His parents and grandparents were orchestral musicians and, while he wished to play the piano, his mother was responsible for his taking up the violin. He has played with the world’s great orchestras, as well as The Who, Robert Plant, Kate Bush and Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman. He also loves jazz, and reveres Ronnie Scott’s in London, seeing Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz luminaries there as a child. Classical music gave him his start, but he knows no boundaries. Kennedy’s version of Hendrix’s Purple Haze here is a delight. There he is, joshing and laughing and dressed like a vagrant, while leading traditionally dressed musicians in a bizarre polka round the stage. The musicians themselves, of all ages, look like they are having a ball. And Purple Haze becomes some Romany jig and reel. Make your own mind up, but I see and hear stuff like this and think I am in the presence of greatness. Musical quotation, as the jazz fans among you will know, means the playing of a musical melody or phrase during something usually entirely different, even from a different genre. During Purple Haze, Kennedy quotes Strangers in the Night, and It Ain’t Necessarily So.

Even during performance, Kennedy comes across as being a bit pissed. Not in the American meaning of being annoyed, but the British version involving the reality-changing effects of fermented liquor. But play a violin drunk? Look, if you drink enough, you won’t even be able to spell violin, leave alone playing the bugger, so despite a reputation for “partying”, I doubt Kennedy went on the sauce before taking on Stravinsky.

Kennedy “likes a drink”, as we English like to say, but I don’t imagine he’s ever had a drink problem. You can get mashed on booze and play the drums, sure. Keith Moon and John Bonham proved that beyond reasonable doubt. But getting pissed and playing violin? Unlikely, despite the Cockney rhyming slang for “pissed” being “Brahms and Liszt”. Kennedy unashamedly admits to smoking cannabis to aid the creative process, and given the end result I find that perfectly acceptable. He lives in Poland now with a Polish wife. His daily routine includes three hours of violin and two hours’ composition on the piano, working “straight or high”, as he puts it.

As for playing the violin, are you out of your mind? I’m sure someone reading this can do it, but the instrument left me at the starting gate. I have a decent voice and I can accompany myself on a six-string semi-acoustic classical guitar, plus I am a good rock and blues electric bass player. I make a part of my living doing both. But I tried the violin for a few lessons aged around 17. Do me a favor. My thumb hurt, because you can’t do that lazy brace on the neck you can get away with on the guitar, you really have to put your thumb straight down the middle of the neck and keep it there. Oh yes, and the violin neck itself is fretless and about the width of a matchstick. I couldn’t get a note out of it as I’ve got bass-player’s fingers. So, my fledgling career as a violinist never really took off, but fortunately Kennedy was there to fill this obvious hiatus in the world of classical music.

Kennedy doesn’t get misty-eyed or corny when he talks about music, he just talks about “the beautiful humanity of Bach”, and the way music fits into his life. He is neither egotistic nor even self-centered, stating that, “If we don’t get all music together – Indian music, folk music, rock music -where are we going to be as a people?”

An interview on national TV staple Good Morning Britain shows Kennedy at his boyish best, and he was for a long time something of a national treasure, although not all those connected with the world of classical music agreed. BBC comptroller John Drummond said of the musician in 1991 that he was “a Liberace for the Nineties” and criticized his “invented” accent. Apart from anything else, Kennedy has a lisp so bad it almost qualifies as a speech impediment, so that comment is particularly crass. I hope very much that if Drummond didn’t go and boil his head, then someone else did it for him. Liberace was an absurdly flamboyant, preening peacock. Kennedy is nothing of the sort, just a boyish man enjoying his chosen profession and going about it in a way of his own choosing. He seems so ordinary and blokeish you have to remember that he is also a creative dynamo. During the stringent Covid lockdown in the UK, I imagine a lot of people watched a lot of daytime TV. During that nationwide house arrest, Kennedy wrote his autobiography in longhand as “I don’t really do computers”, and he threw in writing a violin concerto for good measure.

It may be a bit harsh to say that orchestral musicians “dress like undertakers”, as did Kennedy collaborator Michael Winner (famous for directing the Death Wish movies), but he’s not wrong. Kennedy certainly changed that staid image. He would shuffle onstage to play Bach or Elgar wearing odd socks and bright yellow training shoes, topped off by an Aston Villa away shirt. There are hours of footage by and about Kennedy on YouTube, but a good introduction is a Bach recital from 2003. Kennedy slopes into the church with his violin held like a kid’s teddy bear and fools around with the audience, looking and lisping like a Dickensian urchin. Then he and the orchestra start playing.

Now, I’m not one of those people who knows anything about classical music qua music. There used to be a program on BBC’s Radio 3 – which used to be the best English channel for classical music – and in which they compared recordings. So, a plummy male voice would say, “Let us listen to this version of Brahms from 1962, and then set it against one released on Deutsche Grammophon and performed by the Halle Orchestra in 1983”. Then they would play both, and he would pick out the differences and pronounce one better than the other. I just heard the same piece of music twice, the only difference to my ear being that one was a bit more crackly. But obviously, to the trained ear, there are differences as with every art form. For us laymen, what’s important is beauty and expression in the playing, and Kennedy has been liberally blessed with both.

But there was something else about Kennedy I liked during this tour through his career. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but then I got it. He’s a celebrity socialist who doesn’t act and speak as though he needs immediate and expensive remedial treatment. When he pulled out of a recital at Britain’s famous Proms concerts because the committee wanted him to play Vivaldi and not his preferred Hendrix, he didn’t go on about Hendrix being black as the reason for the preference, didn’t even mention it. He said it was just that it was rock music and not classical, the sort of snobbish English silliness that never really goes away. Rock and roll, as we know, is the Devil’s music, and so has all the best tunes.

It is easy to see why the violin is the musical instrument most readily associated with the Devil. There is something demonic about it, and when it springs to life under Kennedy’s bow, it is also not hard to see why possession and the violin are also associated. That said, Kennedy’s face is a picture of beatific serenity when he plays pieces of particular beauty.

These are vile times for England, and it is a pleasure to revisit the career of a talented Englishman who has achieved more milestones in more musical genres than many people even listen to in a lifetime, let alone play and record. He is affable, raffish, and still boyishly charming at 67. While the current socialist junta fiddles while England burns, more power to this man’s elbow.