The Portland Radio Authority

On this evening's Weekends With The Wizard: a four-hour celebration of three of the best composers of the scores for the best of British cinema, mostly from the immediate ten post-war years.

From Dead Of Night to The Innocents, and everything in between. Sir Malcolm Arnold's devastatingly wistful music for Whistle Down The Wind and his stirring (and Oscar-winning) score for The Bridge On The River Kwai. William Alwyn's music for the relentlessly dramatic Odd Man Out and the relentlessly comedic The History Of Mr Polly. And the music of the very French Georges Auric for the very British Ealing comedies, the likes of Passport To Pimlico and The Titfield Thunderbolt.

All put together and painstakingly reconstructed by the good people at the Chandos Movies sub-label. So do listen, won't you?

On tonight's Fifty-Eighth Edition of Weekends With The Wizard:

The complete original cast recording on Columbia Records of Edward Albee's first (and, perhaps, greatest) full-length play: Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?.

With Uta Hagen, Arthur Hill, George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon.

Listen...for Chrissakes!

On tonight's Fifty-Seventh Edition of Weekends With The Wizard:

Enough of this godforsaken spoken-word bollocks. Time for some cheesy cover-song bollocks instead.

These Foolish Things; Another Time, Another Place; Let's Stick Together; In Your Mind; The Bride Stripped Bare: the first five solo albums of Bryan Ferry, late and occasionally not late of Roxy Music. 1973-1978. Strange covers and stranger originals, all entrancing in one way or another.

And all, of course, impeccably coiffured.

Tonight, on the Fifty-Fifth Edition of Weekends With The Wizard:

The beginning of August Strindberg's memoir of his six years in hell. The legendary work/diary called Inferno, from 1898, documenting his recent psychotic episodes.

Performed live, accompanied by the six string quartets of Bela Bartok, and occasionally interrupted by the poetry of Harold Pinter.

Join us, won't you?, for the best (Faustian) bargain in town.

Tonight and/or NOW on Weekends With The Wizard's Fifty-Fourth Edition:

The complete sessions, February through May of 1956, of John Coltrane. All featuring, and some even led by, the equally-talented but far-more-neglected bassist Paul Chambers.

Show concludes with the very-appropriately-titled Tenor Madness, the only extant track featuring both Coltrane and Sonny Rollins.

SO: LISTEN!

Tonight, on the Fifty-Third Edition of Weekends With The Wizard: the six final masses by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). Four hours worth of some of the greatest orchestral music ever composed around the ordinary Catholic liturgy.

Composer of at least fourteen known full-length masses, Haydn—one of the most unabashedly religious of all classical composers, as well as one of the few great composers to live into old age whose powers never abandoned them or weakened at any point during senescence—hit a new high point in these final half-dozen, which comprise the bulk of his latest full-length compositional works, alongside his great oratorio on The Creation.

After a lifetime of ignominious servitude to the Austrian nobility of the Esterházy family, Haydn was fired in 1790, on the death of the family patriarch and single-handed greatest Haydn supporter. But, on being offered a position in London, he travelled there only to suddenly find, around his sixtieth year, an unprecedented level of fame and wealth, as well as incredibly productivity and creativity, which fuelled the composition of the majority of the great symphonies and other works for which he is most famous to this day....

Tonight, on the 52nd Edition of Weekends With The Wizard: an industrial treatise. How To Eat A House In Eleven Easy Steps.

Forget The Fall. Forget the new albums by Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix. [Christ, what fucking decade is this?] Forget the new soundtrack to Iron Man 2 by AC/DC. [No, surely THAT can't be correct....]

This is the only new release that you need bother hearing. In the works for the past nine months (perhaps there's a joke somewhere in that), the seventy-eight-and-a-quarter-minute complete Retreat album, finally finished, polished and sanded to imperfection by recent two-person music collective 1908.

Tonight and/or NOW: on Weekends With The Wizard's Fifty-First: the country and/or western side of music. A bit in and out of character sometimes, but rarely too undisagreeable.

Five albums compleat; one side furthermore. Bob Altman soundtracks and Ringo Starr to the fore.

Yes, it's one of THOSE programmes where a lot of lying is done.

You'll love it!

Fifty shows. One year. Infinite kvetching. From audience/host alike.

The consistently inconsistent Weekends With The Wizard celebrates a year this Ides of April. Not quite as ominous as those of the month preceding...or, at least, not historically so at any rate.

Tonight, in celebration, an entire edition of Jews and Judaica brought to you by your usual humble, half-Hebraic host. George Gershwin, Groucho...and Garden?

Yes: even a Jew on a motorbike.

Just to prove that your income is to be far from the most taxing thing you'll endure past this midnight.

Tonight, on Weekends With The Wizard, the Forty-Fifth Edition:

The complete United States Live album by Laurie Anderson. Ten sides of glorious (and probably badly-worn) vinyl excerpting a little more than half of the full seven-and-a-half-hour performance piece, during the premiere of the complete Parts I through IV, live in Brooklyn in February 1983.

A mix of spoken words, aphoristic reminiscences, textual gleanings, spacious minimalist music (featuring, amongst other things, the big hit single O Superman) and a number of strange, invented instruments, this is an album that—to use a somewhat-Andersonian cliché—begs repeated listening.

In which case, provided you haven't yet heard it (and you haven't), this would be the only way to get started.