The Stones were very good. I mean, I'd far rather have seen The Magic Band when I had intended to, but the Stones are a bit of an institution and were certainly worth the trip. We got the tickets for free, no manifest reason, from Nicholas' work. It was not only the first concert to be held at Twickenham apparently, but also the first UK gig on the tour. Nicholas' account seems pretty good. Read it here. The crowd seemingly cheering at random times were actually cheering a random guy doing cartwheels. The people in the stands could see him, but we of the mid-pitch seating generally couldn't. It took us ages to work out what was going on. I thought it was a wind-up. I notice that Nick didn't really review the music at all. I would, but not being exactly a Stones expert, I couldn't tell you much that you couldn't guess. They're still not dead, and apparently having fun with it. Music, I often think, is all the better for being fun, especially avent-garde stuff. I could try a playlist, approximately sequenced, and based only on my imperfect knowledge of the most popular Stones songs:
- Brown Sugar
- Wild Horses
- Happy
- Paint It Black
- You can't Always Get What You Want
- Sympathy for the Devil (whoo whoo!)
- I Just Wanna Make Love to You (the one Etta James did, yeah)
- Honky-tonk Woman
- Start Me Up
- Jumping Jack Flash
- Satisfaction
As I say, after that I watched Some of my best friends are Anglican. The Times said it was the best one of the series. This presumably because it uniformly presented the dear old C of E as completely useless. The presenter, forget who he is, some journalist, was a big fan of Betjeman's "faint conviction" phrase. What he likes about the Anglican church is apparently that it provides a haven for people who don't feel comfortable about believing anything. He said he like the tradition or something. I just cannot get my head round those sort of views. Much easier to understand atheists. If you don't think you can assert with any confidence at all that Jesus of Nazareth was something more than a man, it seems to me that going to church, and presumably stating the Nicene creed, is just the biggest waste of time. It kicked off looking at some clergy who didn't believe anything. I got the idea they thought that declaring theological ignorance was very daring, very noble. You might as well ordain a sideboard then I should think. The presenter thought this was pretty stupid too, which is odd considering that it seemed to agree perfectly with his professed views. Then he addressed the evangelical wing of Anglicanism, going to an Alpha course. Thereafter he eschewed their "certainty" and said he couldn't deal with that end of things either. I think he's quietly waiting for the church to drop dead. It was a pretty rubbish programme, one professing Anglican relentlessly mocking the spiritual side of Anglican faith and complaining that he couldn't derive any comfort from it.
