UR TV CAST

Chitty’s set – Birtwistle’s original idea – is a mirror image of itself: both outside and inside are visible onstage, and strikingly “doubled” rearstage.It’s fascinating yet dated. Tippett went there with The Midsummer Marriage; so did Williamson, Nolan and Helpmann in their gorgeous ballet The Display, and Martin Butler in his opera Craig’s Progress.Io is located at Lerna, near Argos, where Pluto carried off Persephone. Today’s “rape” is a mysterious, unspecified, indecent remembered rencontre, which, like Birtwistle’s other operas and his score for Peter Hall’s NT Bacchae, plugs in to an ancient past – here, Zeus’s ungainly rape of the heifer-to-be. Maybe it needs a Mackay to “interpret” Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s latest stagework, The Io Passion.
It’s easy to forget watching Io’s time-moves-yet-stands-still staging, that in Arthur Bliss’s The Olympians the relationship between two young lovers awakens the interference – and blessing – of ancient Gods. 18th century master-maltsters festooning the Snape stairway; that portrait of Imogen Holst, Britten’s factotum, from a composing era snuffed out the year Birtwistle was born; or Jane Mackay’s Turn of the Screw paintings, vivid as Piper – what would synaesthetics make of The Knot Garden? – adorning Aldeburgh Gallery.

At Aldeburgh the peripherals catch your eye. The Red Hot Chili Peppers play the City of Manchester Stadium on Friday; Hyde Park, London W1, Saturday, Sunday and 25 June; and the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff, on 23 June. And we’re not done yet.”The full length version of this interview can be seen in the July edition of Mojo, on sale now. He describes getting thrown off the side of the stage on the previous occasion his band shared a bill with Brown (“They didn’t believe I was in the band”) and being growled at by the great man when he stuck his head into his backstage tent.”As time has gone by, and it’s 21 years, we’ve just gotten better in public,” Flea reflects. “Learnt from our mistakes and held on to the things that are good.

There aren’t a lot of bands who have done that.”"I don’t think you’ll know where we fit yet,” Kiedis concludes, before showing us to the door, “because we keep sliding around We keep changing. They’ll restart when they get back from this summer’s imperial megatour…”…with James Brown,” Flea grins, showing the gap in his teeth. The Chilis bassist comes over all misty-eyed when talking about the Godfather of Soul. It has sold 15 million copies to date.The band started recording tracks for the new album last summer, although it’s too early – reckons Rick Rubin, who has produced the Chilis’ albums since Blood Sugar – to tell which way it’s going to go. His glasses make him look bookish, and overall he appears monkish, cloistered. He has a sweet, sad smile, an impressive set of dentures, and arms so scarred, they look like someone tried to melt them with a blowtorch.Frusciante: “I had so many years of terrible, terrible…” He breaks down.