Crowded House (right) called it quits last month, so there’ll be plenty of time to watch the walls

TOP 10 UK ALBUMS
1 (-) Recurring Dream… The Very Best Of Crowded House2 (1) Jagged Little Pill Alanis Morissette3 (2) Moseley Shoals Ocean Colour Scene4 (6) Falling Into You Celine Dion5 (4) The Score Fugees6 (5) Older George Michael7 (-) Naked Louise8 (3) 18 Til I Die Bryan Adams9 (8) Ocean Drive Lighthouse Family10 (-) The Smurfs Go Pop! SmurfsChart supplied by Millward BrownTOP 10 UK SINGLES1 (2) Three Lions Baddiel/Skinner/Lightning Seeds2 (1) Killing Me Softly Fugees3 (3) Mysterious Girl Peter Andre4 (-) Tattva Kula Shaker5 (5) Because You Loved Me Celine Dion6 (-) Oh Yeah Ash7 (-) Jazz It Up Reel 2 Real8 (7) Don’t Stop Movin’ Livin’ Joy9 (-) Where Love Lives Alison Limerick10 (4) Always Be My Baby Mariah CareyChart supplied by Millward Brown. Much as though we would have liked to have acquired the casket, we felt that there must be price discipline with public money.”. Crowded House? They really should get out more…

While the retiring Australasians may be a little claustrophobic for some, there are enough lovers of melody-driven (drivel?) pop lite to get the band’s best-of compilation to the top album slot in its first week of release. Support from the National Art Collections Fund (NACF) and the Heritage Lottery Fund – which has the same trustees as the Memorial Fund – bought the total to pounds 1.7m, but this was not enough.Responding to the NACF criticisms, a Memorial Fund spokesman said it was a fund of last resort and a difficult precedent would have been set if it had stepped in earlier.Lord Rothschild, the fund’s chairman, said: “All the expert advice suggested that we should not have bid above the level at which the Chasse was sold. The trustees had tried to be helpful to the museums, initially offering the casket to the British Museum, where it had been on loan. “The trustee board has a regulatory responsibility to do the best it can for its members,” she said.More recently, Dr Alan Borg, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, made an appeal which brought a flood of public donations. Mr Barrie said the pension fund trustees would have accepted pounds 2.2m if it had been possible to raise such a sum.Kathryn Long, investment director for the 250,000 pensioners, said they were absolutely delighted that the casket had made nearly three times its estimated price. David Barrie, director of the National Art Collections Fund, which mounted a publicity blitz to attract public support for the casket, said he was “bitterly disappointed”.The disappointment was compounded by a last-minute entrance into the bidding race by the National Heritage Memorial Fund, a national body with an annual pounds 8m grant to save items for the nation.The Memorial Fund bid pounds 3.6m at yesterday’s auction at Sotheby’s in London, a sum which would have secured the casket in advance of the sale.

The Government stepped in yesterday to stop a 12th-century casket which might have held the remains of Thomas a Becket from leaving the country after a vociferous campaign to save it for the nation failed. Amid speculation that the casket would otherwise have been on its way to North America, Virginia Bottomley, the Secretary of State for National Heritage, immediately stepped in to block its export after its sale to an anonymous private collector for pounds 4.18m yesterday.Citing the casket’s history for her intervention, she has delayed any possible export until expert advice has been taken.
The sale of the Becket Chasse, bought in the Seventies by British Rail Pension Fund, prompted fierce criticism that not enough was done to keep the gold and blue casket. She lives in north London with her two children.Sir Angus Stirling, chairman of the Royal Opera House board, said: “The board is delighted to have found in Jenny McIntosh a successor to Sir Jeremy Isaacs who has exactly the right blend of artistic and managerial experience to lead the Royal Opera House through the forthcoming years of redevelopment and change.”Ms McIntosh said that the artistic reputation of the Royal Opera and the Royal Ballet had never been higher and she looked forward to “the challenge of seeing the Royal Opera House through an invigorating period of change, into a new era in a new house”.. Her ex-husband, Neil McIntosh, was director of Shelter and of Voluntary Service Overseas. There is still a substantial financial deficit, and controversy over high ticket prices and the pounds 78m lottery award for redevelopment.Jenny McIntosh, as she is known, is 49. Before working at the National she was casting director and controller of planning at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

That replacement will work alongside the new artistic director of the National, Trevor Nunn, who succeeds Richard Eyre next year.Among likely candidates to replace Ms McIntosh in running the financial, administrative and production side of the National are Ruth McKenzie, director of the Nottingham Playhouse, Nick Starr, a former senior producer at the National who has left to run Warwick Arts Centre, Mary Allen, secretary general of the Arts Council, and Carole Winter, West End producer and former senior executive with the English Shakespeare Company.Ms McIntosh, who will join the Royal Opera House later this year, several months before Sir Jeremy retires, will find it a hotter potato than the National which has enjoyed artistic acclaim, relative financial stability and good labour relations in the past few years.At the Royal Opera House more than 200 people will be made redundant when the House closes down for two years next summer. On the artistic side too, it is unusual to find high-profile international female directors such as Deborah Warner.It is significant, however, that Ms McIntosh will not have the title of general director, enjoyed by Sir Jeremy Isaacs, nor will she have his remuner- ation. Her pounds 90,000 salary will be pounds 24,000 less than Sir Jeremy’s and she will not have artistic control of the Royal Opera and Ballet companies, although their directors, Nicholas Payne and Anthony Dowell, will report to her.Keith Cooper, spokesman for the Royal Opera House, said the board had wished to distinguish between the artistic management and the “huge” job of running the organisation.Ms McIntosh’s departure from the National opens up another round of musical chairs as a replacement will have to be found for her. She will be the first woman to have run the Royal Opera House, and the first woman to lead any one of the four great national companies – the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Few women have risen to the top in the arts administration in Britain, though large numbers of women work in arts companies. Here, chafing urgently against the double-bass, the strings appear gradually from the song’s soft underbelly to whip along the horses when Van gets to the part about driving his chariot down your streets The song seems to swell with the warm glow of recollection.. Genista McIntosh, at present executive director of the National Theatre, is to be the new chief executive of the Royal Opera House, as revealed in the Independent yesterday.

Building upon bleakly strummed guitar and vocal, the song crystallises into a groove when bass, drums and strings come swooping in after the first verse. Rich Tufo’s string arrangement holds the song together, adding increments of melodrama to deepen the darkness with each verse, eventually overwhelming it to conclude the song with a two-minute string suffix of quite chilling intensity.Van Morrison: Sweet ThingVan’s Astral Weeks remains one of the most singular records in all of popular music, not least for the string arrangements with which Larry Fallon embellished Morrison’s remarkable folk-jazz-soul performances, ranging from the dramatic rococo flourishes of “Madame George” – as theatrically camp as its subject – to the subtler approach of “Sweet Thing”. “You Set The Scene”, one of the great hippy anthems of awakening possibilities, opens with a fast stroll of acoustic rhythm guitar and initially just one low cello note; then as the mood moves from uncertainty to resolution, the string arrangement swells its chest proudly and carries the song aloft to its conclusion, marching side by side with fanfaring trumpets to a glorious new dawn.Curtis Mayfield: Right on For The DarknessIn an extraordinary conceit, Mayfield offers a blind man’s relief at not having to witness the evils of the world: “I am blind, and I cannot see/ You are there, your petty evils don’t bother me”. It’s a brilliant manipulation of pressure, releasing the pent-up energy to afford a glimpse of the power and freedom which can never be a man’s, according to Brown, without a woman or a girl; as women are supposed to do to men, so the strings do to his passion.Al Green: Free at LastIn 1973, soul music’s most gifted comet was just starting to register the tug back toward the church. On this track from 1973’s Living For You, the Memphis Strings articulate Green’s situation, stranded between the sacred and the secular, in remarkable fashion. Stiff as stair- rods, the insistent violins cast the sternest of gazes over the sad industry of Father MacKenzie and his parishioner, melting into sympathetic tears only on the final chorus.
James Brown: It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s WorldThe spare, bleak lines of James Brown’s pre-PC testament to the supportive properties of women are inhabited by only a lonely, stalking pizzicato, building tension toward the chorus, where the high string part provides a vaulted blue ceiling for Brown’s squawked “Nothing!”. Initially, the low moan of cello acts as a curtain, from behind which Green murmurs the old gospel refrain “Free at last, free at last”; then as the spirit takes him to more excitable heights, the strings add a sceptical raised eyebrow at his ecstasy, as if questioning the origin of his passion.Love: You Set The SceneLove’s Forever Changes is the high-water mark of orchestral rock, David Angel’s almost easy-listening arrangements (which the group initially hated) adding untold depth and colour to Arthur Lee’s folk-rock material.