Thursday 23 March 2017

For London

I may be an exile for the moment, not from London, but from England and Theresa May's racist regime. That does not mean that I cease to care, quite the contrary. There is no need for mawkishness. (Someone described London as 'the world's most beautiful city'. Whatever its many, many virtues, no more than Berlin is that.) There is no need for absurd over-reaction, either: these things happen in cities and always have. There is always, however, a need for Berio's Cries of London, in which echoes of street vendors' voices, echoes of the voice of the city, resound, not nostalgically, but with the creativity, the eye to the future, that characterise this and all great cities at their best.