Radio Star

At short notice today I got the call to be a Radio Star. BBC Radio 5 Live were going to run a piece on Sting's new CD and wanted to interview someone about it.

Moi? (as Miss Piggy used to say). Well, the new CD is of lute songs by John Dowland, which is not Sting's normal territory. And, even more improbably, it has gone straight into the charts at number 24. That's the real charts, not the classical charts, where it stands at number 1. On the alternative measure of amazon.co.uk sales, Sting's CD stands at number 9. The next highest lute CD, Nigel North's solo Dowland volume 1 on Naxos (highly recommended, by the way), stands at a surprisingly respectable 1,767. After that, lute CDs quickly plummet to around number 30,000.

So that means a load of people hearing the lute for the first time. Fortunately Sting has taken the precaution of engaging a proper lutenist, Edin Karamazov, for the album. Sting sings the songs - though he has learnt the lute for the project and plays a duet on one track.

As he is the first to admit, Sting is not a trained singer. So standard notions of breath control and purity of tone go completely out of the window (or Go from my Window - sorry, that's a lutenists' in-joke). Instead he approaches the songs with a refreshing emphasis on the text and the story - unrefined but sincere. And very brave for someone who is used to being able to hide behind massive studio post-production.

The classical music public will flock not to buy this CD. But if it raises awareness of the lute and John Dowland among the other 97% of the population, that can only be a good thing.

Oh yes, the radio. I got 60 seconds just before the news, and faced challenging questions like "So, it's a bit like an old guitar then?" and "Can you play rock and roll on it?". Next time I will insist on Radio 4.