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It’s late June, Wimbledon’s upon us, and Geoff Dyer is talking about his tennis injuries.

Geoff Dyer is always talking about his tennis injuries. It’s one of his endearing features. But when I saw he had a book forthcoming with ‘last days’ and ‘endings’ in the title – and blurbed, what’s more, as ‘a summation of [his] passions’ – I feared perhaps he might be on his way out.

His publisher assured me this was not so: at least, no more than the rest of us. In fact, The Last Days… finds the 60-something flâneur on fine (not to say ‘sprightly’) form.

He begins, with typically Dyerish mischief, at ‘The End’ – ‘the last track on the Doors’ first album’ (you can almost hear him wondering whether he’d prefer ‘The End’ wasn’t indeed the Doors’ last live song ever) – and the next ten (micro-)chapters take in Bob Dylan, Venice Beach, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, George Best, retirement, Gillian Slovo, the Olympics, TC Boyle, football, and Martin Scorsese. Even Andy bloody Murray (the ‘mumble-core Hamlet’) gets a look in before poor Roger Federer.

But Geoff Dyer has established Views about his books being ‘about’ something (he was supposed to write a book ‘about’ tennis about ten years ago…). Likewise on subtitles/straplines. So Dyer afficionados won’t be at all surprised to find that while he gets to Federer eventually (kind of; not really), notionally abetted by the constraints of lockdown, mainly this is a book about – or from the viewpoint of – ‘my own experience of the changes wrought by ageing.’

There are all the lates: the late fame of Jean Rhys; first encountering the music of Gillian Welch ‘embarrassingly late – after David Cameron, even’; De Chirico’s late ‘phase’ (most of his life); fans leaving the stadium early and so missing a late reversal; Tennyson seemingly always late in his – or someone else’s – day.

And unfinisheds: Turner’s paintings (in the view of some of his contemporaries); Bjorn Borg’s failed comebacks; giving up on Anthony PJohn Berger, owell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (e.g.) before you waste too much of your own time on it.

And then the lasts: Nietzsche’s horrendous final years; Custer’s ‘stand’; Mohicans, tangos in Paris, songs; James Last (only kidding); the psycho-social trauma of the last train on London nights out; one-final-heist films; and the last set in a tennis match, a sport in which famously the last point is the only one that really matters.

And in his own line of work? Dyer has lately got into late Beethoven, but ‘I deliberately left late [Henry] James – let alone what one scholar calls “late late James” – for later, and now it’s too late.’ He ‘worries’ – of course – he might have left this book too late. John Coltrane, he notes, died so fast that he had no time for ‘late’. (Now that I think of it, we never do get to the ‘late’-ness of dead people being ‘late’.)

So this is classic (late) Dyer, a writer whose ranging (‘rangy’?) intellect was, mercifully, prevented from ‘progressing’ beyond the stage of voracious undergrad, and who is, as a result, as likely to quote the script of Heat as Raymond Williams. All his more-enthusiastically-ridden hobby horses are present as per – John Berger, WWII, DH Lawrence, jazz, drugs, Tarkovsky, Burning Man, Rebecca West – and as Dyer goes from Al Pacino to Gerard Manley Hopkins to Chuck Yeager in as many, or fewer, sentences (Mike Tyson is directly compared to Philip Larkin), you’re never entirely sure if this is brilliant exegesis or a bored and over-clever grammar-school boy taking the piss. Who else but Dyer would call the too-heavy impact of skunk ‘the Gesamtkunstwerk effect’?

This is half the fun, of course – and more so for the author, one suspects. No doubt he isn’t kidding when he says he believes David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film to be ‘the great literary achievement of our time.’ But for all the gems of bona fine criticism, either artistic (the ‘idyllic quality’ of the post-apocalyptic movie; third-rate statuary as ‘one of the rewards of achieving nationhood’), or social (the contrary grandiosity of asking an American lady to ‘call me Geoff’; the frantic desire of even the most artsy crowd to hit the bar), Dyer’s business is always scrupulously conducted with one eye on ‘the trusty old ponce-ometer’, from the unabashed dad-puns (‘it’s my neck that’s been the Achilles heel’) to the faux-chippy digs (that Pete Sampras shared with the grass on which he played an ‘incapacity for epistemological enquiry’). ‘Wouldn’t it be marvellous,’ he ends his first section, ‘if it were possible to be a serious writer without taking oneself at all seriously.’ There is no question mark, NB.

With all the contrivances and call-backs and shameless segues – whether conveniently reading Peter Akroyd’s biography of Turner on a train, or embarking on a ‘quasi-Pharaonic’ scheme of pilfering shampoo from hotels – it would be difficult, it occurs to me, to spoof Geoff Dyer at much less than a full book’s length. And there’s always a moment – often a couple – where even the keenest Dyerist must fear that he’s begun to get high on the smell of his own farts (here it’s William Basinkski’s avant-garde music, loo roll, and 9/11)… but then he pulls it back, with a delighted grin, and you’re almost-grudgingly impressed.

Still, if you’re not a fan of the perambulatory style and what, elsewhere, were termed his ‘Anglo-English attitudes’, then The Last Days of Roger Federer is probably not for you. It’s been suggested that the book is 84,600 words long (I didn’t – couldn’t – count them), which happens to be the number of seconds in a (Groundhog) day. And given quite how many nods there are to things Dyer’s written whole other volumes about – or ‘about’ – previously (he openly names at least two of them), one can hardly be blamed for seeing Dyer’s books themselves – from sentence-structure to the Gesamtwerk level – as a cheerful, ironist’s homage to Nietzsche’s concept of ‘Eternal Recurrence’. The ‘Eternal Reference’, perhaps.

On which… References, attributions, and the like pose obvious production difficulties in the audiosphere (George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo was completely unlistenable); but epigraphs and footnotes are key Dyer accoutrements, and for these to be respectively unadvertised (essentially ‘inaudible’) and out of place a) sounds most odd, and b) restricts the sheer divagatory Dyerishness of the whole project.

Worse, Richard Burnip appears to have no idea what Geoff Dyer sounds like. Granted, narrators are not here to do impersonations; but this one hasn’t caught the author’s calm, sardonic voice at all. There is no grin. My guess is that he’s never read a Dyer book before, or even seen The Great JM Coetzee Joke. The result is all-too sincere, loud, and urgent – like Jorah Mormont doing Health & Safety ads.

But such is life – and while it lasts, both on and off the court, Geoff Dyer ‘still love[s] everything about tennis.’ And if ‘ultimately, tennis, like life itself, is just a wet T-shirt contest in the pouring rain, signifying nothing,’ then ‘I’m glad I’m old, old enough to not mind staying in, sitting round here revising this book, remembering all this old poetry, watching the latest compilations of Roger’s best dropshots on YouTube…’

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For Perspective 

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The Betty Nansen Teatret’s Mozart Undone features six singers and five instrumentalists in a two-hour ‘freewheeling musical deconstruction’ of 20 of Mozart’s most recognisable melodies – or what Nikolaj Cederholm would call ‘hits’. Formerly-recognisable, anyway. These ‘hits’ have been, according to the show’s garrulous and inimitable press release, ‘re-imagined and re-engineered into a wild synthesis of ancient and modern genres’ involving such (neo?-)classical touchstones as The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mumford & Sons, and – deep breath – Dolly Parton.

The players come nominally dressed as characters from The Magic Flute – plus Don Giovanni (naturally) – but with only half a dozen of them, each playing numerous ‘roles’, there are never-ending on-stage costume-changes, and no shortage of off-stage antics (we will say nothing of the poor girl charged with inserting microphones into condoms…). The costumes themselves, however, seem influenced less by the fashions of Mozart’s own era than, say, the aesthetics of a Stanley Kubrick production, with a dash of Lady Gaga thrown in for good measure – the net result roughly approximating, perhaps, the opium-befuddled nightmares of an overwrought Mozart scholar. In many respects, it’s not a million miles away from Amadeus. Except that – ahem – there is no actual narrative to speak of. What there is, is a lot of water. Bloody gallons of the stuff.

This entire thing probably has to be seen to be believed – a kind of full-on (and slightly inevitable) ‘Cirque du Gubbay’. But doubters be warned: the company’s Beethoven show had Darwin, Turner, and Nelson Mandela in it. And that ran for months. In Norway.

So, what is a ‘theatre concert’? You have to run to keep up with Cederholm’s comically relentless enthusiasm for his work (think Adrian Edmondon’s Red Baron in Blackadder), but the rough explanation goes something like this:

‘Theatre and music are very old colleagues. But the musical, vaudeville, opera – these are not the ancestors of the theatre concert: they are its cousins. The theatre concert is a real hybrid: music and theatre as equals!

‘In Copenhagen, in the Nineties, we wanted to do musicals; but there was a dissatisfaction with the way that musicals were done – the music was always serving a secondary role. You know when the story calls for a song about someone finding a letter on a mantelpiece… and it’s always a bad song! And there’s always that certain style of singing. Rock concerts, also, had these Old Testament-style rituals: “Good evening, London!” And they had a very low dynamic. In the first quarter of an hour they had shown you everything they had to offer: lighting, playing, singing.

‘So our first show was Gasoline, about ‘The Rolling Stones of Denmark’, and we took an interpretation of their work – as when a theatre does Shakespeare or Chekhov. The only difference is we can hear how the Beatles were supposed to sound. We had the boldness to say, “It doesn’t matter: a song can mean a lot of things.” We interpret not only through the music but also through the rituals, the costumes, the dramas. It’s very rich. You cannot necessarily get everything from seeing it only once.’

Cederholm, it seems, is constitutionally incapable of resisting a challenge. Having subsequently pulled off theatre concerts on Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys and the Beatles (twice), he thought ‘Why don’t we do a classical composer?’ Why not, indeed. But between the mischievous mentions of ‘electro-Irish, punk, and power ballad’ influences, and the programme credits for ‘Music Directors and Producers’ (Jens and Peter Hellemann) and ‘Songs written by’ (Neill Cardinal Furio), an obvious question arises: what really remains of Mozart once he’s done being undone?

Cederholm doesn’t falter: ‘The basic notes.’ But his aim is not to put on a note-for-note concert of Mozart’s music so much as to recreate the antic spirit of, say, Die Zauberflöte’s original Freihaus performances. ‘We just took the music that we could talk with,’ then ‘we tried to make the lyrics about important issues today that would fit…’

To wit, as played over (a piece formerly known as) a piano concerto: ‘Where is my target? / Where is my drone? / The cruel insurgency / I track on my phone.’

Your call. As I said, there’s no storyline. ‘This is not about Mozart, certainly. But if you want to make connections, you are free to do that for yourself.’

Traditionalists will argue that the end product is less Mozart being re-worked than Mozart being worked over. At best, it’s Mozart being sampled (remember the Lloyd Webbers vs Paganini, back in the day? That. Only more so). But Cederholm is unbothered. In fact, he’s far more concerned about people turning away from it because it’s ‘Mozart’.

‘Is it for Mozart-lovers? Maybe… if you are an open-minded Mozart-lover!’ But not liking Mozart is not a reason not to go, either. ‘The years gone since Mozart composed have added to the significance of his music,’ he says, with heavy ambivalence. ‘Same as with The Beatles, Mozart produced some of the greatest hits – part of our understanding of what Music should sound like. He’s a big hit-maker: in the cinema, in the supermarket… So the audience come with their luggage; but the most exciting thing is people don’t know what it is they are going to experience.’

The whole performance, not so incidentally, is in English. ‘Mozart was German but wrote in Italian, the language of opera. English is the language of pop music, and we want to reach out to an audience everywhere.’

And that audience is…? ‘It’s a lot of people who would rather go to the movies. But also traditional theatre-goers, who find the energy very satisfying. It’s a family form. It’s for everybody who loves a good show!’

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For Sinfini Music. Published/edited version here.