BE: I went to see a concert last night. A classical orchestra. And it was fucking atrocious!

JD: [laughs]

BE: It really pissed me off so much because I thought, This was exactly why pop music was necessary. Because you had this huge orchestra, I don’t know what it was, maybe an 80- or 100-piece orchestra, and it was like watching one of those stupid mechanical clocks where the little guy comes out with a hammer and goes ding and then goes back in again. You know, have you seen those things? That was what this orchestra was like, it was totally joyless, you didn’t get the sense that anybody was enjoying it and plus you had this one guy sitting in the far corner on the left sitting there all night …

JD: On stage or in the audience?

BE: On stage. And getting full musicians union rate, whatever that is. And he’s sitting there the whole time and finally his part comes and he’s been following the score all the way through and there’s this little rack of kind of goat bells, and he goes ding ding ding and knocks them around a little bit.

JD: ‘Three-hundred quid please!’

BE: And you can’t even hear them anyway, because, you know, being classical music, they don't use any microphones or anything like that.

JD: And the lighting is always …

BE: The lighting is always killingly dull.

JD: Dull, yeah.

BE: And I thought This is why pop music exists. To just get all this shit out of the way. It was awful, I mean it doesn't have to be that way, you know, there are great conductors like Teodor Currentzis who really bring it to life again, but this sort of [groans] … Oh my God, it’s people all doing their job so politely.

JD: But, again, it’s how it looks. It doesn’t look good so it doesn’t sound good as well. I’m sure the music itself is amazing. You went to hear great music, but it just looked bad. And also audiences at those concerts I find very stressful.

BE: Ugh that’s the other thing, this kind of dutiful coughing thing between movements, this dutiful [imitates exaggerated coughing], I think Oh fuck off, you didn’t really need to cough, you were just given a chance to cough.

JD: [laughs]

BE: It’s your little contribution as the audience, to do a bit of coughing. It just made me sick.

Excerpt from Middle Plane Issue No.10 (Autumn/Winter 2025). Read the full interview by ordering your copy here.

Photographer: Alasdair McLellan