This year’s event, in Eastnor Castle’s rolling Deer Park, pulled its biggest crowd yet – 10 stages and 27,000 punters over three days, a sizeable rise from last year’s 16,000. As Owen said: “All a poet can do today is warn.” We still need poets. Booking: 020-7589 8212; Prom 22 available online until Sunday. He plays two free concerts in a single night and still ends up being accused of selling his fans down the river.
Hooked on heroin and crack cocaine, the estranged frontman of The Libertines had so wanted his solo tour to send a message to the world (and the other Libertines) that he was still in control of his life.But furious fans have turned on him for failing to honour a concert at Barfly, north London. They kept the delivery simple but engaged, coloured just enough to make key words and phrases tell. The contemptuous consonants of Bostridge in “What passing-bells”; the mellowed despondency of Keenlyside in “Bugles sang”; the shrill, demented marching song that has our comrades in arms laughing death in the face; and death itself in “Strange Meeting”, the poem through which Britten so movingly brings the hope of reconciliation.I don’t think I have ever heard Bostridge sing more beautifully than he did in the poem that Britten unforgettably juxtaposes with the “Lacrimosa” – “Move him into the sun” The ache of it was heartbreaking. The soprano soloist Susan B Anthony, however, was disappointing in this same number.

The pitching was neither as limpid nor as sure as it needs to be, sounding preoccupied with the technical at the expense of the inspirational.The voices of innocence – the excellently throaty Finchley Children’s Music Group – were heard “in paradisum”, and the superb LSO Chorus delivered one final benediction. Individually, and together, Bostridge and Keenlyside made us forget the very particular intonation of their predecessors. And especially when the poetry is nailed, as here, by two singers who instinctively know how to make its words resonate.Ian Bostridge and Simon Keenlyside were a quite exceptional pairing for a work forever haunted by the voices for whom it was written – Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. An inexorable tread from the murmured incantations of the opening “Requiem aeternam” to the apocalypse and aftermath of the “Libera me”; one breath, one statement, one destination Our own Calvary, unless we heed the words of the poet.

Britten’s device of playing off the text of the Requiem against the terrible first-hand prophecies of Wilfred Owen’s poetry is still shockingly apposite. No pauses between movementsto break the communion between audience and performers. Benjamin Britten’s Voluntary on Tallis’s Lamentations seemed strangely prophetic, its fractured dissonance like an unsettling upbeat to the impassioned exhortations of arguably the greatest pacifistic statement in music of our time: Britten’s War Requiem. That the world has listened but plainly not heard serves only to make its message more imperative.
Imperative, was certainly Sir Colin Davis’s way with the work. While the massed ranks of the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, soloists, and conductor sat shrouded in darkness, Timothy Bond, at the Royal Albert Hall organ, revealed a hitherto unheard remnant by the composer of the main event. And another song, “Han Up Deh” suggests hanging lesbian women with a long piece of rope.When Beenie Man was due visit London after he was nominated for a Mobo award last year, gay rights activists called on police to arrest him and two other reggae stars, Bounty Killer and Elephant Man, then because their lyrics allegedly incited the murder of gays and lesbians.Outrage! said last week: “In a free society, Beenie Man has a right to criticise homosexuality.

A Jamaican reggae singer famous for homophobic lyrics such as “I’m a dreaming of a new Jamaica, come to execute all the gays” has issued his “sincerest apologies” for his lyrics. His support act, Andrew Aveling, was left to break the news to an exasperated crowd.Sean Hamilton, of The Sun newspaper’s Bizarre column, was among the crowd and was one of a group who followed Doherty back to his flat where dozens of fans were waiting for the second impromptu gig to begin.He said: “In Pete’s head, the venue was full of people who had managed to get tickets or who were on record company ‘freebies’. The real fans were at home, in his view, and I was surprised at how accommodating he was to them.”. Doherty wanted them to be allowed in to a venue that was already full with an increasingly impatient crowd.An altercation is said to have taken place when Doherty’s guitar technician and close friend Chev was refused entry Doherty decided not to perform. How could that be matched?”Monday night’s show at Barfly was to have been the seventh of a successful tour. But after doing his first impromptu gig at home, Doherty arrived at the venue with an entourage that included dedicated fans who had been unable to obtain tickets.