The finale of the Olympics was billed as a “festival of British music”. Excuse me!  It was all pop music, endless pop music.

I personally found the words of most of the songs yawningly banale, and the accompaniments derivative (note:  the word” derivative” is used by professional composers to put down other professional composers).  If you try to  produce music that is beautiful, haunting, soulful, imaginitive  or enlivening  you are looked at askance. One musicologist maintains that all the tunes that can be written have now been written  – that’s because he and his fellow cohorts don’t know how to write tunes. There is little to appeal to the soul or the feelings in British pop music, if what we  saw during the finale is anything to go by.  On the contrary , there is an awful lot of it, it has to be accompanied by antics to make up for all that is wrong with it,  and it is dead boring.   There!  An “emperor has no clothes moment”.

Is there anyone out there who is prepared to argue with me?

Epicurus would comment, no doubt, that if music, however indifferent, gives pleasure then don’t knock it.  Maybe he would be right.  But personally I cringe at the imagine Britain gave to the world, and for nearly four hours!