It is history edited down to make a neat visual accompaniment to a great soundtrack – only in this case, the imagery has been sterilised by overexposure, and the soundtrack isn’t that great. Primal Scream make clever, sprawling records that pillage rock’s septic tank for anything that smells ripe but hasn’t been completely devoured by bacteria.
Last time out, they did a breezy job on the Rolling Stones; on the new album, Vanishing Point, they’ve re- integrated themselves with the values evinced on the award-winning Screamadelica to make a fist of being both traditionally rocky and – dare one breathe it – eclectically postmodern.But eclectic postmodernism in pop music doesn’t always make for a thrilling live experience. As inventories go, Primal Scream’s is the sort that’ll have you reaching for your old videos of the The Rock’n'Roll Years. Stukas dive-bomb, students get clobbered on an American campus, GIs raise the stars and stripes on Iwo Jima, Malcolm X makes a speech, Syd Barrett looks dopey, there are more Stukas, Salvador Dali looks mad, hot-panted African-Americans pose with submachine guns, Elvis’s legs wobble, township protectors protest, Seventies people have sex, James Brown collapses in a heap, and then, after a few more Stukas, there is a brief extract from a Soviet public health film on the dangers of dental plaque. Oddly, in this catalogue of the imagery of oppression and redemption, there is no reference to the Spice Girls or devolution.

In fact there is no reference to anything at all from the last 20 years, unless you count the township bit. He asked his guide – a man who had known great suffering – if he was happy: “Ourself,” said Ishmael, “we are very happy always.” It may not really be Paradise, but I’d like to give it a try.. The opening three minutes of Primal Scream’s show are a barrage. The group slope on, the lights come up, and then the back-projection machine kicks ass. Nicholas Shakespeare, however, has been to Lesotho, a tiny mountain kingdom shaped like an angel fish. In Letters From Here and There (R4), he described this remote, inaccessible and ravishingly beautiful place, where, free from all modern intrusion, “the mind is released from whatever troubles it”. She is, alas, a non-starter for many reasons – and, besides, it was usefully suggested that our attitude is not so much “Diana, help us, pray for us”, as a desire to pray for the repose of her soul.At the funeral, John Tavener’s ethereal Songs For Athene took us to the very gates of Heaven, but only an occasional mystic has looked through and reported back.

Canonisation would merely confirm her, officially, as a model for us all Inevitably, the case of the Princess was raised. But many of the early saints won their status from popular support and never went through a formal process.It’s a delicate business explaining the two-way system of the communion of the saints in a couple of minutes. Mother Teresa must be proved to have been influential in procuring two miracles before she can be canonised, but it’s a technicality, really; she is already widely regarded as a saint and therefore able to pray for those of us left behind. The record is held by Thomas a Becket, whose thaumaturgical powers elevated him to sanctity within two years. It seemed typically modest that she should depart at a time when the world was so distracted. On Wednesday’s Woman’s Hour (R4), Jenni Murray talked to Michael Walsh and Angela Tilby about the possibility of there being a fast track to canonisation. (Incidentally, thank goodness Nicholas Kenyon decided to go ahead with broadcasting the Albert Hall concert on that terrible Sunday, so close to Kensington Palace.

As Classic FM also realised, we needed music that day.)When Solti, too, died unexpectedly, his place was taken by Sir Colin Davis, and Friday’s performance of the grandest of all Masses for the Dead became a magnificent, cathartic tribute to both of them. And again, the coincidence factor was at work: Solti as conductor was heard, as planned, on Friday afternoon’s Mining the Archives (R3) in highlights from his exuberant 1961 recording of Der Rosenkavalier.In the middle of all this bereavement, Mother Teresa slipped quietly away. It was lovely to catch that heavenly voice again on Wednesday’s Morning Collection (R3), once more in a scheduled coincidence, and this time lending its beauty to the more jubilant Chandos Anthem “O be joyful in the Lord”.Other great souls have left us this week. Sir Georg Solti was due to conduct the same Requiem on Friday’s penultimate night of a particularly splendid Proms (R3) season. The “Libera me” from his Requiem, using the most appropriate words for that surrounded, beleaguered lady, was performed with exquisite purity by Lynne Dawson, whose soaring soprano drew the readiest tears from at least one listener.