• California, December 1976. A new album by the Eagles satirises the shallow materialism of mid-70s Los Angeles, portraying it with dry humour as Hotel California. In the title song, a traveller on a dark desert highway stops at a hotel that looks inviting, but soon finds himself trapped in a nightmare as inescapable as it is seductive. An unnamed woman stands in the doorway, welcoming guests. ‘Her mind is Tiffany-twisted’, sings Don Henley. In other words, warped by an insat

In the late 1960s a young English composer, John Tavener, released some cantatas on the Beatles’ Apple record label. In 1977, in his early 30s, Tavener converted to Orthodox Christianity. He started attending St Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London’s Bayswater, and embarked on studies of the early Church Fathers. The iconography, theology and ancient liturgies of the Orthodox Church became a dominant influence on Tavener. A little over a decade later, his work The Prot