IB: I wonder if the 19th-century Romantic attitude towards classical music which develops has migrated into pop music. The thing about popular music is that it's seen as the music of the people and is somehow seen as authentic, but at the same time it's been commodified and turned into big business. A lot of people became rich out of music in the 18th and 19th centuries by writing for rich patrons and having big middle-class audiences, while popular music was generally, until the 20th century, at a lower level where vast fortunes weren't made.

TB: I'm sure you're right. And Handel I suppose was the first musical millionaire, making the equivalent of a million through pleasing aristocratic patrons and pleasing middle-class patrons through oratorio. What happens to popular music, and what transforms the situation, is recording. Until recording came along, popular music came and went, disappearing without the possibility of being revived. But as soon as recording arrived on the scene, pop music became frozen in time, and could have that subsequent effect. So I think that there's a real change in the early 20th-century as a result.

But going back to that very interesting point that you made about popular musicians having ambitions, that takes us back to the
issue which we started with at the very beginning - integrity. And I think that you're right. It does come from the way in which the whole Romantic aesthetic is viewed, in that the premium is now placed on expressiveness. Music, or indeed any other form of cultural activity, doesn't have a value unless it comes from "inside", and is infused with the "inner light". And popular musicians today are just as inclined to articulate that Romantic aesthetic of being true to themselves as Beethoven was.

DJ: But hasn't music gone beyond Romanticism now, in that it's become almost escapist and narcotic in its ambitions? It's trying to be almost an alternative to reality rather than simply providing a special access to reality. And that brings us to the role of sex in music, which is already beginning in the Romantic era - in Wagner you have the musical representation of sex in Tristan and Isolde - but in present-day popular music it is almost all about that, and there's no separation between the performer and the music. This is why the pop tradition has a real problem when the new generation performs the old works again, because it's so clearly linked to the personality and sex appeal of the original performer.

TB: Yes, and it's very important that pop musicians today who wish to be taken seriously have to create their own material, otherwise they're dismissed and derided as cover bands.

IB: Does Amy Winehouse write her own stuff, for example? Because she has a sort of Romantic aesthetic about her: she's being destroyed by drugs and so on.