Not Quite Hollywood

Tribute bands are a phenomenon that have been going on for decades – it seems like every town has a few groups not ashamed to take their teenage-styled admiration of a specific hard rock band out of the bedroom and onto a nearby bar's stage. And one of the leading Guns N' Roses tribute acts that represents California is Hollywood Roses (a play on the name of an early Axl Rose band, Hollywood Rose).

Soon after his return from America, at the height of the war in 1943, Britten wrote incidental music for a radio play by Edward Sackville-West on the Homeric subject of Odysseus’s return to Penelope. Drawn from the complete score with barely any amendment of the original, and compressed into a 36-minute cantata, with Chris de Souza tailoring the text and Colin Matthews, Britten’s last amanuensis, most tactfully editing the music, the result is extraordinarily powerful. The most important role is that of the narrator, here masterfully taken by Dame Janet Baker who brings the story vividly to life despite the stylized classical language (e.g. “Odysseus, Lord of sea-girt Ithaca” or “His fair wife, white-armed Penelope”). Rather confusingly Athene also appears as a soprano, with the radiant Alison Hagley sounding totally unlike Dame Janet. She is one of a godly quartet of singers who contribute Greek-style commentaries – vocal passages which regularly add to the atmospheric beauty of the piece.

The band credited with spawning the "sleaze rock" lip-gloss and hairspray style that emerged from the Hollywood Strip (Los Angeles, California) at the dawn of the 80s and came to dominate rock in that decade. The most famous of those that followed included Poison and Guns n' Roses…