Amid the endless coverage of this year’s Glastonbury Festival I came across this enigmatic nugget from Time Out magazine: ‘Dermot O’Leary played a DJ set. It kinda slapped.’ Kinda slapped, says Time Out’s feature-writer Chiara Wilkinson. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? I resolved to work out what this might mean, through Poirot-style deduction, without having to look it up in one of the ever-expanding online dictionaries of slang. Clearly, the metaphor being used is s

The singer’s face is intense, flushed, contorted with emotion. It’s Saturday lunchtime in the centre of Kingston upon Thames, and she’s singing to a backing of bass-heavy pop standards while a small crowd listens. These days the street singers I walk past invariably strain, emote and grimace as they force their voices into acrobatic displays. Every song an exercise in purple-faced histrionics. In part it’s the fault of the TV talent shows: The Voice, Britain’s Got Talent, X F