I’m looking through a small, round hole that may be the most celebrated hole in music history. It’s in the middle of a canvas cloth, forming the open mouthpiece of a roughly painted face. And it’s the hole through which, in 1922, the poet Edith Sitwell thrust a megaphone and entertained a room in Chelsea to the first performance of Façade: her collection of arcane verse written to be rhythmically declaimed against a jazzy score by William Walton.
That the cloth survives – in something like pristine condition – is surprising. But then it’s been hidden away for decades, with people wondering where it was. The hiding place turned out to be a cupboard in the home of film-maker Tony Palmer, who had been lent the cloth by the Sitwell family for a TV documentary about Walton. ‘We used it for an onscreen re-creation of that first ,’ Palmer tells me. ‘Then the Sitwells didn’t seem
