TB: I hope this won't sound too fanciful, but one comparison that occurs to me, which might be helpful, is between Beethoven's funeral and Freddie Mercury's tribute concert. When Beethoven was buried in 1827, it was a terrific day, a school holiday, vast processions and so on. When the coffin reached the cemetery, the greatest classical actor of the day read a funeral oration written by the greatest Austrian poet and playwright of the day, Franz Grillparzer. It's not very long, it's very eloquent, and it doesn't mention God once. All it mentions is art, Kunst, understood as Beethoven's musical art. That's the divinity that Beethoven served, and which Beethoven was also a substitute for, or that he represented. That's an early indication of the gradual sacralisation of music which was under way.

Then if you fast-forward to Freddie Mercury's tribute concert in 1992; he died in 1991 of an Aids-related illness, and then the three surviving members of Queen organised a tribute concert the following April at Wembley Stadium. There were 74,000 people present in the audience, it's estimated that something like a billion people watched it worldwide on television, and it then appeared on video and DVD. If you look at the DVD you can see that this is not a concert, it's not people who have turned up to hear a group play. It is a real transcendental experience for many of them, I think. They participate, they are a colossal crowd, they know all the words, they've brought along banners which proclaim Freddie to be hero, martyr, a god. It is a liturgical exercise, and I suspect that's as close as many of those people are ever going to get to a transcendental experience.

I think you can rephrase Marx's celebrated dictum that religion is the opiate of the people, to read "music is the religion of the people". Actually, opiates are the opiates of the people - I'm sure that at the Freddie Mercury concert, many of the people there were as high as kites.

IB: A classical concert at its worst is a bit like the Church of England at its worst; you go to a concert, and you have to be quiet, and people are a bit fidgety.

DJ: And you do it to be virtuous.

IB: Yes. Whereas rock concerts are more like enthusiastic religious gatherings.

TB: They're more participatory, certainly.