Spirit of the TLS at PUNK

Last night the TLS went to PUNK.

Now, I hope I'm not misrepresenting the regular clientele of this patch of London underground between Soho Square and Oxford Street. Perhaps early on a Saturday night at club PUNK is alway the time to catch a gang of authorities on Garrick, Robespierre, Dumas pere et fils, contemporary opera and poetry, Bloomsbury painters, English typography, comprehensible post-modernism, the Pope, the French philosophes and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
And then, possibly not.

We were there to hear our house band, Spirit of Play, whose members can be found, all bar one, in the cast list at the back of the TLS each week. We whooped and cheered in what we hoped was best PUNK manner while our resident authority on eighteenth century theatre sang Dictaphone Don and other office pop songs for an audience including our expert on how the Enlightenment adopted the guillotine; and  while our Dumas-iste played her twelve-string guitar before colleagues she might more normally asks to check the Twelve Tables of the Justinian Code. On bass was our distinguished bass-graduate of the Royal College; the high singing notes came from our novelist, poet and the man you might confidently ask about the stage history of the Tempest; and an excellent time was had by all.

Of ourse we talked amongst ourselves a good deal, as we do - about the new Martin Amis novel, whether a non-fiction work-in-progress might be turned into fiction to suit the current fashions of the market and even about whether anyone overseas had yet reviewed On The Spartacus Road, a question which, thanks to the Irish Times yesterday and the Tuam Herald of Galway, was yes and well. Why wasn't Mary Beard here and hadn't she been extraordinary on Desert Island Discs?

But we only talked after the magnificent and witty, make-an-editor-feel-proud band, Spirit of Play, had left the stage and been replaced by the next PUNK act, a woman with a rather unreliable flute.