Paul Morley: ‘Pop belongs to the last century. Classical music is more relevant to the future’

For years, this rock critic viewed classical music as pompous art of the past. Now, tired of pop, he explains why classical is the truly subversive form - and selects six favourite pieces to convert the unbeliever.

Paul Morley in his days on the NME, with the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia (London, 1981). Photograph: David Corio/Redferns

During the 1970s and 80s, I mostly listened to pop and rock music, when even the likes of Captain Beefheart, Henry Cow and Popul Vuh were filed under pop. However far out I went as a listener, though, classical music seemed connected to a dreary sense of uninspiring worthiness that was fixed inside an ideologically suspect status quo, lacking the exhilarating suggestion of new beginnings, a pulsating sense of an exciting, mind-expanding tomorrow. There was something monstrous about it, as if in its world there were lumbering dinosaurs and toothless dragons, refusing to accept they were extinct. Next to Iggy and the Stooges and the Velvets, it sounded frail; next to Buzzcocks and Public Image, it sounded pompous. While I wrote for the NME between 1976 and 1984, interviewing stars from Lou Reed and John Lydon to Sting and Mick Jagger, I didn’t think about classical music – it was from the past, back when the past stayed where it was and wasn’t as easy to access as it is now.