And we had nearly two hours of ba-dah-doo-wah (Wachet Auf) and da-badda-da-badda-da-badda-da (Badinerie), enlivened only by the far more imaginative arrangements of Jonathan Rathbone, before the Michael Nyman premiÿre and a Beatles medley which involved a dance routine that might have been devised by a flight crew for the BA Christmas party Help, I thought. Happiness is a warm gun, whispered my friend.The Swingles have light, sunny voices (though now and again you get the tiniest hint of frustrated opera singer) and immense concentration. The whole programme was sung from memory, an altogether different feat from memorising lieder, and you wonder how the inner-parts manage to recall their intricate lines with no lyrics to cue them in But the ensemble is as tight as a (non-vocal) drum And they smile Constantly. In short, they work hard for their money.Now whether one can say the same of Michael Nyman is a matter of some contention in traditional critical circles.

It’s very possible that the famously chippy Nyman was exercising his god-given right to provoke by calling his new piece Balancing the Books, but the piece itself was clever, pleasing and very, well, Nyman-esque – which is, I suppose, neo-Baroque minimalism or Purcell dressed by Comme des Garçons. The cross-rhythm divisions were all in place, the driving pedal bass and the edgy semi-quaver treble figures. Less successful were the block chords and the Johnny Mercer meets Geoffrey Burgon (having walked out on Benjamin Britten) slow melody. The Swingles looked a bit askance at singing with no tsh-tsh rhythm section but this stuff is exactly the direction they should be heading in and money well spent.Deutsche Grammophon are currently plugging a Swingle Singers compilation to tie-in with two trends; the Bach year and the Music to Watch Girls By lounge music revival beloved of young bankers hoping to get laid through a combination of postmodern taste and pre-modern bonuses. Certainly, the sound of the Swingles (which flirted with something more hard-edged in the nineties) had reverted to its authentic bland suggestiveness on Tuesday night. And what it suggests is uncomplicated sex – post-pill, pre-Aids – with the perpetually smiling girl next door.Whether this Vaseline-lensed, ironic retrospective can work for the Swingles now, or whether the joke will ultimately be on them I can’t tell. The group is is older than half of its members and approaching a mid-life crisis.

They have to decide whether to be slaves to postmodernism or to move forward with minimalism. But I guess they must be cool again if Jarvis Cocker was there …. A unique archive which charts the development of the Stanley Kubrick masterpiece Dr Strangelove reveals that the strange eponymous hero, played in the film by Peter Sellers, was not in the early draft of the script. A unique archive which charts the development of the Stanley Kubrick masterpiece Dr Strangelove reveals that the strange eponymous hero, played in the film by Peter Sellers, was not in the early draft of the script.
A screenplay dated August 1962 contained instead a Strangelove-like character called Von Klutz, and many others who failed to make it into the movie.The script and other papers reveal that, in the early stages, Kubrick and the writer Peter George considered a radically different treatment of the plot, first as a straight thriller and then as a “realistic comedy”. Kubrick eventually rejected these ideas in favour of developing the black humour that helped make the final Dr Strangelove one of the most famous films of the Sixties, a black comedy about nuclear warfare at the height of the Cold War.The archive of papers is being auctioned by Sotheby’s on Thursday for Peter George’s son, David, who was a boy when the film was being made.