TORINO-NO-NO

The music at this evening's Winter Olympics opening ceremony has been bizarre - during the walk-on by the various teams it sounded as if someone had just stuck on a random 80s compilation - the Eurythmics, Van Halen and, erm, James Brown doing I Feel Good rolling away in the background. You wonder if they'd had a better-thought-out collection burned to a CD which they left in the hotel, so they had to grab the first thing they could find in the nearest petrol station dump bin.

Then up pops Yoko Ono, dressed all in white like an irritating hanger on, reading some sort of shit poem she hadn't even bothered to memorise - actually, we say shit; it was more piss. She called for piss, and for people to live in piss, and spread piss all over the world. Could we imagine all that piss? Uh-oh. Was she about to break into that song? The official song of Liverpool Speke Airport?

No. Because here was a slow, thumping interpretation of Imagine. But who's that doing it? "It looks like a drag queen who's been interrupted getting ready for her act." Peter Gabriel... is that you?

Nothing quite on an absurd par with Bjork pretending to be a swan at the last summer games, but oddly like a twenty-five year old taping of a Capital Radio party in a park.

Being a sports event in Italy, of course, Pavarotti is now here by law doing Nessun Dorma to finish it all off.

music winter olympics yoko ono peter gabriel