A Walk On The Wild Side

God bless you, Lou.

A Walk On The Wild Side

In Berlin, by the Wall/You were five foot ten inches tall/It was very nice/Candlelight and Dubonnet on ice Berlin LOU REED

I've got a BA in dope but a PhD in soul LOU REED

There aren't many masterpieces in the rock opera genre. Unfortunately so many stagings of rock concept albums are unmitigated disasters. The whole form - promising so much as it did with The Who's Tommy and Quadrophenia - became unbearably diluted and commercial in the so-called rock musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The more elaborate and baroque these would-be-classical rock extravaganzas are, the bigger they fail - witness Pink Floyd's The Wall or over-the-top The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis.

Therefore Lou Reed's Berlin is a welcome relief from all this overblown froth. Not that there's much of the rock opera about it. It's more of a Kurt Weill/Brechtian song cycle. But with even more depressing bits! Fantastic! I loved it. I was aware of the history - how Reed had given up on the idea of ever staging it after a critical panning in the early 1970s. How it had left everyone nonplussed after the iconic Transformer album. How artist, film director and Reed's friend Julian Schnabel (check out his recent film The Diving Bell And The Butterfly) had become obsessed with the work early on.

Schnabel created the film backdrop to the performance of Berlin we saw in Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall on Thursday - with its Chinese prints superimposing the story of drug-addicted prostitute Caroline (played by Roman Polanski's wife, actress Emmanuelle Seigner). Lou Reed himself, lean and gangly in jeans and red T-shirt, delivered as coolly as ever those devastatingly deadpan, ironic, understated lyrics. The horrors he leaves out reverberate even more than what he actually says.

It's easy to forget, amid all this present-day 60s nostalgia, how Lou Reed with the Velvet Underground created a necessary antidote to the stars-in-their-eyes hippie generation (don't get me wrong, I was one of them). His stark musical vignettes of street low-life showed the flipside of flower-power idealism.

Following a standing ovation came utterly stunning encores of Satellite of Love and Rock And Roll, and an emotive new song, The Power of The Heart. A wonderful, unforgettable evening.

Real, Live Music

Though I must admit I wouldn't go to the ends of the earth to see ballet, I do like the Creative Arts in general. Above all I feel a special love for and affinity with music. For me, music is a direct, immediate gateway to the Divine. But it's got to be real, live music to have this effect. Listening to CDs, as enjoyable as this is, just isn't the same thing at all.

We're surrounded by music a lot of the time - in shops and in lifts, on radio, film and TV - but all this is recorded music, music as wallpaper and background hum. It's frustrating how little we do experience the real, live sound. And when we do we're overwhelmed. Live music - whether it's raga or reggae, classical or country - is a quite different beast from the ersatz, digitally smoothed out, watered down versions of music we constantly hear on ipod and car radio. Somehow during the recording process the heart's been ripped out of it.

When we do get to hear the real thing, it can be shockingly powerful - visceral, compelling, violently emotional, spiritually calming. And hearteningly imperfect. Just listen live to Nina Simone attacking the piano like a revolutionary with a machine gun (sadly no chance to hear her any more), to Cara Dillon melting before your very eyes into the spiritual Celtic Twilight, to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra skewering your soul with that gorgeous melody from the Fourth Movement of Brahms' First Symphony. These live performances can be unforgettable.

In its recorded form, music is good, and it's better than nothing, and it's all we have most of the time. But track down the live stuff, as we did recently in Southwell and Leicester, and the experience can be profound, even life-changing. Each live performance is a one-off, like a piece of theatre. A once-only event, precious in its fleeting uniqueness.

It's Lou Reed in Nottingham this Thursday. I'm looking forward to it...

Perfect Day

Today started out such a perfect day. As Lou Reed once sang. A perfect day for a walk. The Peak District is my nearest area of top-quality walking territory. I decided in haste on a classic White Peak circular I'd done twice before but never in summer: Monyash - Lathkill Dale - Alport - Bradford Dale - Calling Low - One Ash Grange - Monyash. Lathkilldale is for me Derbyshire's loveliest dale, especially the upper and middle sections. A killer dale, one might say. At midday I set off down it. Yes - perfect. Knee seemed OK. Body and mind in smooth coordination. Feet hitting the right spots on the stony path. Focused, yet pleasantly vague at the same time - you know, that easy, familiar walking feeling. Blue sky, fluffy white clouds, sunshine, dappled shade. Languidly registering wild flowers - lots here on the limestone: St John's Wort, Herb-Robert, Lady's Bedstraw, Aaron's Rod. A little late in the year so only a few blooms of the rare Jacob's Ladder left - blue, bell-shaped flowers with yellow stamens. Wrens whirring across the path. Insects humming in the shade. Limestone outcrops flashing in the sunlight. Everything crisp and fresh and scented after an earlier rain shower. Pure, clear, crystal water gushing from Lathkill Head Cave. Never seen this before - often it's dry. I scoop mouthfuls with my hands. It's cold and delicious. I move on through the gorge, then into the wooded part. River weed streams in the current like Ophelia's hair. I think: Walking doesn't get much better than this. This is why I do it. Then, further downstream, things begin to fall apart. Sunday strollers, and families with barbecues, dogs and cigarettes coming up from Conksbury Bridge. At Alport there's a big walking-group-fest - a shock of clattering poles and ice-cream vans. I escape into Bradford Dale, but the clouds scud in, and my mood, already punctured, deflates. Soon there's torrential rain. A wintery, chill wind. Thunder. I plod on. Knee hurting again. Before One Ash Grange I change plan and retreat down Cales Dale, which soon joins Lathkilldale at a bridge over the swollen river. Limping back upstream to the car the weather miraculously clears, and all is calm and bright. A happy weariness in the late afternoon. Everything seems fine once more. And I think: Let me die in my footsteps. As Bob Dylan once sang.